reading stood 26 ayes to 20 nays. Hope ran high with the friends; but alas! on a final vote, taken but a few minutes later, the bill was lost by 24 nays to 22 ayes.[1] The general sentiment was well stated by the Iowa State Register:
The Senate disposed of the woman suffrage question yesterday by voting it down. We think it made a mistake. Certainly there was, at the lowest count, thirty out of every hundred voters in the State who desired to have this legislature ratify the action of the last Assembly, and submit the question at the polls this fall. The Republican party has its own record to meet here. The first time the negro suffrage question was submitted to the people of Iowa, it was submitted by a Republican legislature, and the submission was made when not over one voter in a hundred desired it done. This latter thing was a plain proposition, a most justly preferred petition. The people who were anxious to have the question submitted, are, it is confidently claimed, in majority. We think their wishes might well and fitly have been granted. Even those who were opposed to them must see that the advocates of the reform will now have a chance to claim that the opponents of it are afraid to go with them to the people. This is not merely a defeat for the present year, but practically for four years. Our State constitution can be amended only after two legislatures have acted upon the amendment, and the people have voted upon it. The legislature of two years ago passed the resolution voted down yesterday. Now, we presume, it will have to take another start. Four years of waiting and working before the friends of the reform can be given a chance to get a verdict from the people, is a long and painful ordeal. It will not be endured with patience. It would be asking too much of human nature to expect that.
At the annual convention of 1874, at Des Moines, Bishop Gilbert Haven of the Methodist Episcopal Church, a clear and liberal thinker, made a very impressive speech on the power woman could wield with the ballot in her own hand in making our towns and cities safe for our sons and daughters to live in. This year, the Des Moines annual conference of the M. E. Church passed resolutions advocating woman suffrage as a great moral reform; while the State convention of the Universalist Association in its resolution said: "This convention recognizes that women are entitled to all the social, religious, and political rights which men enjoy."
At the Diocesan Convention held at Davenport May 1881, the Episcopal Church took a step forward by striking the word male out of a canon, thus enabling women to vote for vestrymen, a right hitherto withheld. It is but a straw in the right direction, but "straws show which way the wind blows," and we may hope for more good things to follow. The Republican party, in convention assembled, at Des Moines, July 1, 1874, inserted the following, as the tenth plank of its platform:
Resolved, That since the people may be entrusted with all questions of governmental reform, we favor the final submission to them of the question of amending the constitution so as to extend the right of suffrage to women, pursuant to the action of the fifteenth General Assembly.
- ↑ Yeas, Senators Beardsley, Bemis, Burke, Campbell, Chambers, Converse, Dague, Dashiell, Dysart, Howland, Hurley, Kephart, Maxwell, McCold, McKean, McNutt, Read, Shane, Smith, Vale, West, Young—22. Nays, Senators Allen, Boomer, Claussen, Crary, Fairall, Fitch, Gault, Havens, Ireland, Ketcham, Kinne, Larrabee, Leavitt, Lowry, McCollough, Merrill, Miles, Murray, Russell, Stone, Stewart, Taylor, Willett, Wonn—24. Senator Murray had voted in the affirmative in the first instance, but changed his vote in order to be able to move a reconsideration of the vote, by which the resolution was lost.
