Women are admitted to the postal service on equal salaries with men. In the railway service, which is controlled by the Government, women have ever since 1860 been employed in the controlling office and ticket department and in the telegraph and telephone service, which are owned by the Government. In 1809 women were given the rights of inheritance and in the same year equal matrimonial rights. The colleges and universities are open to them and they receive degrees the same as men. All professions are open except the clerical. Women teachers are pensioned equally with men. Tax paying women have voted in church matters since 1736. Every woman is taxed in the Lutheran Church in America but has no vote and the women blame the Americans because the clergy educated here imbibed the false spirit of liberty and justice.
You can not trust the ballot into the hands of women teachers in the public schools but you give it to men who can not read or write. You can not trust the ballot to women who are controlling millions of money and helping support the country but you give it to loafers and vagabonds who know nothing, have nothing and represent nothing. You can not trust the ballot in the hands of women who are the wives and daughters of your heroes but you give it to those who are willing to sell it for a glass of beer and you trust it in the hands of anarchists. Oh, men, let justice speak and may the public weal demand that this disfranchisement of the noble American women shall be stopped.
Mrs. Catt then introduced to the committee Miss Isabel Campbell, daughter of former Governor Campbell of Wyoming, who in 1869 signed the bill which enfranchised the women of the Territory; Prof. Theodosia Ammons of the Colorado University of Agriculture and Mrs. Ida M. Weaver, a resident of Idaho. Each gave a comprehensive report of the practical working of woman suffrage in her State; the large proportion of women who voted; their appointment on boards and election to offices; the result in improved polling places, better candidates and cleaner politics; higher pay for working women; the advantages to the community; the comradeship between men and women and the general satisfaction of the people with the experiment. Their reports as a whole offered unimpeachable testimony in favor of the enfranchisement of women.
Mrs. Florence Fenwick Miller in her address said:
I have been asked to direct especially my attention to the position of women in England. I hope you, as members of a republic, will be ashamed to hear that the monarchy of England gives its women citizens a great many rights which you deny to yours, that we have had those rights for so many years that nobody talks about them. When I am asked to give you testimony as to the smooth working of the women's vote in all local affairs, I am at a loss to know what to say, because it runs along so easily and naturally, so like breathing the air in a thoroughly healthy state of the lungs, that there is absolutely nothing to be said. Men and women vote on equal terms and the woman's vote is as much a matter of course as the man's.
The local government of England is divided among a number of different bodies. We have the school boards, established in 1870, which have managed the elementary education of the country, now compulsory and free. They spend very large sums of the taxpayers' money and for them every woman who pays taxes has a vote. Any woman whom the electors choose is entitled to take a seat on them. There are at present not only hundreds of thousands of women voting for the school boards but there are 276 women sitting as representatives upon those of England alone. I myself have for nine years been a member of the school board of London, sitting for one of the great divisions called Hackney, which has 60,000 voters. My election committee was composed of men and women. Men worked for me very hard indeed!... The next great local governing bodies are the boards of guardians of the poor. These bodies spend annually about $127,000,000, which they raise from the taxpayers, men and women. These are huge organizations. Many of the workhouses contain over 1,000 persons; besides which, outside relief in money or food or medical aid is given. Every woman who is a taxpayer can vote for a member of these boards. Women are eligible to sit on them the same as men. There are nearly 1,000 women on the boards.
Women may vote for the municipalities, for the town councils. I can not offer you any illustration of how the women's vote has improved them for the simple reason that when those councils were instituted in 1869 the Parliament of a monarchy was sufficiently large-minded to perceive that women ought to vote for them; that they have to pay their taxes and where a woman stands at the head of a household she is not only equally entitled to representation in regard to the spending of her money but also she is as much concerned with the work that the councils have to do as any man. This was so obviously just that women were given the right to vote on them and have exercised that right ever since.... The women vote as fully as the men do.
We have district, parish and county councils, which have to a considerable extent the moral and the intellectual government of the cities under them, licensing of places of amusement, public parks, technical education for young people over school age and so on. The building of homes for the poor, the oversight of lunatic asylums and matters of that kind, they have under their authority. These were established in 1884 and the women who had voted so well for many years for school boards and town councils of course were given the right to vote for the new county councils.
Mrs. Miller went fully into the work of women on borough and county councils and closed her valuable address by saying: "Gentlemen, the work of women in English public life has not only been unattended with any mischief but has been a great force for service and benefit. Surely American men can trust their sisters as our men have for the past generation trusted us, to their own as well as our advantage."
In closing the hearing to which the committee gave the strictest attention, Mrs. Catt said in part: