question is represented by over 2,000 tax-paying ladies, and assessed at the value of $14,490,199.
Yours very respectfully,
Robt. J. Rombauer, Assessor.
This exhibit has opened the eyes of a good many people. "Two thousand on 'em," exclaimed a male friend of mine, "and over fourteen millions of property! Whew! What business have these women with so much money? "Well, they have it, and now they ask us, "Shall 2,000 men, not worth a dollar, just because they wear pantaloons go to the polls and vote taxes on us, while we are excluded from the ballot-box for no other reason than sex? "What shall we say to them? They ask us if the American Revolution did not turn on this hinge, No taxation without representation. Who can answer?
The advocates of suffrage in St. Louis made their attacks at once in both Church[1] and State, and left no means of agitation untried. There has never been an association in any State that comprised so many able men and women who gave their best thoughts to every phase of this question, and who did so grand a work, until the unfortunate division in 1871, which seemed to chill the enthusiasm of many friends of the movement.
In the winter of 1869 the association sent a large delegation of ladies to the legislature with a petition containing about 2,000 signatures. A correspondent in The Revolution, February 6, 1869, said:
The first woman suffrage convention ever held in the city of St. Louis, or the State of Missouri, assembled in Mercantile Library, October 6, 7
- ↑ The following we find in the St. Louis papers. It is significant of the sentiment of the Methodist women of the West: "We, the undersigned, join in a call for a mass-meeting of the M % E. Church in St. Louis, to meet at Union Church on the 15th inst., at 3 o'clock p. m., to consider a plan for memorializing the General Conference to permit the ordination of women as ministers. All women of the M. E. Church are requested to attend. Mrs. Henry Kennedy, Mrs. T. C. Fletcher, Mrs. E. O. Stanard, Mrs. A. C. George, Mrs. Lucy Prescott, Mrs. U. B. Wilson, Mrs. L. Jones, Mrs. E. L. Case, Mrs. W. F. Brink, Mrs. S. C. Cummins, Mrs. R. N. Hazard, Mrs. Dutro, Mrs. M. H. Himebaugh." The result of this meeting of the ladies of the Methodist churches to discuss a plan for admitting women into the pulpit as preachers was the appointment of a committee to draft a memorial to the General Conference to meet at Brooklyn, N. Y., asking that body to sanction and provide for the ordination of women as ministers of the Methodist Church.