Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
noble men to bring about this reform.
Of equal interest with Pioneers' Evening and in striking contrast with
it was the College Evening. One commemorated the first efforts to
obtain a college education for women, the other the full fruition of
these efforts in the announcement of a National College Women's Equal
Suffrage League with branches in fifteen States. Dr. Shaw, possessing
three college degrees, opened the session, and the founder of the
League, Mrs. Maud Wood Park, a graduate of Radcliffe College,
presided. "With the exception of Oberlin and Antioch," she said, "not
one college was open to women before the organized movement for woman
suffrage began." She gave statistics of the large number now open to
them and said: "Such facts as these help us to understand the service
which the leaders of the suffrage movement performed for college women
and it is fitting that these should make public recognition of their
debt. It was with this idea of responsibility for benefits received
that the first branch of this League was formed in Massachusetts in
1900. The League realizes that the best way to pay our debt to the
noble women who toiled and suffered, who bore ridicule, insult and
privation, is for us in our turn to sow the seed of future
opportunities for women."
In introducing Dr. Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, dean of the Junior
Women's College of the University of Chicago, Mrs. Park said that she
had half the letters of the alphabet attached to her name representing
degrees. Dr. Breckinridge also paid a tribute of gratitude to the
National Suffrage Association and began her address: "My faith has
three articles. I believe it is the right and the duty of the
wage-earning woman to claim the ballot and to have her claim
recognized to participate in the political life of her community. Her
status as a worker depends in part upon it and only thus can she
protect the interests of her group. I believe it is the right and duty
of the wife and mother to claim the ballot, for as a housekeeper and
carer of her children she cannot do her work economically and
satisfactorily without it. It is easy to see why the wage-earning
women and the housekeepers need the ballot; but why should we, who do
not belong to either of those groups, want it? Every woman should want
it because tasks lie before the public so difficult that they can not
be fulfilled without the cooperation of all the trained minds in the
community, and these problems can be met only by collective action. We
want to get hold of the little device that moves the machinery."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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