Two anti-suffrage associations were represented, the National, headed by its president, Mrs. Arthur M. Dodge of New York, and the Guidon Club, headed by its president, Mrs. William Force Scott of New York. Mrs. Dodge presented as speakers Miss Alice Hill Chittenden and Miss Minnie Bronson (N. Y.), Mrs. Robert Garrett (Md.), Miss Emily P. Bissell (Del.), Mrs. A. J. George (Mass.), Miss Annie Bock (Calif.), Mrs. O. D. Oliphant (N. J.), Miss Ella Dorsey (D. C.), Mrs. R. C. Talbot and Miss Lucy Price (O.), Miss Eliza Armstrong, Miss Emmeline Pitt and Miss Julia Harding (Penn.), Miss Alice Edith Abell, president "Wage-earners' Anti-Suffrage League" (N. Y.); Everett P. Wheeler and Charles L. Underhill, representing the Men's Anti-Suffrage Leagues of New York and of Massachusetts. Letters were read from Miss Elizabeth McCracken (Mass.) and Arthur Pyle (Minn.). Mrs. Scott introduced as speakers Dr. and Mrs. Rossiter Johnson and John C. Ten Eyck of New York. Representative J. Thomas Heflin (Ala.) spoke over an hour on his own initiative.
As the anti-suffragists had entirely disregarded the agreement to confine the hearing to the purpose of obtaining a special committee and had covered the whole field of woman suffrage itself, the Committee on Rules willingly granted time for a rebuttal. Miss Alice Stone Blackwell (Mass.), editor of the Woman's Journal, was selected as the principal speaker because of her extensive knowledge of the subject and another large audience assembled for the fifth time, both suffragists and opponents. Mrs. Catharine Waugh McCulloch (Ills.) presided and Miss Blackwell said in beginning:
Gentlemen of the committee, it is difficult in a short time to review the arguments that have been made during nine or ten hours, therefore I shall take up only the most important points. The argument has been made over and over that you ought not appoint this committee because there is not a sufficient public demand and because the number of women who oppose suffrage is greater than the number who favor it. It is an actual fact that we represent a very much larger number. The opponents say that only 8 per cent. of the women of this country favor suffrage. They have no authority for this, nobody knows how many there are, but it is a fact that less than one per cent. of the women of the United States have expressed any objection to equal suffrage. The anti-suffragists claim to be organized in seventeen States. The suffragists are organized in forty-seven; the only State without an organization is New Mexico. The anti-suffrage movement maintains only three periodicals—two monthlies and one quarterly. The suffrage movement maintains seven weekly papers, one fortnightly and four or five monthlies.
In every State where petitions for suffrage and remonstrances against it have been sent to the Legislature, the petitioners have always outnumbered the remonstrants and generally by 50 or 100 to one. At the time of the last New York constitutional convention as far back as 1894 the suffragists obtained more than 300,000 individual signatures to their petitions. Suppose only one-half of those were women, that would make 150,000. At the same time the anti-suffragists obtained only 15,000, men and women. In Chicago, a few years ago, 104 organizations, with an aggregate membership of more than 100,000 women, petitioned for a municipal woman-suffrage clause in the new city charter, while only one small organization of women petitioned against it ...
One of the opposing speakers claimed that the majority of the grangers were opposed to suffrage. The National Grange passes a strong resolution in favor of woman suffrage every year and a long list of State granges have done the same. Individual working women have appeared before this committee and have said that they believed that the majority of working women were opposed to suffrage, but all the great organizations of working men and working women have repeatedly passed strong resolutions in favor of it.
We have been told that all kinds of terrible things will happen if suffrage is granted. With the exception of Illinois, every State that has adopted it borders directly upon some State which has it. If, as has been claimed here, homes were broken up and made desolate, if husbands found that their wives were neglecting their home duties and their children, it is not likely that suffrage would spread from the State which first adopted it to one adjoining State after another. You have had one California woman here who claimed that woman suffrage there does not work well. California adopted the initiative and referendum at the same time with woman suffrage. The "antis" immediately started an initiative petition for the repeal of woman suffrage. They said that 80 per cent. of the women of California were opposed to it and that they would repeal it. Both men and women were eligible to sign the repeal petitions; but out of the 1,591,783 men and women they failed to get the 32,000 signatures necessary. It has been asserted that the women in all the equal suffrage States would like to repeal it. In any one of these States they could repeal it if they wished to. A great effort was made by the editor of the Ladies' Home Journal to find Colorado women who would express themselves against it and the fact that he wanted adverse opinions was widely announced in the papers. Out of the more than 200,000 women he succeeded in finding only nineteen who said they did not think much of woman suffrage and of these three said it had not done any harm.
A few years ago Mrs. Julia Ward Howe took a census of all the ministers of four leading denominations in the four oldest suffrage States—Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Idaho—and of all the editors, asking them whether the results of woman suffrage were good or bad. She received 624 answers, of which 62 were unfavorable, 46 undecided and 516 in favor. The answers from the editors were favorable more than 8 to 1: those from the Episcopal clergymen more than 2 to 1; from the Baptist, 7 to 1; from the Congregationalists about 8 to 1; from the Methodists more than 10 to 1; and from the Presbyterians more than 11 to 1.
Miss Blackwell disproved thoroughly the charges made by the opposition disparaging to the laws for working women in the equal suffrage States and many other charges, giving full proof of the accuracy of her statements. The committee asked her many questions and gave her leave to print as much of her argument as she wished. Her carefully prepared data filled thirty-five pages of fine print in the published hearing.
James Lees Laidlaw (N. Y.), president of the National Men's League for Woman Suffrage, showed that the attitude of the opponents expressed a distrust of democracy. He refuted many of their assertions, among them the one that U. S. Senator John D. Works (Calif.) had declared woman suffrage a failure in that State. He read a letter received from the Senator the preceding day as follows: "I did not make any statement anywhere that woman suffrage in California has proved a failure. Such a news item was sent out over the country but it was entirely without foundation and was based on a false headline in a newspaper not borne out by the quotation from my speech even in that paper. You may say for me that the statement is wholly without foundation and that woman suffrage has not proved to be a failure in my State."
Mrs. McCulloch referred to the "poor, misguided working girl" among the "antis" who said wage-earning women didn't want the vote and asked Miss Rose Winslow, a prominent working woman, to read the resolution demanding the suffrage which was passed by the National Women's Trade Union League. She did so and in a few sentences scored one of the flowery anti-suffrage speakers, saying: "I have not had any choice as to whether I should walk on the Bowery or on Fifth Avenue, because I walk nowhere in the sunshine. I am one of the millions of women who work in the shadow of these women of whom men speak as though they are the only ones in the country, in order that they may parade the avenue in all the beauty and glory of everything brought from all over the world for their decoration, but I do not come with merely my personal opinion and experience. I have the opinion of the organized working women of America in convention assembled. These women represent all the trades that women work at in the United States and they have passed this resolution demanding the ballot without a dissenting vote."