I am absolutely sure that the Congressional Union has the right policy for us to follow and that through this policy we are going to win the passage of the Federal Amendment.
Incidentally the referendum in 1914 in Nevada and Montana gave Suffrage to women.
Although the Congressional Union never deviated from its policy of devoting itself to the Federal Amendment, yet it was deeply interested in the success of these referendum campaigns and gave aid when it seemed needed. The Congressional Union sent Mabel Vernon, a national organizer, to help in the Nevada campaign. At the close of the campaign an enthusiastic audience welcomed Mabel Vernon home.
Miss Vernon said:
In the West they do not have the feeling that Suffrage is an old, old story. They were very willing to go to a Suffrage meeting, particularly in the mining camps, where to advertise that a woman is going to speak is almost enough to cause them to close down the mines in order that they might hear her. This summer Miss Martin, the State president, and I went all over the State in a motor, traveling about three thousand miles. We would travel sometimes one hundred and twenty miles in order to reach a little settlement of about one hundred people, sixty voters perhaps. We had the conviction that if Suffrage was going to win in Nevada, it was going to win through the votes of those people who lived in the remote places. We knew Reno. We knew it well. We knew it was not to be counted upon as giving any majority in favor of Suffrage. That was the object of the motor trip this summer.
We traveled for miles and miles without seeing one sign of life. There was only the sand, the sage-bush, and the sky. Even though we did not arrive until ten o’clock at night at the place where we were to speak, we always found our crowd waiting for us. There was one mining camp, one of the richest camps there now, where the men said, “We will give you ninety per cent, ladies, there is not a bit of doubt about it.” When the returns came in from that camp, there were eleven votes against it and one hundred and one for it. The politicians laughed at us because we were so confident. “Don’t you appreciate that many men who promised to vote for you just want to make you feel good and haven’t any intention of doing it?” they would say. When the returns came in I took a great deal of satisfaction in showing them that the men had kept their promises.
The position that Nevada has geographically had a great deal to do with it: We made a house-to-house canvass to find out if the majority were in favor of Suffrage and we found that women out there would say, “Of course I believe in Suffrage; I used to vote myself in Idaho.” One woman told me, “I feel very much out of place here in Nevada because I haven’t the right to vote. I voted for years in Colorado.” It would have been an easy thing to prove that at least seventy-five per cent of the women in Nevada were in favor of Woman Suffrage. When the men said, “We are willing that Nevada women shall have the vote when the majority of them want it,” we could say that the majority of the women in the State of Nevada do want it.
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CONGRESS TAKES UP THE SUFFRAGE AMENDMENT
The effect of this campaign—the first of the kind in the history of the United States—was as though acid had been poured into the milk of the Democratic calm and security. Within a few days of the appearance of the Congressional Union speakers, the Democratic papers were full of attacks on the Congressional Union. The following from the Wyoming Leader of October 6 is typical of the way the Democratic papers handled the Congressional Union workers: