Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
At this junction of the work a question arising upon the
advisability of securing a petition of a million signatures to
present to President Roosevelt in order to influence a
recommendation of suffrage for women in his annual message, a
request was made that he receive at Oyster Bay a committee from
our association. The President reasonably declined to have his
vacation interrupted with committees but offered to receive our
request in writing. Your secretary accordingly wrote him to the
effect that we wished to know--before going to the labor and
expense involved in securing such a petition--whether its
influence would have any weight in leading him to recommend woman
suffrage in his message. Courteously but emphatically came the
reply that it would not, but at the same time extending an
invitation for the National Association to appoint a committee to
see him on his return to Washington. The committee appointed was
composed of your national treasurer, Mrs. Upton, Mrs. Henry
Dickson Bruns of New Orleans, Mrs. Katharine Reed Balentine of
Maine and your corresponding secretary, and at the appointed time
it was received by the President, who again reiterated his
opinion on the absolute valuelessness of such a petition. In so
doing he ignored what for the women of this republic is their
only right--the right of petition. The interview was fruitful of
no suggestion beyond the time-honored recommendation to "get
another State." Women who worship as a fetish the power of this
right to petition may well catalogue this fallacy with those
other American fallacies that "taxation without representation is
tyranny"; that "governments derive their just powers from the
consent of the governed," and that the Government guarantees
"equal rights for all and special privileges for none."
Miss Gordon told how the last convention had changed the plan for
forty years of holding the national convention in Washington during
the first session of a new Congress and therefore the corresponding
secretary had been obliged to arrange for representative women to go
there and have a hearing before the committees of Senate and House.
Mrs. Balentine, who was staying in Washington, and Miss Emma Gillett,
a lawyer of that city, took charge and hearings were granted March 3.
They lacked the inspiration of the presence of delegates from all
parts of the country and the convention lost the pleasure and benefit.
The Work Conferences were continued under the name of Round Table
Conferences. The subjects considered were: Increase of membership;
press work; 16th Amendment as a line of policy; finance; State
legislative methods. An organizers' symposium discussed "A comparison
of conditions today with those of ten years ago; the building of a
State association; the personal touch; preliminary arrangements for
meetings."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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