From the early days of the National Suffrage Association its representatives had appeared before committees of every Congress to ask for the submission of an amendment to the Federal Constitution and during many years this "hearing" took place when the annual convention met in Washington. As it was to be held elsewhere this year and at a time when the Congress was not in session a delegation of speakers had gone before the committees the preceding March by arrangement of Mrs. William Kent, chairman of the association's Congressional Committee.
At the hearing before a joint committee of the Senate Judiciary and Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage March 13 six of the members were present: Senators Overman (N. C.), chairman; Brandegee (Conn.); Bourne (Ore.); Brown (Neb.); Johnston (Ala.); Wetmore (R. I.). Senator John D. Works of California, who had introduced the resolution in the Senate, presented Dr. Anna Howard Shaw as "one of the best known and most distinguished of those connected with the movement for the enfranchisement of women." As she took charge of the hearing she said in part:
Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Committee, this is the forty-third year that the women suffragists have been represented by delegations appointed by the national body to speak in behalf of resolutions which have been introduced to eliminate from the Constitution of the United States in effect the word "male," to eliminate all disqualifications for suffrage on account of sex. The desire of our association is not so much to put on record the opinions of this committee in regard to woman suffrage as to plead with it to give a favorable report, so that the question can come before the Congress, be discussed on its merits and then submitted to the various States for ratification. The Federal Constitution guarantees to every State a republican form of government—that is, a government in which the laws are enacted by representatives elected by the people—and we claim that it has violated its own principle in refusing to protect women in their right to select their representatives, so we are asking for no more than that the Constitution shall be carried out by the U. S. Government. As the president of the National Suffrage Association, I stand here in the place of a woman who gave sixty years of her life in advocacy of that grand principle for which so many of our ancestors died, Miss Susan B. Anthony. There is not a woman here today who was at the first hearing, nor a woman alive today who was among those that struggled in the beginning for this fundamental right of every citizen. I now introduce Mrs. Susan Walker Fitzgerald of Massachusetts. It has been said that women cannot fight. Mrs. Fitzgerald's father was an Admiral of the Navy and if she can not fight her father could.
Mrs. Fitzgerald spoke at length in the interest of the home and the family, showing the evolution that had taken place until now "the Government touches upon every phase of our home life and largely dictates its conditions while at the same time the woman is held responsible for them and is working with her hands tied behind her back and she asks the vote in order to do her woman's work better." Mrs. James Lees Laidlaw of New York spoke beautifully of the desire of the mothers of the rising generation that their daughters should not have to enter the hard struggle for the suffrage and pictured the need for the highest development of the womanly character. Mrs. Elsie Cole Phillips of Wisconsin showed the standpoint of the so-called working classes, saying in part:
The right to vote is based primarily on the democratic theory of government. "The just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed." What does that mean? Does it not mean that there is no class so wise, so benevolent that it is fitted to govern any other class? Does it not mean that in order to have a democratic government every adult in the community must have an opportunity to express his opinion as to how he wishes to be governed and to have that opinion counted? A vote is in the last analysis an expression of a need—either a personal need known to one as an individual as it can be known to no one else, or an expression of a need of those in whom we are interested—sister-women or children, for instance. The moment that one admits this concept of the ballot that moment practically all of the anti-suffrage argument is done away with.... Is it to strengthen the hands of the strong? Oh, no; it is to put into the hands of the weak a weapon of self-protection. And who are the weak? Those who are economically handicapped—first of all the working classes in their struggle for better conditions of life and labor. And who among the workers are the weak? Wherever the men have suffered, the women have suffered more.
But I would also like to point out to you how this affects the homekeeping woman, the wife and mother, of the working class, aside from the wage-earning woman. Consider the woman at home who must make both ends meet on a small income. Who better than she knows whether or not the cost of living advances more rapidly than the wage does? Is not that a true statement in the most practical form of the problem of the tariff? And who better than she knows what the needs of the workers are in the factories? Take the tenement-house woman, the wife and mother who is struggling to bring up a family under conditions which constantly make for evil. Who, better than the mother who has tried to bring up six or seven children in one room in a dark tenement house, knows the needs of a proper building? Who better than the mother who sees her boy and her girl playing in the streets knows the need of playgrounds? Who better than a mother knows what it means to a child's life—which you men demand that she as a wife and a mother shall care for especially—who, better than she, knows the cruel pressure that comes to that child from too early labor in what the U. S. census report calls "gainful occupations"?
There is a practical wisdom that comes out of the pressure of life and an educational force in life itself which very often is more efficient than that which comes through textbooks of college.... The ignorant vote that is going to come in when women are enfranchised is that of the leisure-class woman, who has no responsibilities and knows nothing of what life means to the rest of the world, who has absolutely no civic or social intelligence. But, fortunately for us, she is a small percentage of the women of this land, and fortunately for the land there is no such rapid means of education for her as to give her the ballot and let her for the first time feel responsibilities....
Now the time has come when the home and the State are one. Every act, every duty of the mother in the home is affected by something the State does or does not do, and the only way in which we are ever going to have our national housekeeping and our national child-rearing done as it should be is by bringing into the councils of the State the wisdom of women.
James Lees Laidlaw of New York was introduced as president of the National Men's League for Woman Suffrage and after stating that such leagues were being organized throughout the country he spoke of the great change that had taken place in the status of women and said: