117 Miss Anthony spoke to a crowded house in the Fountain Street Baptist Church on The Moral Influence of Women, and the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw to another great audience in the Park Congregational Church from the text, "Only be thou strong and very courageous." Calvary Baptist Church was filled to overflowing to hear Miss Laura Clay on The Bible for Equal Rights. Interested congregations listened to the Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, who preached at the Division Street Methodist Church from the text, "Knowledge shall increase"; Miss Laura Gregg, who spoke at the Second Baptist Church on My Country, 'Tis of Thee; Mrs. Colby, at the Plainfield Avenue Methodist Church, on The Legend of Lilith; Miss Lena Morrow at Memorial Church, Miss Lucy E. Textor at All Souls, and Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton and various members of the convention in other pulpits.
118 The following resolutions were adopted:
That we reaffirm our devotion to the immortal principle that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and we call for its application in the case of women citizens.
We protest against the introduction of the word "male" in the suffrage clause of the proposed Constitution of Hawaii, and declare that upon whatever terms the franchise may be granted to men, it should be granted also to women.
In all the great questions of war and peace, currency, tariff and taxation, annexation of foreign territory and alien races, women are vitally interested and should have an equal expression at the ballot box, and we recommend to the President of the United States the appointment of a committee of women to investigate the condition of women in our new island territories.
We congratulate the women of Ireland who have just voted for the first time for municipal and county officers, and we call attention to the fact that 75 per cent. of the qualified women voted, and that the dispatches say they discharged their duty in a serious and businesslike spirit, with a keen eye to the personal merits of candidates.
We congratulate the women of Colorado, whose Legislature lately passed a resolution testifying to the good effects of equal suffrage by a vote of 45 to 3 in the House, and 30 to 1 in the Senate.
We congratulate the women of New Orleans, who are about to vote for the first time, on a tax levy for sewerage and drainage, and we commend their patriotic activity in collecting the signatures of 2,000 taxpaying women of that city in behalf of clean streets and a pure water supply.
We congratulate the women of France, who have just voted for the first time for judges of tribunals of commerce, and we call attention to the fact that in Paris, of the qualified voters, men and women taken together, only 14 per cent. voted, but of the women 30 per cent. voted.
We congratulate the women of Kansas on the increased municipal vote of April, 1899, over the entire State, Kansas City alone registering 4,800 women and casting over 3,000 women's votes at the municipal election.
We thank the House of Representatives of Oklahoma for its vote of 14 to 9, and of Arizona for its vote of 19 to 5, for woman suffrage, and regret that the question did not reach the Councils of these Territories.
We thank the Legislature of California for its enactment, with only one dissenting vote in the House and six in the Senate, of a school suffrage law (which failed to receive the approval of the Governor), also we thank the Legislatures of Connecticut and Ohio, which have defeated bills to repeal the existing school suffrage laws of those States.
We thank the legislators of Oregon who have just submitted an amendment granting suffrage to women by a vote of 48 to 6 in the House and 25 to 1 in the Senate, and we hope that Oregon will add a fifth star to our equal suffrage flag.
This association is non sectarian and non partisan, and asks for the ballot not for the sake of advancing any specific measure, but as a matter of justice to the whole human family. In all the States where equal suffrage campaigns are pending we advise women and men to base their plea on the ground of clear and obvious justice, and not to indulge in predictions as to what women will do with the ballot before it is secured.
We protest against women being counted in the basis of representation of State and nation so long as they are not permitted to vote for their representatives.
We appreciate the friendly attitude of the American Federation of Labor, the National Grange and other public bodies of voters, as shown by their resolutions indorsing the legal, political and economic equality of women.
We rejoice in the Peace Congress about to meet at The Hague, and hope it may be preliminary to the establishment of international arbitration.
119 See also Chap. XXIII for further efforts to protect the women of Hawaii.
CHAPTER XX.
The National-American Convention of 1900.
The Thirty-second annual convention of the suffrage association, held in Washington, D. C., Feb. 8-14, 1900, possessed two features of unusual interest—it closed the century and it marked the end of Miss Susan B. Anthony's presidency of the organization. The latter event attracted wide attention. Sketches of her career and of the movement whose history was almost synonymous with her own, appeared in most of the leading newspapers and magazines of the country; special reporters were sent to Washington, and the celebration of her eightieth birthday at the close of the convention was in the nature of a national event. On the opening morning the Post said in a leading editorial:
Washington entertains the National Woman Suffrage Association from year to year with entire complacency, apart from any political prejudice, without any sense of partisanship and in a spirit of keen interest in the great propaganda which is being thus conducted. There was a time, not so very long ago, when the plea for suffrage was ridiculed far and wide; but the women have worked ahead undaunted by the scoffings of the world, until they have actually won the battle in such a marked degree as to give them unbounded assurance for the future....
The world is beginning to take a new view of this suffrage question. The advent of women into the professions and even the trades, their appearance as wage-earners in virtually every branch of modern activity, and their success in these various enterprises which they have entered, have worked a reform even more significant than the absolute and universal grant of the suffrage would have been. It can not be denied by men to-day that the women have become economic factors of marked importance, and this appreciation has had a great influence in softening the sentiments of the male population toward the suffragists.
One of the foremost arguments formerly urged against the extension of the suffrage to women was that it would be harmful to woman's moral nature to thrust her into contact with the rough conditions of campaigning. The women answered that their entrance would perhaps redeem the immoral character of the politics of many communities. In the minds of impartial observers the argument was a stand-off. But this economic, professional tendency of the women has done much to destroy the force of the men's plea to preserve the women from contaminating contact with harsh conditions. The security of the average woman worker in the various lines of honest activity which the sex has fearlessly entered has worked a revelation. The close of the century is witnessing a great change in public sentiment in this regard. The demand of the suffragists can not but be strengthened by the demonstrated fact that women can become workers in competition with men without becoming demoralized.
Just where this new tendency will lead in an economic direction is a serious question, to be answered by facts rather than by theories.