Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/287

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NATIONAL AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1909
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close of the afternoon session the delegates enjoyed an automobile ride of many miles amidst scenery which many who had travelled widely declared was unsurpassed in the whole world.

The most brilliant session of the convention probably was that of the College Women's Evening, with Dr. Shaw presiding. Miss Caroline Lexow (N. Y.), secretary of the College Women's League, spoke of its remarkable growth since its organization the preceding year and said that it now had twenty-four branches in as many States and twenty-five chapters in as many colleges. She called attention to the fact that no College Anti-Suffrage Association had ever been formed and said that college women remembered the words of one of the pioneers: 'Make the best use you can of your freedom for we have bought it at a great price." Mrs. Eva Emery Dye (Ore.) gave an able address on College Women in Civic Life. The Law and the Woman was the subject considered by Miss Adella M. Parker, a popular lawyer, president of the Washington College League. 'I have been looking for years," she said, "to find any legislation that does not affect women, from a tariff on gloves to a declaration of war. The great problems which face the human race demand the genius of both men and women to solve them. The law needs women quite as much as women need the law." The closing address on College Women and Democracy by Frances Squire Potter, professor of English at the University of Minnesota, was a masterly review of the relation of college women to the life of the present, and later it was printed by the College League as a part of its literature. In the course of it she said:

The admission of women began with Oberlin, Ohio, in 1833, then a provincial institution, religious in its purpose and one where the boys and girls did the work. From that time on the West was committed to the co-educational State university. The influence set back eastward and women demanded admittance successively in this college and that college. It is to be remembered that they did not go in naturally and pleasantly but at the point of the sword and to the sound of the trumpet. And to-day the segregated college life of the East illustrates the "last entrenchments of the middle ages.' Those monasteries and nunneries of learning crown the hilltops from Boston to Washington and "watch the star of intellectual empire westward take its way.".... Following upon the democratization of the university we now see rising a tide which is as