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HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE.
of New Jersey, formerly of Colorado, who had supervised the petition of the writers.
Miss Reynolds. This attempt to canvass the writers of the United States is absurdly inadequate and fragmentary. It was the unpaid work of women, each of whom had her own occupation in life, in such spare time as they could get during the year. These writers represent only twenty-one States. Others, including such great States as New York, Michigan and Wisconsin, sent in huge rolls of names without a classification. I am speaking for 1,870 writers. The first name is that of William Dean Howells, the "dean of American letters," perhaps more truly representative of American literature than any other living person. The second name is that of John Bigelow, ex-ambassador to France, ex-secretary-of-state of New York, and author of some twenty scholarly books. On this list are the names of men and women known to every reader of American literature and to every reader of the periodical press. The petition blanks were sent to them by mail and if they did not wish to sign they had only to drop them in the waste-basket. A number of publicists have signed, among them Melville E. Stone, head of the Associated Press, and six of his editors; S. S. and T. C. McClure, publishers of the McClure's Magazine; the editors of Everybody's, the Independent, the Public, Philistine, Delineator, Designer, New Idea, Harper's Bazar, La Follette's Magazine, the Springfield Republican; editors of Current Literature, Philadelphia Record, Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, New York Herald, New York Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Baltimore American, Minneapolis News, Cincinnati Post and numerous other newspapers over the country. These publications reach millions of readers.
There are on this list the names of many persons who, although authors or magazine writers, are still more distinguished in other lines of work, as William James and George Herbert Palmer of Harvard; Graham Taylor and Shailer Matthews of the University of Chicago; Simon N. Patten of the University of Pennsylvania; and other professors from the universities of Harvard, Chicago, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Cornell and Columbia, and from Oberlin, Vassar and Wellesley. The great families of Hawthorne, Chanler and Beecher are represented by living descendants who are carrying on the literary traditions which must ever be associated with those names. The late Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the Century, published a tribute to Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi after her death. In this he said in substance that the American women who had most conspicuously united rare intelligence with rare goodness were Josephine Shaw Lowell, founder of the New York Charity Organization; Alice Freeman Palmer, president of Wellesley College, and Dr. Jacobi. Mr. Gilder was an anti-suffragist. The three women whom he thus placed at the pinnacle of American womanhood were all strong suffragists.
The women whose names are on this list represent brains and
