"We recommend that the League of Women Voters, now a section of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, be organized as a new and independent society, and that its auxiliaries, while retaining their relationship to the Board of Officers to be elected in this 51st convention in form, shall change their names, objects and constitutions to conform to those of the National League of Women Voters and take up the plan of work to be adopted by its first congress."
Following the precedent of the last convention, in order to save time, all headquarters' activities were summed up in the report of the corresponding secretary, Mrs. Nettie Rogers Shuler. Much condensed the report was as follows:
In the greater glory of the Federal Amendment and the ratifications which are bringing about our ultimate victory we should not overlook the solid, constructive work of the past ten and a half months and those successes of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and its branches in the various States, which made possible the Federal Amendment.
At our convention in St. Louis, March 24-29, 1919, when we met to counsel together for the future and to gird on our armor for the "one fight more—the last and the best," we celebrated the Missouri victory, the twenty-seventh State to give Presidential suffrage to women. Mrs. Catt, by resolution of the convention, immediately wrote to the legislators of Tennessee and Iowa urging passage of a similar bill. Tennessee gave Presidential and Municipal suffrage to women April 14 and Iowa Presidential suffrage on April 19, increasing the number of presidential electors for whom women may vote to 306 out of 531, the total in the United States.
Connecticut women made a magnificent campaign for Presidential suffrage, failing by only one vote in the Legislature. The strength displayed by the suffragists, the obtaining of 98,000 women's signatures and the dignity and ability shown under the leadership of Miss Katherine Ludington, so advanced suffrage in that State as to make the battle seem a victory rather than a defeat.
Municipal suffrage was given by the Legislature to the women of Orlando, Fla., April 21, making sixteen towns in ten counties in that State where women have this right. An effort to secure a Primary suffrage bill for the entire State failed.
Suffrage in the Democratic municipal primaries was granted by the local Democratic committee to the women of Atlanta, Ga., May 3, for one election.
In a referendum vote on a State amendment, May 24, 1919, full suffrage was defeated in Texas. The main causes were: The large number of men who were so confident of the success of the amendment that they did not take the trouble to go to the polls to vote for it; illegal changes in the numbering and position of the amendment on the ballots of the various counties; the absence from the State of about 200,000 soldiers; unfavorable weather conditions; the shortness of the time allowed for the campaign, and, chief of all, the organized opposition of the foreign-born and negro voters. The Texas suffragists won a clear-cut victory January 28 when the State Supreme Court upheld the decisions of the lower courts that the Primary suffrage bill was constitutional....
On June 28 the women of Nebraska won a distinctive victory when the State Supreme Court held the Presidential and Municipal suffrage act of 1917 to be constitutional. The history of woman suffrage records no harder fought legal battle than this. They won another victory in the decision by Attorney General Clarence E. Davis that they had the right to help choose delegates to the national political party conventions. On February 12 the constitutional convention voted to leave the word "male" out of the new constitution.
In Tennessee the decision of the Court of Chancery, which declared the Presidential and Municipal suffrage bill of 1918 unconstitutional, has been reversed by the State Supreme Court....