health compelled her to resign her position as president of the association.[1]Since then her able coadjutor Elizabeth B. Chace, has been president of the Rhode Island Suffrage Association, and with equal faithfulness and persistence, carried on the work. She steadily keeps up the annual conventions and makes her appeals to the legislature. Among the names[2] of those who have appeared from year to year before the Rhode Island legislature we find many able men and women from other States as well as many of their own distinguished citizens.
In this State an effort was made early to get women on the board of managers for schools, prisons and charitable institutions. In a letter to Mrs. Davis, John Stuart Mill says:
I am very glad to hear of the step in advance made by Rhode Island in creating a board of women for some very important administrative purpose. Your proposal that women should be empanneled on every jury where women are to be tried seems to me very good, and calculated to place the injustice to which women are subjected at present by the entire legal system in a very striking light.
In 1873 an effort was made to place women on the Providence School Board, with what success the following extracts from the daily papers show. The Providence Press of April 25, 1873, says:
A shabby trick was perpetrated by the friends of John W. Angell, which was certainly anything but "angelic," and which ought to consign the parties who committed it to political infamy.
Yesterday, for the first time in the history of this city, women were candidates for political honors—in the fifth ward, Mrs. Sarah E. H. Doyle, and in the fourth ward, Mrs. Rhoda A. F. Peckham, were candidates for positions on the school committee; both, however, failed of an election. Mrs. Doyle received the unanimous nomination of the large primary meeting of the National Union Republican party, and Mrs. Peckham was run as an outside candidate against the regular nominee. These ladies would undoubtedly have made excellent members of the committee, and unlike a great portion of that body, would have been found in their places at the meetings, and we should have been glad to have seen the experiment tried of women in the position for which their names were presented. When the polls opened in the fifth ward, instead of Mrs. Doyle's name being on the ballots for the place to which she had been nominated there appeared the name of John W. Angell, esq., and until about 11
- ↑ Mrs. Chace says in a letter, speaking of Mrs. Davis: "After several years absence in Europe she returned, a helpless invalid, unable to resume her labors. But her devotion in early years will long remain fresh in the memory of those associated with her, who were inspired by her self-sacrifice and enthusiasm." For farther details of Mrs. Davis' earlier labors, see vol. I, pages 215, 283.
- ↑ Julia Ward Howe, Celia Burleigh, William Lloyd Garrison, Aaron M. Powell, Caroline H. Dall, Mrs. Ednah D. Cheney, Miss Mary F. Eastman, Elizabeth K. Churchill, Rev. Augustus Woodbury Hon. Amasa M. Eaton, Mr. Stillman, Hon. Thomas Davis, Hon George L. Clarke, Rev. Frederick Hinckley, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Hon. A. Payne.
