Monday afternoon, they desecrated a charitable gathering of the Ladies’ Hospital Aid.... If it was nothing more than the harmless effort of a couple of women to earn some Congressional coin, it might be overlooked, and these two women with fatherly tenderness, told to go back home. But it involves an insult to the intelligent citizenship of this State. It attempts to compromise and bring into disrepute the practical workings of Woman Suffrage in this, the original Suffrage State. It proposes to prostitute religion, charity, fraternity, and society itself, to the ambition of a place-and-plunder-hunting politician. These women go into gatherings to insult and outrage harmony and good-will among women who themselves avoid politics in their meetings.
They could not have selected a meeting at which it was so plainly out of place as a meeting of hospital workers. These women had gathered together to promote the good work of mercy and charity in our community. They were Republicans, Progressives, and Democrats in their preferences....
The editor of the Leader has met and talked with these two women and believes they do not realize the insult they are offering to the women of Wyoming.
The Republican papers of course instantly came to the rescue of the Congressional Union organizers. The Cheyenne Tribune said editorially on October 16:
Democratic newspapers like the Wyoming Leader are finding fault with the Woman Suffrage Congressional Union for sending representatives into this State to work against the Democratic candidate for Congress.
This is a free country, and Wyoming a Woman Suffrage State, and if worthy, respectable women come into Wyoming, the first State to grant the franchise to women, and conduct a decent campaign for the principles of Woman Suffrage, they should be treated courteously and given a respectful hearing.
They rightly hold the Democratic Party responsible for its self-evident opposition to the cause of Woman Suffrage, and rightly are seeking to defeat Democratic candidates for Congress by endeavoring to get woman voters to vote against them.
As to the actual effects, I quote from the report of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage for the year 1914:
One of the strongest proofs of the results accomplished in Washington was given when Judge W. W. Black, Democratic candidate for the United States Senate, called at the headquarters of the Congressional Union in Seattle, and urged the organizers in charge, in the words of the Seattle Sunday Times, “to go home and wage a campaign for female Suffrage, and let the Democratic Congressional candidates in this State alone. Judge Black disclaimed personal interest,” continued the Seattle Times, “and insisted that his is merely a fatherly concern for the two young Suffrage leaders. To demonstrate that he was not concerned personally, Judge Black told the two workers that he was going to be elected, anyway.”
Shortly before election day, Democratic leaders in Colorado formed a Democratic woman’s organization for the purpose of actively combating the Congressional Union’s work among the women voters.