[296] The History is indebted for this chapter to Mrs. Lucy Hobart Day of Portland, president of the State Suffrage Association, whose work is done under the motto, "In order to establish justice."
[297] State officers for 1900: President, Mrs. Lucy Hobart Day; vice-president-at-large, Mrs. S. J. L. O'Brion; vice-president, Mrs. Sarah Fairfield Hamilton; corresponding secretary, Miss Anne Burgess; recording secretary, Miss Lillia Floyd Donnell; treasurer, Dr. Emily N. Titus; auditor, Miss Eliza C. Tappan; superintendent press work, Miss Vetta Merrill.
Among others who have served are Mesdames Lillian M. N. Stevens, Etta Haley Osgood, Winnifred Fuller Nelson and Helen Coffin Beedy; Miss Louise Titcomb and Dr. Jane Lord Hersom.
[298] Among those who have been instrumental in securing better legislation for the women of the State may be mentioned the Hon. Thomas Brackett Reed, Judge Joseph W. Symonds, Franklin Payson; ex-Governors Joseph Bodwell, Frederick Robie, Henry B. Cleaves and Llewellyn Powers; Mesdames Augusta Merrill Hunt, Margaret T. W. Merrill and Ann Frances Greeley; Dr. Abby Mary Fulton and the Misses Cornelia M. Dow, Charlotte Thomas and Elizabeth Upham Yates.
CHAPTER XLIV.
MARYLAND.[299]
If but one State in the Union allowed woman to represent herself it should be Maryland, which was named for a woman, whose capital was named for a woman, and where in 1647 Mistress Margaret Brent, the first woman suffragist in America, demanded "place and voyce" in the Assembly as the executor and representative of her kinsman, Lord Baltimore. Her petition was denied but she must have had some gallant supporters, as the archives record that the question of her admission was hotly debated for hours. After the signal defeat of Mistress Brent, there seems to have been no demand for the ballot on the part of Maryland women for about 225 years.[300]
In 1870 and '71 Miss Susan B. Anthony, Mrs. Lucy Stone and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe lectured in Baltimore and there was some slight agitation of the subject.