Although the Congressional Union welcomed any simplification of the Congressional machinery as by the creation of a Suffrage Committee, its object was to secure action on the Suffrage Amendment. Since April 7, 1913, the Amendment had been before the Judiciary Committee in which it had been introduced by Representative Mondell. The Congressional Union asked for a hearing on the Amendment before this Committee. March 3, 1914, was set for that event.
Thitherto, these hearings had been dreary occasions, sparsely attended. There was the half-circle of Committee members, a trifle perfunctory in its attitude, the scattered, tiny audience, very little interested or stirred; the few Suffragists pleading—eloquently, it is true—but pleading; using the inevitable Suffrage arguments, unanswerable, but threadbare. The hearing of March 3 was very different. The Committee was electrically alert.... They listened intently.... For the first time at a Congressional hearing, propagandistic argument did not appear. The Suffragists appealed to the Committee to report the Suffrage Resolution to the House—not as a matter of justice to women—but as practical politics. They pointed out to the Committee that the women voters of the West would hold the Democratic Party responsible for the refusal of this Committee to make that report.
In the meantime, highly important things had been going on in the Senate. It will be remembered that the Suffrage Resolution had been placed upon the Senate Calendar in June, 1913. Ever since that date, it had been awaiting a vote. It could be voted on any time up to the close of the Sixty-third Congress (March 3, 1915).
At the beginning of the year 1914, more votes were pledged in its favor than had carried the Income Tax in the Senate, and sentiment in its favor was steadily increasing among the Senators. Moreover, the prospect that the Referendum elections of the coming autumn would add to the number of Suffrage States promised an increase of Suffrage strength in the Senate. There remained—as it transpired—a whole year before that Congress adjourned, in which the work of obtaining the vote could have gone on. These features of the situation made the Congressional Union most desirous that the Resolution should not be voted upon until every possible vote was won. However, Senator Ashurst, who had reported the Bill to the Senate, had it made “unfinished business” on March 2, 1914. It is the spirit of “unfinished business” that it must be brought up and voted on. In spite of the vigorous protests of the Congressional Union, and of many Suffragists in all parts of the country, it was brought to the vote on March 17. A two-thirds vote was necessary to carry it. It received thirty-five; a majority, it is true, of one vote; but failing of the necessary two-thirds majority by eleven. The Congressional Union blamed the Democratic leaders entirely for this premature vote, as they were fully informed that a vote at that time would mean defeat.
However, this was a memorable moment. It was the first time since 1887 that Suffrage had been voted upon in the Senate. And from the moment on March 2 when it was made “unfinished business” until March 17, when the vote was taken, the Senate debated it almost continuously.
On that same day—March 2—Senator Shafroth of Colorado introduced a resolution providing for a new Suffrage Amendment to the Federal Constitution. This was to become famous as the Shafroth-Palmer Resolution. It offered a path to the enfranchisement of women incredibly cluttered and cumbered. It reads:
Section 1. Whenever any number of legal voters of any State to a number exceeding eight per cent of the number of legal voters voting at the last preceding General Election held in such State shall petition for the submission to the legal voters of said State of the question whether women shall have equal rights with men in respect to voting at all elections to be held in such State, such question shall be so submitted; and if, upon such submission, a majority of the legal voters of the State voting on the question shall vote in favor of granting to women such equal rights, the same shall thereupon be deemed established, anything in the constitution or laws of such State to the contrary notwithstanding.
Compare this with the simplicity and directness of the original Susan B. Anthony Amendment: