The Executive Council was called to meet at the headquarters of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in New York at 10:30 a.m., June 22, 1921, for final action on the new constitution. Mrs. Catt presided and Mrs. Lewis J. Cox, State executive member from Indiana, acted as secretary. It was voted that the following sentence be added to the objects of the association: "To remove as far as it is possible all discriminations against women on account of sex." Sixty-six of the eighty-two members of the Council having voted in the affirmative and none in the negative the constitution was declared to be legally adopted.
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER XIX.
DEATH OF DR. ANNA HOWARD SHAW.
It is literally true that a nation mourned the death of Anna Howard Shaw. Having lectured from ocean to ocean for several decades she was universally known and there were few newspapers which did not contain a sympathetic editorial on her public and personal life. Telegrams were received at her home from all parts of the world and the letters were almost beyond counting. Friend and foe alike yielded to the unsurpassed charm of her personality and the rare qualities of her mind and heart.
In February, 1919, the Woman's Council of National Defense, of which Dr. Shaw had been chairman since its beginning in April, 1917, dissolved with its duties ended. For the past two years she had practically given up her platform work for woman suffrage, then at its most critical stage with the Federal Amendment pending. Now she had made a large number of speaking engagements for the spring in its behalf and had accepted the invitation of Dr. M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College, to be her guest on a trip to Spain afterwards. Everything was put aside when in May came an urgent request from former President Taft and President Lowell, of Harvard University, to join them in a speaking tour of fourteen States from New Hampshire to Kansas to arouse sentiment in favor of the League of Nations as a means of assuring peace forevermore. She was to speak but once a day but she could not resist the appeals in the different cities and it became four or five times a day. At Indianapolis she made speeches, gave interviews, etc., eight times. The next day at Springfield, Ill., she was stricken with pneumonia and was in the hospital two weeks. By June 12 she was able to leave for her home in Moylan, a residence suburb of Philadelphia, with her beloved friend and companion, Lucy Anthony, who had gone to her and who wrote to anxious friends: "She made the journey without even a rise of temperature, found the house all bright with sunshine and flowers and was the happiest person in the world to be at home again." She seemed to recover entirely but on June 30 had a sudden relapse and died at 7 o'clock on the evening of July 2.
DR. SHAW'S TRIBUTE TO THE AMERICAN FLAG, GIVEN MANY TIMES.
"This is the American flag. It is a piece of bunting and why is it that, when it is surrounded by the flags of all other nations, your eyes and mine turn first toward it and there is a warmth at our hearts such as we do not feel when we gaze on any other flag? It is not because of the beauty of its colors, for the flags of England and France which hang beside it have the same colors. It is not because of its artistic beauty, for other flags are as artistic. It is because you and I see in that piece of bunting what we see in no other. It is not visible to the human eye but it is to the human soul.
"We see in every stripe of red the blood which has been shed through the centuries by men and women who have sacrificed their lives for the idea of democracy; we see in every stripe of white the purity of the democratic ideal toward which all the world is tending, and in every star in its field of blue we see the hope of mankind that some day the democracy which that bit of bunting symbolizes shall permeate the lives of men and nations, and we love it because it enfolds our ideals of human freedom and justice."