Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/290

At an afternoon session Mrs. Rachel Foster Avery read the report of the National Committee on the Petition to Congress. It had been the plan of Mrs. Catt, as presented and adopted at the convention of 1908, to have one final petition to Congress for the submission of the Federal Amendment and she had consented to take the chairmanship temporarily. Headquarters had been opened in the Martha Washington, the woman's hotel in New York City, where the headquarters of the Interurban Woman Suffrage Council, of which Mrs. Catt was chairman, were located. Here she and Miss Mary Garrett Hay spent many months from 9 a. m. to 5 p. m., assisted by Miss Minnie J. Reynolds, who did press work and correspondence with the States. Mrs. Priscilla D. Hackstaff of Brooklyn, a former Missourian, took charge of the work in that State from these headquarters and there was an energetic volunteer sub-committee of New York suffragists. The report continued:

"The Governors of the four enfranchised States served on an honorary Advisory Committee, as did the following men and women: Anna Howard Shaw, Clara Barton, Julia Ward Howe, William Lloyd Garrison, William Dudley Foulke, Jane Addams, Mary E. Garrett, Sarah Platt Decker, the Hon. John D. Long, Samuel Gompers, Colonel George Harvey, Rabbi Charles Fleischer (Mass.), Dr. Josiah Strong, Edward T. Devine, John Mitchell, Judge Ben Lindsey, Mrs. Clarence Mackay, Lillian M. Hollister, Mary Lowe Dickinson, Mrs. Bourke Cockran and Cynthia Westover Alden.

 

When Mrs. Catt left for London in March, 1909, in the interests of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, the work came to me. At that time upwards of 10,000 letters had been written and 100,000 petitions distributed and twenty-three State organizations were collecting, counting, pasting and classifying the lists. Since then five other States have gone to work. Letters were written to all the newspapers in the four equal suffrage States asking the insertion of a coupon petition and these coupons brought in the names of many friends who could not otherwise be reached and who were enthusiastic workers for the petition. Others to the Age of Reason and Wilshire's Magazine brought hundreds of willing workers. Letters were sent in every direction, friends stirred up, reminded of their task and requested to send names of others who would work. Every sheet that came in was searched for names of possible friends who might circulate the petitions. Between March 1 and July 1, 1909, nearly 2,000 letters were written and 45,000 blanks distributed....