Politically, it was a tremendously impressive gathering. Prominent women came from all the Western States to decide how they should endeavor to mobilize the women’s votes. Greatly alarmed at this drifting away of members, the Democratic Party sent prominent Democratic women to plead with them not to leave the Party and to represent to them that Peace was more important than Suffrage. The Republicans sent important Republican women to plead with them to give their support to Hughes since he had come out for the Federal Suffrage Amendment.
Finally the Democratic leaders appealed to the President to counteract the attacks being made on the Party, on the score of its Suffrage record. The President, thereupon, despatched to the Thomas Jefferson Club of Denver the following letter which was read at a banquet the last day of the Conference.
The White House,
Washington, D. C., August 7, 1916.
My dear Friends:
I wish I could meet you face to face and tell you in person how deeply I appreciate the work your organization has done and proposes to do for the cause of democracy and popular government.
I am told that yours was the first woman’s Democratic voters’ organization in America, and I am sure that as such it must have been the instrument of impressing your convictions very deeply upon the politics of your State.
One of the strongest forces behind the Equal Suffrage sentiment of the country is the now demonstrated fact that in the Suffrage States women interest themselves in public questions, study them thoroughly, form their opinions and divide as men do concerning them. It must in frankness be admitted that there are two sides to almost every important public question, and even the best informed persons are bound to differ in judgment concerning it. With each difference in judgment, it is not only natural, but right and patriotic, that the success of opposing convictions should be sought through political alignment and the measuring of their strength at the polls through political agencies. Men do this naturally, and so do women; though it has required your practical demonstration of it to convince those who doubted this. In proportion as the political development of women continues along this line, the cause of Equal Suffrage will be promoted.
Those who believe in Equal Suffrage are divided into those who believe that each State should determine for itself when and in what direction the Suffrage should be extended, and those who believe that it should be immediately extended by the action of the national government, by means of an amendment to the Federal Constitution. Both the great political Parties of the nation have in their recent platforms favored the extension of Suffrage to women through State action, and I do not see how their candidates can consistently disregard these official declarations. I shall endeavor to make the declaration of my own Party in this matter effectual by every influence that I can properly and legitimately exercise.
Woman’s part in the progress of the race, it goes without saying, is quite as important as man’s. The old notion, too, that Suffrage and service go hand in hand, is a sound one, and women may well appeal to it, though it has long been invoked against them. The war in Europe has forever set at rest the notion that nations depend in time of stress wholly upon their men. The women of Europe are bearing their full share of war’s awful burden in the daily activities of the struggle, and more than their share as sufferers. Their fathers and husbands and sons are fighting and dying in the trenches; but they have taken up the work on the farms, at the mill, and in the workshop and counting houses. They bury the dead, care for the sick and wounded, console the fatherless, and sustain the constant shock of war’s appalling sacrifices.