Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
The Western Federation of Women's Clubs gave its welcome through its
president, Mrs. Nettie Rogers Shuler, of whom the _Woman's Journal_
said: "She spoke with an accent of unaffected sincerity and
self-forgetfulness that recalled the spirit of the pioneers." She
referred with pride to the fact that this organization, with nearly
100 clubs and about 32,000 members, was the first Federation of
Women's Clubs to admit suffrage societies. Mrs. Lucretia L.
Blankenburg, president of the Pennsylvania Suffrage Association and
officer of the General Federation, brought its greeting, the first it
had ever sent to a national suffrage convention. Mrs. Frances W.
Graham, president of the New York State Woman's Christian Temperance
Union, gave its greeting and spoke of the close cooperation which had
always existed between the workers for temperance and suffrage. Dr.
Shaw asked that she would convey the cordial greetings and best wishes
of the association to the National W. C. T. U., to whose convention in
Denver she was en route. Mrs. Ella Hawley Crossett, for the sixth term
president of the New York State Suffrage Association, united with Dr.
Shaw in responding to the welcoming addresses and spoke with deep
feeling of the courage and persistence of the pioneers and of the
pride with which the State where the movement for woman suffrage had
its birth welcomed the convention to celebrate the event.
Miss Emily Howland of Sherwood, N. Y., reformer, educator and
philanthropist, a co-worker and friend of the early suffragists, gave
a delightful address on The Spirit of 1848, "herself a living
embodiment of that spirit," in which she said:
"Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life
for his friends!" These are the words that come to me as I essay
to speak of the Spirit of '48! Was it not something of this love
which inspired that immortal Declaration made at the Woman's
Rights Convention on July 19-20, 1848? "This," says Mrs. Stanton
in her autobiography, "was the initial step in the most momentous
reform that has yet been launched upon the world--the first
organized protest against the injustice which had brooded for
ages over the character and destiny of one-half of the race. No
words could express our astonishment on finding a few days
afterward that what seemed to us so timely, so rational and so
sacred should be a subject for sarcasm and ridicule in the entire
press of the nation. The anti-slavery papers alone stood by us
manfully."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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