Partly our reasons are personal to our own profession and partly they are the same that move the whole mass of mankind to ask for suffrage today. Some of our personal reasons are these: As women we are excluded from most of the well-paid positions for physicians. We know that the dependent womanhood of the country needs our care; from time to time we hear grewsome tales from the insane asylums and the pauper institutions of wrongs done the women because there is no woman doctor there to protect them. Little children in my own State have gone through a life of degradation owing to the fact that there was no woman doctor in charge of them in the public institutions. The best paid positions are political jobs and no woman can get one. Another reason why, as physicians, we want the ballot is that at present we need police protection. We need a city that is well lighted and safe for women, as we are obliged to go out at all hours of the night. A few years ago the hunters of women became unusually active and several respectable women were in the early hours of the evening hunted to their death and murdered. We were told at that time by the commissioner of police that it would be well for all the respectable women of the city to remain indoors after 8 o'clock in the evening unless they were escorted by a gentleman! Imagine when the telephone rings for a woman doctor to attend some critical case that she shall be required either to get a male escort or remain at home! This is also true of nurses and many others....
I do not think that men can grow to be the best men when they are in constant association with a subject class. I ask you gentlemen of the United States Senate, for the sake of womanhood, but most of all for the sake of manhood, to report this resolution out of the committee, and to ask the Senate of the United States to give the — of this country, so far as in its power, the right of suffrage.Dr. Shaw: "I present a lawyer, Mrs. Ellen Spencer Mussey, but she will speak in the capacity of a college woman." After giving her experience in trying to secure better laws for women in the District of Columbia, Mrs. Mussey told of her visits to Norway and Sweden, where as attorney for a legation she had every opportunity to attend the Parliaments, meet the statesmen and leading women and hear their universal testimony in favor of the experiment in woman suffrage. In closing she stated that as chairman of the legislative committee of the General Federation of Women's Clubs she had received reports from hundreds of them regretting their lack of power to obtain legislation and their need of representation on boards of education and of public institutions. Dr. Shaw then introduced Miss Minnie J. Reynolds
