Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
Miss Alice Stone Blackwell began her address: "We are not here to ask
you to extend suffrage to women but to give to the State Legislatures
an opportunity to vote on it, and probably some practical
considerations should be offered to show that public sentiment has
arrived at a point where it seems to be timely and worth while that
this question should be submitted to them. We would like to convince
you that this is only right. If three-fourths of them are not prepared
to give us suffrage, we shall not get it. If three-fourths of them are
prepared, then public sentiment has arrived at a point where we ought
to have it." She reviewed the advance of the movement and said: "We
could keep this committee here until next week reading to them
testimony from representative men and women as to the good results of
woman suffrage where it is in operation." The unimpeachable testimony
which she then presented from the equal suffrage States filled several
pages of the printed record.
Introducing Mrs. Kelley, Chairman Jenkins had spoken of her father,
William D. Kelley, known as the Father of the House, and she said:
It is quite true that my father, Judge Kelley of Pennsylvania,
came to Congress in the year in which President Lincoln was first
elected and for twenty-five years he patiently introduced at
every session a resolution preliminary to a hearing for the woman
suffragists. Through all that period of ridicule, when the
hearings were not conducted so respectfully or in so friendly a
manner as this one has been, he continued to introduce that
resolution. In 1890 death removed him from the House of
Representatives and I come here as the second generation. I
assure you that I and the rest of the women throughout the
country will come from generation to generation, just so long as
it is necessary. Next year my oldest son will vote and that
generation will take up the task on behalf of the enfranchisement
of the women of this country.... Every time we come there is some
gain to record, but, between the times, at least 1,000,000 new
immigrants have come into this country who will have to be
brought to the American way of thinking about women before they
will vote to give the ballot to those who are born here and whose
forefathers have asked that we be enfranchised.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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