“On the fifteenth of February,” said Miss Younger, “the sub-committee reported out the Suffrage Amendment. We are told that there is a gentleman’s agreement to the effect that when a sub-committee reports, no action shall be taken that day but the matter shall lie over for a week. Four of our supporters were absent on the day of the report and the opposition sent the Amendment back to sub-committee. There were nine votes cast in favor of sending it back, and seven against. We feel that it was you who cast the deciding vote, for if you had voted with supporters of Suffrage, the vote would have been a tie, and the Amendment would not now be in sub-committee.
“You told me that you were in favor of having this matter remain in committee until December, because you felt it would be embarrassing to some men who would run for office next fall. As a trades-unionist, as well as a woman voter, I feel that the eight million working women of this country are entitled to as much consideration as are a few politicians.”
Miss Younger then introduced Mrs. Lowell Mellett, of Seattle, Washington; Mrs. William Kent, of California; Mrs. Gilson Gardner, Mrs. Charles Edward Russell, of Illinois; Anne Martin, of Nevada; each of whom made an appeal to Mr. Williams to give his support to a report from the Judiciary Committee during the present session.
Miss Martin said:
You are in what seems to us a very undesirable position. You are a Representative from a Suffrage State, from a State where women have the right to vote for President. You are a professed Suffragist, yet you are the only member of that committee who is a Suffragist and who is in the position of having voted with the professed anti-Suffragists against a hearing.... We urge you to do everything in your power to reconsider the smothering of this resolution, and bring up the question in committee again as soon as possible, to report it to the House and then to leave to the Rules Committee the question of what time it shall have for discussion in this session. We urge this most earnestly.
Mr. Williams replied:
I am pleased to hear from you ladies and to know fully your side of this case.
If I remember correctly the conversation you refer to in which I spoke of some embarrassment—not to myself, but to some of my colleagues—I think I stated the condition of the calendar and the business of this session. I have not double-crossed anybody. I have not taken any sudden change of front. I have told every representative of the Suffrage organization who has visited me that I do not favor a report at this first session of the Sixty-fourth Congress. I gave, as my primary reason, the crowded condition of the business of this Congress. I incidentally—sometimes in a good-natured way, as I remember—stated that it did not embarrass me to vote on the question because I was already on record, but it might embarrass some of my colleagues. My real views have been that Congress has duties in this, a campaign year, when all members hope to leave at a reasonable time within which to make their campaign; that this session is not a good time to take upon ourselves the consideration of any unimportant question that can be disposed of just as well at the next session.
With a campaign approaching and two national conventions in June, I do not believe it wise for your cause to crowd this matter on now. I do not believe that it would get that consideration that you will get after the election and after these necessary matters—matters of importance and urgent necessity—are disposed of.
I am opposed to smothering anything in committee. I do not propose to smother this in committee. I intend, when I think it is the proper time, to vote the Susan B. Anthony Amendment out and vote for it in the House. Now that is my intention. I have not said that I would not do so at this session. I think the strongest that I have put it is that I would not do so unless the work of the session is cleared away so that we can get to it.