The Story of the Woman's Party

by Inez Haynes Gillmore

She described with a real dramatic effect the incident of the President’s trip to Philadelphia, when he welcomed a great army of naturalized immigrants, and denied a hearing to American women.

“There are some of our men,” she commented, “the mechanics of whose minds we do not understand. George Washington, you may remember, in Woodrow Wilson’s History of the United States, had no mother.”

Mrs. Kelley told of the battle women, themselves sworn to enforce the law, have to fight if they are without the ballot. She went into her experiences as a voteless citizen of Illinois, when she was a factory inspector there.

Eastern women have been degraded by sixty-eight years of beggary. They have begged of the steerage; they have begged of politicians; now they find it possible to come West and ask the co-operation of their own sisters. But I come to you with a nobler argument when I ask you to support the work of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. Do not do it for us, even though we have borne the rigor and heat of the day in the long fight for enfranchisement. Do it for the children of the future: let them come into a noble heritage through us.

The climax of this Conference came the final day when, at the Inside Inn ball-room of the Exposition, the representatives of the eleven enfranchised States, the Territory of Alaska and in addition the enfranchised nations, meeting on the same platform, told what freedom for women had accomplished in their nations and States. The great ball-room was decorated with purple, white, and gold banners of the Union, and massed with golden acacia. Many of the women representatives wore the costumes of their native land. Mayi Maki, a Finnish girl typically blonde, in the striking peasant costume of Finland, spoke. Mrs. Chem Chi, a Chinese woman, in the no less striking costume of China, spoke. Representatives of New Zealand, the Isle of Man, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark spoke.

The Congressional Union celebrated Bunker Hill Day, June 17, by another charming occasion. It dedicated to the Massachusetts exhibit a miniature reproduction of Bunker Hill monument, thrown into relief by a black-velvet background, which bore the history of the notable women of the State.

It was a brilliant day, sunny and clear. The Massachusetts Building, a facsimile of the noble State House of Boston, situated between the gorgeous bay of San Francisco and the iridescent Marin shore on the one hand, and the long line of orientally colored Exposition Buildings on the other, was decorated for the occasion with the red, white, and blue of the national flag, and the white of the great State flag.

A procession of Suffragists, headed by Gail Laughlin, wearing the purple, white, and gold regalia, and escorted by a special military band, marched behind a large purple, white, and gold flag, and between an avenue of purple, white, and gold flags up to the Massachusetts Building, where they were confronted by a great banner, bearing the words of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.

Gail Laughlin, who was educated in Massachusetts, said in part:

There were Pilgrim mothers in those days, as well as Pilgrim Fathers, though they were singularly absent from history. You will find nothing of them in the schoolbooks; you have to go to the sources from which histories are made. Then Mary Warren, advisor of Knox and Adams and Jefferson; and Hannah Winthrop and Abigail Adams begin to stand out beside the men who are said to have made the history of that time. Was it not Abigail Adams who wrote to her husband at the Continental Congress when the very document we women are now striving to change was drawn up: “If you do not free the women of the nation, there will be another revolution.” I consider Abigail Adams the first member of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage.