The Story of the Woman's PartyGillmore, Inez Haynes
History
The Story of the Woman's Party
Gillmore, Inez Haynes
National Woman's Party; Paul, Alice, 1885-1977; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
From the vividly colored fastness of the miners’ villages in this
wild mountain region, to border towns like Nogales, though but a
short step geographically, the temper and character of the cities
change.... In places like Nogales, the soldiers who could not go
home to vote turned the Woman’s Party meetings into near-riots, so
anxious were these victims of a peace administration to hear what
the ladies had to say about Wilson. The soldiers registered their
approval by helping take up collections, though even the provost
guard could not remove them to give space to citizens able to
register their protests.
An event equally picturesque marked the closing of the campaign on the
night of Sunday, November 5, on the platform of the Blackstone Theatre,
Chicago. There, Harriot Stanton Blatch, acting as the spokesman of the
disfranchised women of the East, called up by long-distance telephone a
series of mass-meetings, one in each of the twelve Suffrage States and
repeated their message—a final appeal to the women voters of the West to
cast their ballots on the following Tuesday against President Wilson.
* * * * *
The result of the election is summed up in the _Suffragist_ of November
11:
In Illinois, the only State where the vote of women is counted
separately, over seventy thousand more women voted against Mr.
Wilson than for him....
The reports indicate that the Woman’s Party campaign was as
successful in holding the woman’s vote in line in the other eleven
States as in Illinois. While ten of these States went for Wilson,
they did not do so, as has been claimed, by the woman’s vote. Mr.
Wilson received in these States almost the solid Labor vote, the
Progressive, and the farmer’s vote. The popular majority which Mr.
Wilson received in the twelve Suffrage States amounted only to
twenty-two thousand one hundred seventy-one out of a popular vote,
according to the latest returns, of more than four million, eight
hundred and ten thousand in the same States. This does not include
the Socialist and Prohibition vote, which was very heavy in some of
the Western States....
We were not concerned with the result of the election. Ours was a
campaign in which it made no difference who was elected. We did not
endorse any candidate. We did not care who won. We were not
pro-Republican, pro-Socialist, pro-Prohibition—we were simply
pro-woman. We did not endeavor to affect the result in the
non-Suffrage States. What we did try to do was to organize a protest
vote by women against Mr. Wilson’s attitude towards Suffrage. This
we did. Every Democrat who campaigned in the West knows this. The
Democratic campaign in the West soon consisted almost entirely of an
attempt to combat the Woman’s Party attack.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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