The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V

by Unknown

It devolves upon the college woman more than upon any other one type to face and conquer a retarding tendency which is becoming marked in this country. I refer to the anti-feminization movement. Dr. Stanley Hall has given voice to it in education; Dr. Lyman Abbott quavers about it in religion; the committee on tariff revision is an example of it in politics. When women sent a petition to the committee against raising the duties on certain necessities of life of which they were the chief consumers, the chairman said: "It doesn't make any difference whether these women send in a petition signed by 500 or 5,000 names, they will receive no consideration. Let them talk things over in their clubs and other organizations; this will occupy them and do no one any harm; but it will not affect the tariff." On the same day the committee accorded a deferential hearing to a deputation of lumbermen.... This discrimination against woman, the vague feeling that she has been allowed to get on too fast, to get out of control, that she has slipped into too large activities while the good man slept, has come upon us at the very time when Scandinavia and Germany and England are getting rid of their simian chivalry. It is notorious that America, which once was the progressive nation, has been for a generation in a comatose state in the matter of social ideas. It is high time that our college women should stand solid against the blind superstition, whose mother is fear and whose father is egoism, that women can not be trusted in public affairs....

The report of Mr. Blackwell on Presidential suffrage was accepted by a rising vote and his report as chairman of the Committee on Resolutions was adopted, as usual, without change.[61] For many years he had served as chairman of these committees. His constitutional argument for the right of Legislatures to grant women a vote for presidential electors always stood unchallenged and his faith that they would do this was eventually justified. One of the founders of the American Suffrage Association in 1869, he had not during forty years missed attending a national suffrage convention, first with his wife, Lucy Stone, and later with his daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell. He had never seemed in better health and spirits than at this one in Seattle but two months later, on September 7, he died at the age of 84, a great loss to the cause of woman suffrage. (Memorials in next chapter.)

The Legislative Evening was in charge of the State suffrage association, Mrs. De Voe in the chair, and it was the intention to have those members of the Legislature who were principally responsible for submitting the amendment address the convention but an extra session at that time spoiled this program. The Hon. Alonzo Wardell spoke for Charles R. Case, president of the State Federation of Labor, which was strongly in favor of the amendment, he said, and had votes enough to carry it if the members would go to the polls. Mrs. Lord represented the Grange, which she said could be depended on for an affirmative vote. Miss Parker gave a graphic description of the "illegal and dishonorable methods" by which the vote was taken away from the women while Washington was a Territory.[62] Mrs. John Moore of Tacoma read a powerful scene from The Spanish Gypsy by George Eliot. After a lively collection speech by Mrs. Upton, Dr. Shaw closed the evening with a mirth-provoking "question box."

At an afternoon session Mrs. Rachel Foster Avery read the report of the National Committee on the Petition to Congress. It had been the plan of Mrs. Catt, as presented and adopted at the convention of 1908, to have one final petition to Congress for the submission of the Federal Amendment and she had consented to take the chairmanship temporarily. Headquarters had been opened in the Martha Washington, the woman's hotel in New York City, where the headquarters of the Interurban Woman Suffrage Council, of which Mrs. Catt was chairman, were located. Here she and Miss Mary Garrett Hay spent many months from 9 a. m. to 5 p. m., assisted by Miss Minnie J. Reynolds, who did press work and correspondence with the States. Mrs. Priscilla D. Hackstaff of Brooklyn, a former Missourian, took charge of the work in that State from these headquarters and there was an energetic volunteer sub-committee of New York suffragists. The report continued:

"The Governors of the four enfranchised States served on an honorary Advisory Committee, as did the following men and women: Anna Howard Shaw, Clara Barton, Julia Ward Howe, William Lloyd Garrison, William Dudley Foulke, Jane Addams, Mary E. Garrett, Sarah Platt Decker, the Hon. John D. Long, Samuel Gompers, Colonel George Harvey, Rabbi Charles Fleischer (Mass.), Dr. Josiah Strong, Edward T. Devine, John Mitchell, Judge Ben Lindsey, Mrs. Clarence Mackay, Lillian M. Hollister, Mary Lowe Dickinson, Mrs. Bourke Cockran and Cynthia Westover Alden.

When Mrs. Catt left for London in March, 1909, in the interests of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, the work came to me. At that time upwards of 10,000 letters had been written and 100,000 petitions distributed and twenty-three State organizations were collecting, counting, pasting and classifying the lists. Since then five other States have gone to work. Letters were written to all the newspapers in the four equal suffrage States asking the insertion of a coupon petition and these coupons brought in the names of many friends who could not otherwise be reached and who were enthusiastic workers for the petition. Others to the Age of Reason and Wilshire's Magazine brought hundreds of willing workers. Letters were sent in every direction, friends stirred up, reminded of their task and requested to send names of others who would work. Every sheet that came in was searched for names of possible friends who might circulate the petitions. Between March 1 and July 1, 1909, nearly 2,000 letters were written and 45,000 blanks distributed....

Later the work was removed to Washington and headquarters established there to finish the petition by 1910.

The report of Mrs. Lucretia L. Blankenburg (Penn.), chairman of the Committee on Civil Rights, showed the usual painstaking year's work. Her letters to all the State presidents for information had brought answers from twenty-two and eleven of these showed advanced legislation for women and children. In some of them it was amended labor laws or new ones; in others for a Juvenile Court, for improving the position of teachers, for the advantage of children in the public schools, for property rights of wives. Maine reported nearly a dozen such new laws. Minnesota was in the lead with thirty Acts of the Legislature.