Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/340

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308
HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE.

return to the Government for any privilege she might have in the exercise of her right as a citizen?" Mrs. Kelley answered: "Yes, I think we have always done it. We pay taxes, we teach the children to obey the laws, we fill their hearts with patriotism, but the principal thing is that we furnish the army at the risk of our own lives. Every time an army has been called for in the United States it has been the sons of American women on the whole who have carried the weapons and every son has been born at the risk of his mother's life. Her service is a very much greater contribution than the two or three years of the son's carrying a gun or perhaps dying of typhoid fever while in the service."

Miss Clay could not keep silent but asked if they realized how much the order of society depended on the teaching and the restraining influence of women, on their power to maintain decency of life, not alone by their presence but also by their high ideals of law and society. "When they are recognized as voting citizens," she said, "their idea of civic duty will reach a still higher point and they will have power to see that it is enforced." Members of the committee began to bring forward the stock misrepresentations about the voting of women in Colorado, which called Mr. Rucker to his feet with statistics to show that women voted in quite as large a proportion as men; that, instead of men's controlling the women's votes, women often controlled the men's; that in the hundreds of cases of election frauds only one or two women had been implicated; that less than 15 per cent. of the so-called "ostracized" women go to the polls.

In closing Chairman Parker said: "I wish to render the thanks of the committee for this large and representative audience, which is almost an American Congress, I am all the more pleased and interested to find such strong presentations by those whom I might call, possibly without offense, 'Daughters of the American Congress,' two of whom claim an acquaintance with this committee that goes back at least as far as any of us. I wish to offer all of you our thanks for the earnest consideration that you seem to have given to the great problems, industrial and social, as well as those of the family, which confront us all, and in comparison with which the political powers and actions of this country are