Henry B. Blackwell, chairman of the Presidential Suffrage Committee, urged the southern women to petition their Legislatures, seven of which would meet during the year, to give women the right to vote for presidential electors. "The choice of President and Vice-president of the United States," he said, "is the most important form of suffrage exercised by an American citizen.... The King of England and the Emperor of Germany are practically possessed of no greater political power than our President during his official term," and he continued:
Here then is an open door to equal suffrage. Once let the women of any State take their equal part in this great national election and their complete equality is assured. Without change of State or Federal Constitution, without ratification by the individual voters, a simple majority of both houses of any Legislature at any time in any State can confer upon women citizens this magnificent privilege, which will carry with it a certainty of speedy future concessions of all minor rights and privileges. It is amazing that no concerted effort has been made until recently to secure this right, so easily obtained and of so much transcendent importance. Especially is it strange that in States where iron-bound constitutional restrictions forbid any exercise whatever of local or municipal woman suffrage and where the social conditions make an amendment of State constitution almost impossible, suffragists allow year after year to elapse without any effort to get the only practical thing possible, action by the State Legislature conferring Presidential suffrage on women. Suffrage in school or municipal elections cannot give us a full and fair test of the value of equal suffrage or of woman's willingness to participate. Suffrage in State elections cannot be had without amendment of State constitutions, always difficult and usually impossible of attainment in the face of organized opposition. Why not then avail ourselves of this unique, this providential opportunity?
Among other committees reporting was that on Church work, Miss Laura De Merritte (Me.) chairman, and her recommendations were adopted that the committee on National Sunday School lessons be asked to prepare one each year on the rights and duties of women citizens; that ministers of all denominations be urged to preach one sermon each year on this topic; that all women's missionary societies be requested to make it a part of their regular program at their annual conventions and that a place be sought on the program of national conventions of the Epworth League and Christian Endeavor Societies to present the question of woman's enfranchisement. The valuable report of the Committee on Industrial Problems Relating to Women and Children by the chairman, Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby (D. C.) said: "Everyone can recall instances of discrimination against women by factories, business firms, school boards and municipalities, making it plain that women are at a disadvantage as non-voting members of the community. As a recent fact in regard to the government I would cite the order by Postmaster-General Payne that a woman employee must give up her position if she marries." The report continued:
Nearly all the appointments in the departments obtained last year by women were as printers' assistants at a small salary. Not a woman has been selected by the Pension Office in six years. In 1902 twenty-seven women were chosen as typewriters and stenographers and 114 men. The Civil Service Commissioners are compelled by law to keep separate lists of men and women who have passed examinations and must certify to the appointing officers from either list as specified by the heads of the bureaus, so that it is quite possible for these to keep women out and fill the places with voters. Commissioner W. D. Foulke not long ago called the attention of the chiefs of bureaus to the fact that by taking from the men's list down to the lowest point of eligibility, while women who passed with a rank of 90 and over were not chosen, the Government was not getting the skilled labor to which it was entitled.
The continued defeat of child labor protection laws in some of the southern States and the conditions of children working in the mines of Pennsylvania, as shown in testimony before the Coal Strike Commission, show the need of woman's help in shaping social economics and her powerlessness without the ballot.... How can we get hold of the wage-earning women in mass and convince them that from their own selfish and personal standpoint, if from no other, they should join the ranks of those that are working for the ballot? Talented speakers from the ranks of wage-earners have thrilled audiences with their impetuous oratory but there has been no general rally of working women to secure the ballot for themselves....
How can we stimulate in women of wealth and opportunity, whose influence would be invaluable and whose support might give the movement the financial backing it needs, a consciousness of the solidarity of human interests, so they will see that from an impersonal, unselfish standpoint, if they have no personal need, they are under the most commanding obligation to add their strength to ours to make better conditions for working women? We might despair of reaching either the overworked, underpaid and unresponsive wage-earner, or the indifferent, irresponsible and almost inaccessible woman of fortune, were it not that all along the social line we are linked by one common possession, our womanhood, which, when awakened, is the Divine Motherhood and it is to this we must appeal.
Miss Anthony presided at the Friday evening public meeting, which was opened with prayer by the Rev. Gilbert Dobbs, who said: "We invoke Thy divine blessing, O God, upon this assembly and we rejoice that Thou hast always opened the way for Thy consecrated servants—women—to do well from the time of Miriam and of Deborah to the present. While not often has the call been to women to don armor and press on to battle, yet it may be that Thou hast reserved them for the battle of ballots, in which they can secure victory for all moral good and aid in the overthrow of every organized vice and infamy, so that there shall be a higher type of public morals and nobler methods of government."
Mrs. Bennett spoke in her humorous and inimitable way on The Authority of Women to Preach the Gospel of Christ in Public Places. Mrs. Rachel Foster Avery (Penn.) under the title What's in a Name? told of the efforts that were being made by the conservative women of Philadelphia to reform municipal conditions through Civic Betterment Clubs, not by the ballot in the hands of women but through the men voters. "Yet, after all," she said, "are not these clubs doing good work for woman suffrage under another name? For as these earnest but conservative women find themselves in contact with life at so many new points they are getting so used to all the things which go to make up that awful bugaboo, 'politics,' that they will soon begin to realize that politics affects for good or evil all the things which touch the daily lives of every one of them. After awhile, perhaps sooner than most of us think, they will join the ranks of the wiser women who are now suffragists and who know that they want the vote and why they want it."
Miss Frances Griffin (Ala.) kept the audience in a gale of laughter from the first to the last of her speech, which began: "My address is put down on the program as 'A Song or a Sermon.' It is going to be neither, I have changed my mind. Mrs. Catt's address last night furnished argument enough to lie three feet deep all over Louisiana for three years."
The talented young lawyer, Miss Gail Laughlin (Me.), gave an address entitled The Open Door, during which she said: