The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V

by Unknown

Introducing Representative Raker Miss Addams said smilingly that while the women speakers were allowed ten minutes the men were to have but five. Judge Raker of California referred to the fact that he had pledged himself to this Federal Amendment when he was first a candidate for Congress eight years before and said: "This matter, as it appears to me, has passed beyond the question of sentiment; it has passed beyond the question of advisability; it has passed beyond the question of whether or not women ought to participate in the vote for the benefit of the home or the benefit of the State. As I view it it is a clean-cut question of absolute right and upon that assumption I base my argument—that we today are depriving one-half of the intelligence, one-half of the ability of this republic from participating in public affairs and that from the economic standpoint of better laws, better homes, better government in the country, the city, the State and the nation, we need our wives', our sisters' and our mothers' votes and assistance."

"May I introduce one of my own fellow townswomen, Miss Mary E. McDowell," said Miss Addams, "who has had what I may call a distressing life in the stockyards district of Chicago for many years, and she will tell you what she thinks of the franchise for women." Miss McDowell said in part:

We are all together very human, it seems to me, both men and women, and it is because we are human, because this is a human proposition and not a woman proposition, that I am glad to speak for it and believe in it so firmly. Giving the vote to women is not simply a woman's question, it has to do with the man, the child and the home. Women have always worked but within much less than a century millions of women and girls have been thrust out of the home into a man-made world of industry and commerce. We know that in the United States over 5,500,000, according to the census of 1900, are bread winners.... Do we not see that the working women must be given every safeguard that workingmen have and now as they stand side by side with men in the factory and shop they must stand with them politically? The ballot may be but a small bit of the machinery that is to lift the mass of wage-earning women up to a higher plane of self-respect and self-protection but will it not add the balance of power so much needed by the workingmen in their struggle for protective legislation, which will in the end be shared by the women? Today women are cheap, unskilled labor and will be until organization and technical training and the responsibility of the vote in their hands develop a consciousness of their social value....

The vote and all that it implies will awaken this sense of value. It will give to the wage-earning woman a new status in industry, for men will help to educate her when she is a political as well as an industrial co-worker. As man gave strength to the developing of the institution of the home so woman must be given the opportunity to help man humanize the State. This can be done only when she has the ballot and shares the responsibility.

Representative A. W. Lafferty of Oregon said in his brief five minutes: "I believe it is not only practicable but that it would be profitable to the United States to extend equal suffrage to men and women. We have had here this morning a practical demonstration of the ability of the women of this country to participate intelligently in the discussion of public questions. I think that we could not make a mistake in placing the ballot in the hand that rocks the cradle. Having only the best interests of this republic at heart, I believe it would be a good thing if fifty of the mothers of this country were in the House of Representatives today and I wish that at least twenty-five of them were in the Senate. You should consider, as lawyers, as statesmen and as historians that in the history of the civilized world in monarchies women have participated in the Government; it is a shame that in a republic like ours, the best form of government that has ever yet been established, women can not, under the present law, actively participate in it."

The address which Representative Edward T. Taylor put into the Congressional Record on this occasion was also printed in a pamphlet of forty pages and until the end of the movement for woman suffrage was a standard document for distribution by the National Association. He said in the introduction:

I want to recite in a plain, conversational way some of my personal experiences and individual observations extending over a period of thirty years of public life, during nearly nineteen years of which we have had equal suffrage in Colorado....

When I came to Congress I did not realize and I have not yet been able fully to understand the deep-seated prejudice, bias and even vindictiveness against woman suffrage and the astounding amount of misinformation there is everywhere here in the East concerning its practical operation. I have been equally amazed and indignant at the many brazen assertions I have seen in the papers and heard that are perfectly absurd and without the slightest foundation in fact, and I have had many heated discussions on the subject during the past three years. When I hear men and women who have never spent a week and most of them not an hour in an equal suffrage State attempt to discuss the subject from the standpoint of their own preconceived prejudices and idle impressions, I feel like saying: "May the Lord forgive them for they know not what they do." Let me say to them and to my colleagues in the House that it will not be ten years before the women of this country from the Pacific to the Atlantic will have the just and equal rights of American citizenship.[77]

Since coming here I have been frequently asked by friends what we think of woman suffrage in Colorado, and when I tell them that it is an unqualified success and that I doubt if even five per cent. of the people of the State would vote to repeal it, they ask me what it has accomplished. I believe it is generally conceded by enlightened people that the laws of a State are a true index of its degree of civilization. I will, therefore, give a brief catalogue of some of the most important of the 150 legislative measures that have been either introduced by the women or at the request of the various women's organizations and enacted into law.

Then followed under the head of different years, beginning with 1893, that in which women were enfranchised, a roster of Colorado's unequalled laws. These were followed by a complete analysis of the practical working of woman suffrage during the past eighteen years, with comprehensive answers to all the stereotyped questions and objections.