The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V

by Unknown

It was voted to continue the national headquarters in New York. There was a flurry of discussion over a proposed amendment to the constitution changing the present method of voting, which allowed the delegates present to cast the entire number of votes to which the State was entitled by its paid membership. The convention finally adopted the amendment that hereafter the delegates present should cast only their individual votes. The election resulted in a change of but two officers. Professor Breckinridge and Miss Ashley did not stand for re-election and Miss Anita Whitney of California was chosen for second vice-president and Mrs. Louise De Koven Bowen of Chicago for second auditor.

A serious controversy arose during the convention in regard to the deviation of some of the national officers from the time-honored custom of non-partisanship. It had always been the unwritten but carefully observed law of the association that no member of the board should advocate or work for any political party. Mrs. George Howard Lewis, a veteran suffragist of Buffalo, N.Y., sent a resolution to the convention declaring that officers of the association must remain non-partisan and Mrs. Ida Husted Harper presented it and led the contest for it. Dr. Shaw announced before it was discussed that the board recommended that it should not pass.

Women had taken a larger part in the political campaign which had just ended than ever before and one of the officers and many of the delegates present had spoken and worked for the Progressive party because of the suffrage plank in its platform. Other members had done the same for the Socialist and Prohibition parties for a like reason. As a result, while the resolution had some warm support it was defeated by a vote of ten to one, although it applied only to the officers and left individual members free. The consequences of this vote soon began to be realized by the board and the delegates and in the official resolutions was one which said: "The National American Suffrage Association reaffirms the position for which it always has stood, of being an absolutely non-partisan, non-sectarian body." When asked for an interpretation the officers answered that "the association must not declare officially for any political party."[76]

One of the most enjoyable evenings of the convention was the one in charge of the National College Equal Suffrage League, the program consisting of a debate between groups of clever speakers, each with one or more university degrees, half of them posing as anti-suffragists, with Dr. Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College and of the league, in the chair. A suffrage meeting which touched high water mark was that of Sunday afternoon, when the immense opera house was filled to overflowing and literally thousands stood on the outside in the intense cold and listened to speakers who were hastily sent out to address them. Dr. Shaw presided. The meeting was opened with prayer by the Rt. Rev. Philip Mercer Rhinelander and the music was rendered by the choir, under its director, Samuel J. Riegel, with the audience joining. An eloquent address was given, the Democracy of Sex and Color, by Dr. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois, and one by Miss Addams on the Communion of the Ballot, the necessity for cooperative work by men and women, in which she said: "Take a still graver subject. Everywhere vice regulation is coming up for government action. The white slave traffic is international and it goes on from city to city. I ask you, in the name of common sense, is it safe or wise or sane to entrust to men alone the dealing with this age-long evil? Our laws are superior to those of most European countries. In England, because women have been obliged to appeal to the pity of men against these evils, (for the appeal to chivalry seems to have fallen), there is a disposition to divide into two camps, men in one and women in the other. Any sex antagonism thus engendered arises because these grave moral questions have not been taken up by men and women together. By debarring women from suffrage, we are failing to bring to bear on these questions that vast moral energy which dwells in women.... Whenever there is a great moral awakening it is followed by an extension of the movement for women's rights. The first wave came with the anti-slavery agitation; the second with the prohibition movement and Frances Willard, and now there is coming all over the world this irresistible movement of government to take up great social and industrial questions."

The very fine address of Miss Julia Lathrop, Chief of the National Children's Bureau, on Woman Suffrage and Child Welfare filled over five columns of the Woman's Journal and contained a sufficient argument for the enfranchisement of women if no other ever had been or should be made. "My purpose," she began, "is to show that woman suffrage is a natural and inevitable step in the march of society forward; that instead of being incompatible with child welfare it leads toward it and is indeed the next great service to be rendered for the welfare and ennoblement of the home. A little more than one-third of all the people in this country, something over 29,500,000 in actual numbers, are children under the age of fifteen—that is, still in a state of tutelage; and it is of unbounded importance that nothing be done by the rest of us which will injure this budding growth. So it is right to judge in large measure any proposed change in our social fabric by its probable effect on that dependent third of the race to whom we are pledged, for whose succession it is the work of this generation to prepare. What we propose is to give universal suffrage to women."

Answering the question, "Do we propose a mad revolution?" she traced the development in the position of woman, every step of which was condemned at the time as a dangerous innovation. "It was a revolution when women were given equal property rights over their goods and equal rights over their children," she said. "We must blush that there are States in this country where that revolution is still to be accomplished. I have heard an old Illinois lawyer describe the early efforts to secure equal property rights for women in that State and the constant objection that such laws would destroy the family, that there could be no harmony unless the ownership were all in one person and that person the man. It was feared then, as now, that women would become tyrannical and unbearable if they were allowed too much independence. Do children suffer because their mothers own property?" She pointed out the necessity for woman's political influence on humanitarian movements and said: "Suffrage for women is not the final word in human freedom but it is the next step in the onward march, because it is the next step in equalizing the rights and balancing the duties of the two types of individuals who make up the human race."

Miss Lathrop showed the need of legislation for all social reforms and how the experience of women beginning with domestic duties carried them forward to a sense of their obligations in community life and a fitness for it. Referring to the uneducated women she said: "The ignorant vote is not the working vote. Working women in great organized factories have been having, since they began that work, an education for the suffrage. They are not the ignorant voters nor are wives of workingmen; at least, they know in part what they need to safeguard themselves and their homes. The ignorant vote is the complacent, blind vote of men and of the feminine 'influence' that moves them, which disregards the real problems of setting safe and wholesome standards of life and labor and education and spends its strength in looking backward, insisting upon precedents without seeing that, good and enduring as they may be, all precedents must be daily retranslated into the setting of today. "Women must vote for their own souls' good," she said, "and they must vote to protect the family. The newer conception of the family is one which depends upon giving to both parents the fullest expression on all those matters of common concern."

The address closed with a fine peroration—Pass on the Torch! In the evening the officers of the association gave a largely attended reception to delegates and friends in the banquet hall of Hotel Walton.

The closing night of the convention was one long to be remembered. There was the same vast, eager audience: Dr. Shaw presided and on the platform was the distinguished Apostle of Peace, winner of the Nobel prize, Baroness Bertha von Suttner, and Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, just returned from a two-years' trip around the world. The meeting was opened by the Rt. Rev. James Henry Darlington, bishop of central Pennsylvania, whose brief address was of great value to the cause. He congratulated the American people on the fact that four more States had been added to the ever-growing list of those which had given the suffrage to women and he called upon all observers to notice that no State which had once voted in woman suffrage had ever voted it out. Once in use, local opposition to it ceased by reason of the self-evident good results. He offered congratulations to those who were humble privates in the ranks and to the famous and brave leaders who organized the victories. "As the Elizabethan and Victorian eras are the most distinguished for philanthropic, literary and economic advancement in the whole history of Great Britain, though the Kings were many and the Queens were few in the long line," he said, "so no man need be ashamed to follow feminine leadership when it means advancement in every good word and work," and he offered congratulations to little children of the future generations of this and all lands. "When our anti-suffrage sisters throw aside their complacency and selfish ease," he said, "to strive side by side with men to formulate and pass necessary laws to protect and develop the bodies, minds and souls of our present little children and all that are to come through the passing centuries, then will dawn a new day for humanity."

Brief addresses were made by Mrs. Blankenburg, Miss Jane Campbell and Professor Breckinridge of Chicago University. Miss Crystal Eastman gave a graphic account of why the amendment failed in Wisconsin and Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton, State president, told in her inimitable way of the campaign that failed in Ohio. Baroness von Suttner made a magnificent plea for the peace of the world and asked for the enfranchisement of women as an absolutely necessary factor in it. The dominant note of Mrs. Catt's speech was the great need for political power in the hands of women to combat the social evil, which she had found intrenched in the governments of every country. These last two addresses, which carried thrilling conviction to every heart, were made without notes and not published.