Our plan is this: To send at least two women to each of those nine States. We would put one woman at the center who would attend to the organizing, the publicity and the distribution of literature. We would have literature printed showing what the Democratic Party has done with regard to Suffrage in the Sixty-third Congress. We would have leaflets printed from the Eastern women appealing to the Western women for help, and we would have leaflets issued showing how much the enfranchised woman herself needs the Federal Amendment because most important matters are becoming national in their organization and can only be dealt with by national legislation. We could reach every home in every one of those nine States with our literature, without very great expense. One good woman at the center could make this message, this appeal from Eastern women, known to the whole State. The other worker would attend to the speaking and in six weeks could easily cover all the large towns of the State.
Why Is the Girl from the West Getting All the Attention?
Nina Allender in The Suffragist.
This is the plan that we are considering, and that we are hoping to put through. We would be very much interested to hear what you think about it and want, of course, to have your co-operation in carrying it through.
The Conference voted to unite behind the Bristow-Mondell Amendment in Congress and to support an active election campaign against candidates of the Democratic Party. It raised over seven thousand dollars to meet the expense of this campaign.
The details of the election campaign project were immediately worked out; organizers were selected and after a farewell garden party on September 14, they started for the nine enfranchised States. Headquarters were opened in San Francisco under Lucy Burns and Rose Winslow; in Denver, Colorado, under Doris Stevens and Ruth Noyes; in Phœnix, Arizona, under Jane Pincus and Josephine Casey; in Kansas City, Kansas, under Lola C. Trax and Edna S. Latimer; at Portland, Oregon, under Jessie Hardy Stubbs and Virginia Arnold; in Seattle, Washington, under Margaret Whittemore and Anne McCue; at Cheyenne, Wyoming, under Gertrude Hunter; at Salt Lake City, Utah, under Elsie Lancaster; at Boise City, Idaho, under Helena Hill Weed.
In these centers, open-air, drawing-room, and theatre meetings followed each other in rapid succession. In many districts, the campaigners canvassed from door to door. Window-cards, handbills, cartoons, moving-picture films, and voiceless speeches, calling upon the women voters to refuse their support to the Party which had blocked the National Suffrage Amendment, appeared everywhere from Seattle to Phœnix. A pithily worded Appeal to the Women Voters was placed in the hands of the women voters. Press bulletins describing the campaign against the Democratic candidates for Congress and reiterating the record made by the Democratic Party on the Suffrage question, were issued daily. Literature dealing with the record of the Democratic Party and with the value to the woman voter of a national Suffrage Amendment, were sent to innumerable homes in every Suffrage State.
The Suffragist, which teemed with reports of what these vigorous campaigners were doing, presents pictures which could have occurred nowhere in the world but the United States, and nowhere in the United States but the West. The speakers were interesting, amusing, full of information and enthusiasm. With a sympathy and understanding typically western, men and women responded immediately, responded equally to this original campaign.