Mrs. Flora Beadle Renkes, School Commissioner of Barry County, Mich., described Some Phases of Public School Work. She advocated industrial and moral as well as intellectual training and all of this equally for both sexes.
Mrs. Minerva Welch, in considering Woman's Possibilities, said: "To my mind it is given to woman to develop the greatest possibilities in all the world. She can direct the character of generations. If woman ever gains the place God intended her to have it must be through the mother element. In Denver we have organized women's clubs for the study of art, literature and political science. We have learned to fraternize. Men have found that women bring their moral influence into politics, and the men also know that they must look to their own morals if they want office. Many questions have been sent to our State asking about the new conditions. Woman suffrage has proved a success, and the women can stand with heads erect, shoulder to shoulder with any one, knowing that they are full, free citizens of the State of Colorado and of the United States."
Miss Anthony then, by special request, gave a recital of all the facts connected with her arrest, trial and conviction for voting in 1872. Miss Shaw introduced her as a criminal, and Miss Anthony retorted, "Yes, a criminal out of jail, just like a good many of the brethren." With marvelous power she recalled all the details of that dramatic episode.
Mrs. Abigail Scott Duniway (Ore.) gave an address on How to Win the Ballot, containing much sound sense. It was published in full by the Grand Rapids Democrat. Mrs. Evelyn H. Belden, president of the Iowa Equal Suffrage Association, spoke on Women and War, saying:
Did you ever have to live with heroes—with men who have survived the hardships and dangers of war? One of the reasons for my mildness in public is that I have to be mild at home. I live with the heroes of two wars. The elder put down the rebellion—so he tells me. The younger, for whom I am responsible, has accomplished an even more perilous feat; he met in mortal combat every day for six months the product of the commissary department of our late war. He is still alive, but "kicking"—and so is his mother!
Note that there were no women on the War Investigating Commission. Brutal officers, incompetent quartermasters and ignorant doctors were tried before a jury of their peers. Every department which was conducted without the help of women has been for months writhing under the probe of an official investigation, and is still writhing under the lash of public opinion.
When the war broke out, the women of Iowa, with the suffragists at their head, cheerfully consecrated themselves to the service of a State which does not recognize them as the equals of their own boys. I have one old trunk that made six trips to Chickamauga Park, filled with delicacies for the soldiers. About August I made up my mind to go and see things for myself. My husband was told it was no place for a woman there among 60,000 men and 1,500 animals; but he had business at home which he did not think I could attend to, and he thought I could go to Chickamauga just as well as he....
If there had been women on the commission, would they have pitched the camp five miles from water? Or provided only one horse and one mule to bring the water for two companies? Or ordered the soldiers to filter and boil their drinking water, without furnishing any filters or any vessels to boil it in? It is said that suffragists do not know how to keep house. If so, the men who managed the war must all be suffragists.
But Clara Barton and the women nurses have won golden opinions from every one. If any man had given a tithe of what Helen Gould did, he could have had any office in the gift of the administration. So could she, if she had been a voter. She might even have been Secretary of War.
We raise our sons to die not for their country—no woman grudges her sons to her country—but to die unnecessarily of disease and neglect, because of red tape....
History furnishes no parallel to the women of America during the last year's war. They were fully alive to its issues, intelligently conversant with its causes, its purposes and possibilities; they studied camp locations, conditions and military rules; and through the hand the heart found constant expression, as many a company of grateful boys can testify. The experience of this war ought to have effectually destroyed the last trace of mediæval sentiment concerning the propriety of women mixing in the affairs of government, and also the last shadow of doubt as to the expediency of recognizing them as voters.
Mrs. Josephine K. Henry (Ky.) made an address sparkling with the epigrams for which she was noted, entitled A Plea for the Ballot:
....The light and the eager interest in the faces of American women show that they are going somewhere; and when women have started for somewhere, they are harder to head off than a comet.... All roads for women lead to suffrage, even if they do not know it. We are Daughters of Evolution, and who can stop old Dame Evolution?... We must live up to our principles, or, as a nation, we are not going to live at all. Then it will be time for Liberty to throw down her torch, and go out of the enlightening business.... "Woman's sphere"—these are the two hardest-worked words in the dictionary.... They call in the mental and moral wreckage of foreign nations to help rule us. A man was asked, "How are you going to vote on the constitution?" He answered: "My constitution's mighty poorly; my mother was feeble before me." There is deep tragedy in giving such men control of the lives and property of American women.... There is not so much the matter with the U. S. Constitution as with the constitutions of some of our statesmen.... It is not an expansion of territory that we need so much as an expansion of justice to our own women.... American men have had a hard struggle for their own liberty, and some of them are afraid there will not be liberty enough to go around.... What relation is woman to the State? She is a very poor relation, yet her tax-money is demanded promptly.
Dr. Mary H. Barker Bates, of the Denver School Board, discussed Our Gains and Our Losses, and said in closing: "We have learned that in politics we must have a machine, only it should be used for good government, not for corruption. Make your machine as perfect as you can, without a flaw in it anywhere, and then use it for good ends." Mrs. Mary B. Clay (Ky.) gave a careful survey of conditions resulting from The Removal of Industries from the Home, which had forced woman to follow them and made her an industrial factor in the outside world. Miss Griffin being again called on told these anecdotes:
In my home in Alabama there are four educated women. My father has passed away. My sisters are widows and I am an old maid. We have as our gardener a negro boy twenty-three years old. When he came to us he said that he had been in the Second Reader for ten years, but on election day he goes over and votes to represent our family. If we complain of having no vote on the expenditure of our tax-money, we are told we must "influence" men; in other words, we must influence that gardener. But when we start to do so, and ask him how he means to vote, he says he doesn't know yet, because he hasn't seen "Uncle Peter," the colored minister.
In my section men are chivalric and say, "Don't you know that you shall have everything you ask as ladies? Don't you know that we are your natural protectors?" But what is a woman afraid of on a lonely road after dark? The bears and wolves are all gone; there is nothing to be afraid of now but our natural protectors.
On the islands off our coast there was a large population that could not read or write. A missionary-spirited woman went there to help educate them. After awhile she was made a member of the school board, which consisted of a few white men and more negroes. The president of the board, a colored man, was disgusted at the elevation of a woman to that dignity, and when she was sworn in he resigned, saying, "Now you've swore her in, you've got to swear me out; I'm not going to sit on no board with no woman."