“Not until you report our Amendment.”
For the first time Mr. Webb smiled. There was surprise in his voice. “You women are in earnest about this.”
IV
MORE PRESSURE ON THE PRESIDENT
In the meantime the work with the President was going on. Mr. Wilson was about to make a speaking trip which included Kansas. This would be the first time since his inauguration that he would visit a Suffrage State.
On January 26, 1916, Mrs. William Kent and Maud Younger waited on the President to ask him to receive a delegation of women in a forthcoming visit to New York. In presenting this request, Mrs. Kent sounded a note which was beginning to become the dominant strain in the Suffrage demands of the western women.
“Women are anxious to express to you, Mr. President,” she said, “the depth of earnestness of the demand for Woman Suffrage. We as western women and as citizens are accustomed to having a request for political consideration received with seriousness; and we feel keenly the injustice of the popular rumor that such delegations are planned to annoy a public official. We hope that you will appreciate the dignity and propriety of such a representative appeal as the women of New York are now making.”
President Wilson said that such an assumption was entirely absent from his mind. He added that he had decided to make it a rule during his trip to New York and throughout the Middle West not to receive any delegations whatever, since he would “get in wrong,” as he said, if he received one and not another; it was very possible, however, that he might be approached by deputations which he would be able to receive.
As Mrs. Kent and Miss Younger came out from this call on the President, the evening papers were on the stands. They announced that the next day in New York the President would receive fifteen hundred ministers.
On the morning of January 27, 1916, over a hundred women, organized by Doris Stevens and led by Mrs. E. Tiffany Dyer, assembled in the East Room of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Fifteen minutes later they sent up a note asking for a ten-minute audience with the President, that New York women might lay their case for federal action upon Suffrage before him. Secretary Tumulty sent back the following note: