Clara Bewick Colby (D. C.) gave a historical sketch of Our Great Leaders, replete with beauty and pathos. Miss Kate M. Gordon spoke entertainingly on the possibilities of A Scrap of Suffrage.121 In presenting her Miss Anthony said: "The right of taxpaying women in Louisiana to vote upon questions of taxation is practically the first shred of suffrage which those of any Southern State have secured, and they have used it well. They deserve another scrap, and I think they will get it before some of us do who have been asking for half a century."
Miss Gail Laughlin, a graduate of Wellesley and of the Law Department of Cornell University, discussed Conditions of the Wage-Earning Women of Our Country, saying in part:
"Wage-earner" among women is used in a broad sense. All women receiving money payment for work are proud to be called wage-earners, because wage-earning means economic independence. The census of 1890 reports nearly 400 occupations open to women, and nearly 4,000,000 women engaged in them. But government reports show the average wages of women in large cities to be from $3.83 to $6.91 per week, and the general average to be from $5.00 to $6.68. In all lines women are paid less than men for the same grade of work, and they are often compelled to toil under needlessly dangerous and unsanitary conditions. If the people of this country want to advance civilization, they have no need to go to the islands of the Pacific to do it.
How are these evils to be remedied? By organization, suffrage, co-operation among women, and above all, the inculcation of the principle that a woman is an individual, with a right to choose her work, and with other rights equal with man. Our law-makers control the sanitary conditions and pay of teachers. Here is work for the women who have "all the rights they want." When one of these comfortably situated women was told of the need of the ballot for working women, she held up her finger, showing the wedding ring on it, and said, "I have all the rights I want." The next time that I read the parable of the man who fell among thieves and was succored by the good Samaritan, methought I could see that woman with the wedding ring on her finger, passing by on the other side.
It is said that every woman who earns her living crowds a man out. That argument is as old as the trade guilds of the thirteenth century, which tried to exclude women. The Rev. Samuel G. Smith of St. Paul, who has recently declared against women in wage-earning occupations, stands to-day just where they did seven hundred years ago....122
Mrs. Helen Adelaide Shaw (Mass.), in A Review of the Remonstrants, was enthusiastically received. Young, handsome and a fine elocutionist, her imitation of the "remonstrants" and their objections to woman suffrage convulsed the audience and was quite as effective as the most impassioned argument.
The speakers of the convention were invited to fill a number of pulpits in Washington Sunday morning and evening. In the Unitarian Church, where the Rev. Ida C. Hultin preached, there was not standing room. The Rev. Anna Howard Shaw gave the sermon at the Universalist Church, of which the Post said:
Never in the history of the church had such a crowd been in attendance. The lecture rooms on either side of the auditorium had been thrown open, and these, as well as the galleries, were crowded almost to suffocation. Women stood about the edges of the room, and seats on window sills were at a premium. Outside in the vestibules of the church women elbowed one another for points of vantage on the gallery stairs, where an occasional glimpse might be caught of the handsome, dark-eyed, gray-haired woman who looked singularly appropriate at the pulpit desk. The congregation hung upon every word, and her remarks, sometimes bitter and caustic, were met with a hum of approval from the crowded auditorium.
Perhaps eight-tenths of the congregation were women. Miss Shaw's pulpit manner is easy, but her words are emphasized by gestures which impress her hearers with a sense of the speaker's earnestness. Her voice, while sweet and musical, is strong, and carries a tone of conviction. Her subject last night was "Strength of Character." The text was chosen from Joshua, 1:9: "Have I not commanded thee? Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed; for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest."
In the opening remarks the speaker said it was now time that women asserted their rights. "Men have no right to define for us our limitations. Who shall interpret to a woman the divine element in her being? It is for me to say that I shall be free. No human soul shall determine my life for me unless that soul will stand before the bar of God and take my sentence. Men who denounce us do so because they are ignorant of what they do. Woman has broken the silence of the century. Her question to God is, 'Who shall interpret Thee to me?' The churches of this day have not begun to conceive of what Christianity means.
"It is not true that all women should be married and the managers of homes. There is not more than one woman in five capable of motherhood in its highest possible state, and I may say that not one man in ten is fitted for fatherhood. We strongly advocate that no woman and man should marry until they are instructed in the science of home duties. Instead of woman suffrage breaking up families, it has just the opposite effect. In the State of Wyoming where it has existed thirty years, there is a larger per cent. of marriages and a less of divorces than in any other State in the Union. Because a woman is a suffragist is no reason that she may not be a good housekeeper. The two most perfect housekeepers I ever knew in my life were members of my congregation in New England—one was a suffragist and the other had no thought of the rights of women." ...
After the services almost every woman in the congregation crowded forward to shake the hand of the speaker.
On Monday evening the national character of the convention was conspicuously demonstrated, as the speakers represented the East, the South, the Middle West and the Pacific Slope. Mrs. Florence Howe Hall (N. J.), the highly educated daughter of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, read a charming farce entitled The Judgment of Minerva, the suffragists and the antis, as goddesses, bringing their cause before Jupiter, with a decision, of course, in favor of the former. Miss Diana Hirschler, a young lawyer of Boston, presented Woman's Position in the Law in a paper which was in itself an illustration of the benefit of a legal training. Mrs. Virginia D. Young (S. C.) told the Story of Woman Suffrage in the South, and sketched the history of the progressive Southern woman, beginning as follows:
The woman suffragists of the South have suffered in the pillory of public derision. It has been as deadly a setting up in the stocks as ever New England practiced on her martyrs to freedom. The women who have led in this revolt against old ideals have had to be as heroic as the men who stormed San Juan heights in the contest for Santiago de Cuba....
It is out of date to be carried in a sedan chair when one can fly around on a bicycle, and though in our conservative South, we have still some preachers with Florida moss on their chins, who storm at the woman on her wheel as riding straight to hell, we believe, with Julian Ralph, that the women bicyclists "out-pace their staider sisters in their progress to woman's emancipation."
Clark Howell, the brilliant Georgian, in his recent address before the Independent Club, set people to talking about him, from Niagara Falls in the East to the Garden of the Gods in the West, by his elucidations of "The Man with his Hat in his Hand;" but I propose to show you to-night a greater—the Woman With Her Bonnet Off, who speaks from the platform in a Southern city. You know how the women of the stagnant Orient stick to their veils, coverings for head and face, outward signs of real slavery. The bonnet is the civilized substitute for the Oriental veil, and to take it off is the first manifestation of a woman's resolve to have equal rights, even if all the world laugh and oppose.
In South Carolina the first newspaper article in favor of woman suffrage written by a woman over her own name, was met by the taunt that she had imbibed her views from the women of the North. But this was merely ignorance of history, for the story of woman suffrage in the South really antedates that in New England. The new woman of the new South, who asks for equal rights with her brother man, is in the direct line of succession to that magnificent "colonial dame," Mistress Margaret Brent of Maryland, who asked for a vote in the Colonial Assembly after the death of her kinsman, Lord Baltimore, who had endowed her with powers of attorney. Margaret Brent antedated Abigail Adams by over a century.
Mrs. Annie L. Diggs, State librarian, depicted Municipal