Suffragists -- United States; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
After a most careful re-reading of my letter, I am unable to understand
how you could judge that any discussion by you of my reasons for
resigning would not be acceptable to me since my letter was an appeal
to you on specific grounds for action now by the Administration on the
Federal Suffrage amendment.
However, I am profoundly grateful to you for your prompt acceptance of
my resignation.
Yours respectfully,
(Signed) DUDLEY FIELD MALONE.
It may have been accidental but it is interesting to note that the
first public statement of Mr. Byron Newton, appointed by the
Administration to succeed Mr. Malone as Collector of the Port of New
York, was a bitter denunciation of all woman suffrage whether by state
or national action.
Chapter 8
The Administration Yields
Immediately after Mr. Malone’s sensational resignation the
Administration sought another way to remove the persistent pickets
without passing the amendment. It yielded on a point of machinery. It
gave us a report in the Senate and a committee in the House and
expected us to be grateful.
The press had turned again to more sympathetic accounts of our campaign
and exposed the prison regime we were undergoing. We were now for a
moment the object of sympathy; the Administration was the butt of
considerable hostility. Sensing their predicament and fearing any loss
of prestige, they risked a slight advance.
Senator Jones, Chairman of the Suffrage Committee, made a visit to the
workhouse. Scarcely had the women recovered from the surprise of his
visit when the Senator, on the following day, September 15th, filed the
favorable report which had been lying with his Committee since May
15th, exactly six months.
The Report, which he had so long delayed because he wanted [he said] to
make it a particularly brilliant and elaborate one, read:
“The Committee on Woman Suffrage, to which was referred the joint
resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United
States, conferring upon women the right of suffrage, having the same
under consideration, beg leave to report it back to the Senate with the
recommendation that the joint resolution do pass.”
This report to the Senate was immediately followed by a vote of 181 to
107 in the House of Representatives in favor of creating a Committee on
Woman Suffrage in the House. This vote was indicative of the strength
of the amendment in the House. The resolution was sponsored by
Representative Pou, Chairman of the Rules Committee and Administration
leader, himself an anti- suffragist.
It is an interesting study in psychology to consider some of the
statements made in the peculiarly heated debate the day this vote was
taken.
Scores of Congressmen, anxious to refute the idea that the indomitable
picket had had anything to do with their action, revealed naively how
surely it had.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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