Helen Pitts spent most of her Christmas holiday at home packing and harking to parental admonitions. Gideon Pitts regarded his daughter both with pride and apprehension. Schoolteaching had been a nice, quiet occupation, but he knew something about the “wiles” and “pitfalls” of big cities. He thought he ought to go down with her and see that she found a respectable place to live in. His wife held him back.
“That’s silly, Pa. Helen’s got plenty mother wit, for all she’s so small and frail-looking.” Her mother sighed. “I was hoping she’d be settling near home—that she might accept Brad.”
Aunt Julia was a little more direct.
“I’d get this nonsense out of Helen’s head if I was her mother.” She spoke firmly. “Old maids soon fade, and all these new-fangled ideas ain’t a-gonna keep her warm winter nights.”
“Helen’s no old maid yet,” defended her mother.
“’Pears like to me she’ll be thirty come this spring. And if that ain’t an old maid my mind’s failing me,” was the acid comment.
In due time Helen Pitts took her seat in the Fourth National Suffrage Convention, meeting in Washington the first week in January, 1874.
The air crackled with excitement. Now that the Fourteenth Amendment had gone to some length to define “citizenship” within the United States, “manhood suffrage” was being substituted by the politicians for the recent vanguard cry “universal suffrage.” Susan B. Anthony was calling upon the women of America to have their say. The leaders of the movement were ridiculed, mocked and libeled, but they had come to Washington in full armor.
Her face aglow, eyes sparkling with indignation, Miss Anthony told the opening session that a petition against woman’s suffrage had been presented in the Senate by a Mr. Edmunds. Mrs. General Sherman, Mrs. Admiral Dahlgren and other Washington wives had signed it.
“These are the women,” she said, “who never knew a want, whose children are well fed and warmly clad. Yet they would deny these same comforts to other women even though they are earned by the toil of their hands. Such women are traitors not only to their best instincts, but to all mothers of men!”