Suffragists -- United States; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
The month of May saw monster demonstrations in many cities and villages
throughout the country, with the direct result that in June the Senate
Committee on Suffrage made the first favorable report made by that
committee in twenty-one years, thereby placing it on the Senate
calendar for action.
Not relaxing the pressure for a day we organized the third great
demonstration on the last of July when a monster petition signed by
hundreds of thousands of citizens was brought to the Senate asking that
body to pass the national suffrage amendment. Women from all parts of
the country mobilized in the countryside of Maryland where they were
met with appropriate ceremonies-by the Senate Woman Suffrage Committee.
The delegation motored in gaily decorated automobiles to Washington and
went direct to the Senate, where the entire day was given over to
suffrage discussion.
Twenty-two senators spoke in favor of the amendment in presenting their
petitions. Three spoke against it. For the first time in twenty-six
years suffrage was actually debated in Congress. That day was historic.
Speeches? Yes. Greetings? Yes. Present petitions from their
constituencies? Gladly. Report it from the Senate Committee? They had
to concede that. But passage of the amendment? That was beyond their
contemplation.
More pressure was necessary. We appealed to the women voters, of whom
there were then four million, to come into action.
“Four million women voters are watching you,” we said to Congress. We
might as well have said, “There are in the South Sea Islands four
million heathens.”
It was clear that these distant women voters had no relation in the
senatorial mind to the realism of politics. We decided to bring some of
these women voters to Washington: Having failed to get the Senate to
act by August, we invited the Council of Women Voters to hold its
convention in Washington that Congress might learn this simple lesson:
women did vote; there were four million of them; they had a voters’
organization; they cared about the enfranchisement of all American
women; they wanted the Senate to act; suffrage was no longer a moral
problem; it could be made a practical political problem with which men
and parties would have to reckon.
Voting women made their first impression on Congress that summer.
Meanwhile the President’s “paramount issues”—tariff and currency—had
been disposed of. With the December Congress approaching, he was
preparing another message. We went to him again. This time it was the
women from his own home state, an influential deputation of
seventy-three women, including the suffrage leaders from all suffrage
organizations in New Jersey. The women urged him to include
recommendation of the suffrage resolution in his message to the new
Congress. He replied:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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