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WOMAN SUFFRAGE MASS MEETING COLUMBIA THEATRE, SUNDAY EVENING, MARCH 31, 8 O'CLOCK
Amendments to the State Constitutions to be MRS. C. W. MacNAUGHTON voted on this year in chairman of arrangements and Finance committee, WISCONSIN, KANSAS, OREGON, OHIO Vice Chairment, Presidents of Women's Clubs
Advisory Committee
Rev. Olympia Brown, Wisonsin. Mrs. D. R. Anthony, Jr. Kansas. WASHINGTON D. C., MARCH 1912 Mrs. Atlee Pomerene, Ohio. Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby, Oregon. Mrs. Belva A. Lockwood, Washington D. C. Professor H. Parker Willis, Washington D. C. Kepler Hoyt, Washington D. C.
Potronesses
Mrs. Wm. E. Andrews " A. L. Barber " Le Droit Barber " Alexander Graham Bell " Victor Berger " A. S. Burleson " Julius C. Burrows " Michael E. Driscoll Dr. Elnora C. Folkmar Mrs. David J. Foster " Helen Gardner Day " Hohn B. Henderson " Katherine Gillett-Hill " Eben J. Hill " Martha Mitchell Hoyt " Carrie E. Kent " Joseph R. Knowland " Wm. La Follette " Mary S. Lockwood " H. C. Macfarland " Charlotte Emerson Main " Anson Mills " U. G. B. Pierce " Miles Poindexter Miss Janet Richards Mrs. O. S. Richey " Rufus Smith " F. Carl Smith " L. B. Swormstedt " Edw. T. Taylor " Helen Rand Tindall Miss Nettie Lovisa White CHAIRMAN Mrs. Jessie Waite Wright " John W. Works 1229 Harvard Street and others
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Personal Trouch with Elizabneth Cady Stanton.
By Clara Bewick Colby. As one of Mrs. Stanton's "Girls" the centennial of her birthday brings home to me very forcibly-as I am sure it must to [a] multitude of others-what a direct personal inspiration she was to the young women with whom she came in contact. There can be nothing like it to-day for there is no ignorant, unsophositicated girls such as were the type in the middle West forty years ago. As Mrs. Stanton lectured on "Our Girls" through the length and breadth of the land she gave them a new point of view. She opened a new world to them or opened their eyes to see that the [old] one had been made for women and by women as well as by and for men. Then later the pioneers and the near-pioneers in the woman movement found their inspiration and support in the army of young women who rallied to their standard. They were [reinforced] by women who had come from schools of higher learning; who had won places in skilled industries; superior positions in the educational fielde ; and recogntion in the learned professionall of whom were impossible until these Mothers of Woman had trodden down the thorns in the path of those who were to follow. And as these in daughters of the Intellect and the Spirit came forward and acknowledged their heritiage (line) and their gratitude the leaders of the Woman's Rights movement a proud feeling of possession in them in even a higher sense tha[n] that of the ordinary parent or teacher. "My Girls" their young aids always were to both Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony.
I remember well when I first saw Mrs. Stanton. It was before I had known anything about women lecturers or what women were claiming for their sex. Mrs. Stanton had giben a lecture [illegible] the night before in my home town but I had felt no call to go: and now we were leaving on
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the same train. While waiting for the departure I was fascinated by the appearance of a woman whopaced up and down the aisle, as if wishing to utilize the time for excerise. The diginity of her carriage, the charm of her beautiful face, enhanced then as always by the halo of puffs of silvery hair around it, and above all [the air] of doing as she pleased without any impatience of fussiness, -arrested my attenton. I learned had never before seen a woman who ventured to do anything on a train but "stay put". I found out who she was and was thus able to anser the question of another woman whose curiouslty had also been aroused. When she got the desired information thw[the] woman answered back with an air of satisfaction at her prescience, "I knew she was somebody".
Perhaps it was the memory of this impression which, when later it became my duty to arrange a lecture course for a new Western town, led me to insist on having an equal number of women lecturers,, and thus it was that Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Mary A. Livermore, and others blessed my home with their short stay. What an education for a young womans yet ignorant of all that was going on in the world, of its reforms and reformers, and yet [who], having pondered many things in her heart, recognized the prophets and their message when they came.
Mrs. Stanton felt justified by this and later visits in prefacing a sketch of my work which she wrote for a book which was to be a compedium of information about women who were doing things with a tribute to my housekeeping; but alas, the publisher neither used her manuscript nor returned [it], and this I not only lost the prestige of such a write-up, but the suffrage cause lost the benefit of my culinary accomplishments. which was serious in days when these were the standard of a woman's value to the community.
From 1883 when I became the founder and editor of THE WOMAN'S TRIBUNE every one of Mrs. Stanton's great speeches were published in it. How marvelous they were. In the history of the movement there have never been any other speeches so uniformly based on universal
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Truth. Justice and Beauty. I should say these were the three spirtual characteristics which dominated Mrs. Stanton's thought. Logic clothed [in] elegant rhetoric, and delivered with majestic forse and sincerity, won [over] her large audience, convinced Legislatures, and charmed if not compelled Congressional Committees. I was present when she made her last address before a United States Senate Committee, and she prefaced her appeal with these words, "Gentlemen, I have stood before you for thirty years, begging you to do justice to the women of this nation, and now I ask to be allowed to sit during my remarks." It passed my comprehension how the Committee could fal to report favorably the measure for which this [immeasurably] superior woman had plead so earnestly for a generation and more.
Mrs. Stanton's last [speech] address for a National Suffrage Convention was read by me and she was then too feeble to appear on the platform. It was on the need of an educational qualification for voting. Not only did she think that this would remove one of the objections that were brought forward to women having the ballot, but she had observed the perils which arise from the ignorance[vote] which does not even stand vote [even] its own crude opinions--that her democratic spirit would not have objected to-but which is voted by the unscrupulous politician.
Mrs. Stanton's "Reminiscenses", the most delightful autobiography I have ever read, were published first in theWOMAN'S TRIBUNE in chatty form, an intimate and spontaneous revelation of character, with a keen irresistible humor playing on the every page. Later in the same paper published Part I. of "The Woman's Bible" This perfectly harmless and justifiable commentary because of its title brought upon its author and the editor a storm of criticism which Mrs. Stanton sought to focus entirely upon herslef by publishing Part II. [first] as a pamplet. The-stand taken by the OMAN'S TRIBUNE WAS was that it would be a medium for all Mrs. Stanton wished to say, and that ahat she had to say would always be worth attending to. Mrs. Stanton had no respect for creeds, custooms, or conditions, save as these [she] embodied the highest ideals.
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(4) People needed to be shocked out of their indifference, she thought, and so she would not yeild to entreayies to change the name of "The Woman's Bible" by which title she wanted to showthat she thought no one's ideas more sacred than her own. She knew and maintained both in this and in the resolutions which were often like bombs thrown into the Conventions, that there was no idea of women's subjection in Nature or in the Divine plan, but that it had been entirely of man's invention, and she was ready to attack the obnoxious monstrous doctrine when formulated in church [construction?] as in State constitutions.
Mrs. Stanton's last letter to me written not long before her death enclosed a new resolution which called for more vigorous protest against the Church for its delay in taking a stand for equal rights for women. She and those to whom she gave courage to follow her lead have doubtless contributed largely to the chnage in church teaching, so that now new translations and new interpretations have quite taken the point out of "The Woman's Bible" and rendered it obsolete.
Mrs. Stanton's letters, even those relating to business were dotted with jewels of wit and wisdom. No one could criticise more effectively than she, and yet no string was left behind. The short-comings of her co-workers were perferctly obvious to her, but she loved them none the less. Her optimism and her tolerance emvraced the whole world, and she knew that to demand only faultess adherents of the woman suffrage organization was to kill it at its birth.
In a suffrage household a boy showing Mrs.Stanton's picture to a guest astonished her by saying, "Here's the Mother of us all". and [And] so in the name of the True, the Just, and the Beautiful for which she lived and strove, we acclaim her in this centennial day.
