Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
Miss Gordon spoke on A Sustaining Faith, showing that from labor, from
all forms of social service and from countless sources was converging
the demand for the reform which the suffrage association was seeking.
Miss Blackwell (Mass.) talked briefly as always but clearly and
convincingly on The New Woman. Miss Laura Clay (Ky.) began her address
on Dimes: "As an auditor I have been going over our treasurer's books.
Usually such books are mere debits and credits but in ours those stiff
rows of figures tell many beautiful things--the sacrifices of the poor
and the generosity of the rich--but best of all are the 'dimes'
because they are the dues paid to the association. They bear the
figure of Liberty and they stand for it.... These dimes are inspiring,
for they represent our membership when we gather here from the four
corners of the nation. Therefore I rejoice over these thousands and
thousands, each with a human heart behind it."
"No woman has a record of greater faithfulness in this cause," Mrs.
Catt said in introducing Mrs. Mary J. Coggeshall, who began her
remarks on Precedents by saying: "I come from Iowa where things are
very different from those in this beautiful capital. We do not see
Senators and Representatives on every hand but we have lent to
Washington, Secretary of Agriculture Wilson, Secretary of the Treasury
Shaw, Speaker of the House Henderson and also Mrs. Catt to lead the
suffrage clans."
The evening closed with Mrs. Catt's presidential address, the full
report of which filled eleven columns of the _Woman's Journal_. The
subject was the vital necessity of an educational qualification for
the use of the ballot in a country which opens its gates to
immigration from the whole world. Little idea of its logic and
virility can be conveyed by detached quotations. Referring to the
necessity for enfranchising women she said: "Despite the fact that
education even yet is not so generally advocated for girls as for boys
among our foreign and ignorant classes of society, the census of 1900
reveals that between the ages of ten and twenty-one, representing
school years, there are 117,362 more illiterate males than females. If
men and women had been entitled to the franchise upon equal terms in
1900, the political parties, which always make their appeals to the
young man just turned twenty-one to cast his first vote for 'the party
of right and progress,' would of necessity have made the same appeal
to young women, but they would have appealed to 20,000 fewer
illiterates among the women than the men of from twenty-one to
twenty-four. If the same conditions continue for the next twenty
years--that is, if there is no restriction in the suffrage for men and
women still remain disfranchised, and if the proportionate increase of
women over men in the output of our public schools continues, we shall
witness the curious spectacle of the illiterate sex governing the
literate sex."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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