The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V

by Unknown

As the resolution to submit the Federal Suffrage Amendment to the State Legislatures for ratification had been lost in the Senate and House of the 63rd Congress it was necessary to begin again with the 64th. Usually the hearings before the committees of the two Houses were held at the same time and the convention adjourned so the delegates might be present but at this time the one for the National American Association before the Senate was set for the morning of December 15 and the one before the House for the following day. It adjourned for the first one but as the second promised to be long drawn out only a delegation went with Dr. Shaw and she returned to the convention after she had made the opening speech.

At the Senate hearings the chairman, Senator Charles S. Thomas (Col.), presided and members present were Senators Hollis (N. H.); Clapp (Minn.); Sutherland (Utah); Catron (N. M.); Jones (Wash.). The other members, Senators Owen (Okla.) and Johnson (S. Dak.), were suffragists and probably were out of town. Senator Catron was the only opponent. Senator Ransdell was added to the committee the second day. On the third day only Senators Hollis, Clapp, Sutherland and Jones attended. The time was divided among the representatives of the National Association, the Congressional Union and the National Anti-Suffrage Association, the first taking from 10 to 12 o'clock Wednesday; the second from 10 to 11:30 Thursday; the third from 2 to 3:15 Monday. The joint resolution for the amendment had been introduced by Senators Thomas and Sutherland.

On the first day Chairman Thomas said: "This meeting of the Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage is called at the instance of the National Association of which Dr. Anna Howard Shaw is the honored president. The hearing will be conducted under the auspices of that association and by her direction. Dr. Shaw, we will be glad to hear you now." Dr. Shaw said in part:

For thirty-seven years this amendment has been introduced and re-introduced into the Congress by members who have been favorable to our movement, or who have believed in the justice and right of citizens to petition Congress and have that petition heard. Last year we were permitted to address your body and we rejoiced in the fact that a committee, which from the time of its creation usually had been indifferent toward our subject, had now been appointed with Senator Thomas, who from the very beginning had seen the justice of the demand for woman suffrage, at the head. This committee gave us great courage and hope, which were fully justified in the fact that for the first time in twenty years our resolution was reported out of committee and acted upon in the Senate, receiving a majority vote but not the necessary two-thirds. We come again with the same measure and again we appeal to this committee, in the same terms as for all the past years, for the women citizens of the United States who at every call have responded as readily as the men in doing their duty and serving their country. More and more the demand is being made by ever-increasing groups of women that they shall directly share in the Government of which they form a part. So we come to you today with the same old measure but we come with greater hope than ever before because we realize that back of you there are now in many of the States constituencies of women.

Dr. Shaw introduced Mrs. Pattie Ruffner Jacobs of Alabama, who quoted from distinguished southern members of Congress on State's rights and asked that these sentiments be applied to the National Amendment for Woman Suffrage, saying in part:

If this amendment is adopted it in no wise regulates or interferes with any existing qualification for voting (except sex) which the various State constitutions now exact. It leaves all others to be determined by the various States through their constitutional agencies. It is a fallacy to contend that to prohibit discrimination on account of sex would involve the race problem. The actual application of the principle in the South would be to enfranchise a very large number of white women and the same sort of negro women as of negro men now permitted to exercise the privilege....

However much these chivalrous gentlemen may wish it were so, that southern women might truly be called roses and lilies which toil not, they must know that their compliments do not provide equal pay for equal service, which obtains in all the woman suffrage States and that their flowers of speech do not help us secure a co-guardianship law, which every suffrage State has and which is non-existent in all southern States. The pedestal platitude appeals less and less to the intelligence of southern women, who are learning in increasing numbers that the assertion that they are too good, too noble, too pure to vote, in reality brands them as incompetents. It cannot be sugarcoated into any other significance as long as we remain classed with idiots, criminals and some of the negro men who also are disfranchised. As things stand in the South an incentive is held out to the negro man to become educated that he may meet the tests; to practice industry and frugality and acquire property to meet the taxpaying qualification; but no such incentive is held out to the white women, who meet the insuperable barrier of sex at every turn which might lead to progress....

We women of the South today, while proud of our past do not live in it. We wish to be proud of our present that we may look forward with confidence to our future. We know that sectionalism should have no place in our hearts or lives. This demand for suffrage is not sectional, it has its adherents in every State and in almost every town in every State. There is little or no organized opposition in my part of the country but there are many thousands of fine, thoughtful, forward-looking southern women banded together seeking the removal of this last badge of incompetency. For them there is no North or South but one great nation, the interest of whose women is the same. We realize that we are not different or better, we southern women, than the women in Montana, Illinois, Maine or Massachusetts but are just human beings as they are. We are not queens but political and industrial serfs. We are not angels but our better natures, our higher selves are becoming aroused by the needs of our common humanity with a solidarity of purpose, a keenness of vision unmarred by selfish motives.

Miss Caroline Ruutz-Rees, head of the Rosemary School for Girls in Greenwich, Conn., described the work of the National Suffrage Association and its sixty-three auxiliaries in the many State campaigns and the long effort for a Federal Amendment and said in closing: "In its propaganda and campaigns the association has steadily maintained a non-partisan attitude, endeavoring so far as it had power to help the friends of suffrage and considering as antagonistic only its opponents. It does not hold its friends responsible for the failure of their party to pass its measures. It never forgets that it may have to look for help in amending the State constitutions to the adherents of a party unfriendly to a Federal Amendment. It believes in educating the public until the demand for the enfranchisement of women becomes so strong as to be irresistible. The enormous change of opinion in that public within a few years inspires the association to hope for the speedy conclusion of its labors."

Mrs. George Bass, the well-known suffrage and political worker of Chicago, said in the course of her remarks: