Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/426

nents. Mrs. Catharine Waugh McCulloch (Ills.) presided and Miss Blackwell said in beginning:

Gentlemen of the committee, it is difficult in a short time to review the arguments that have been made during nine or ten hours, therefore I shall take up only the most important points. The argument has been made over and over that you ought not appoint this committee because there is not a sufficient public demand and because the number of women who oppose suffrage is greater than the number who favor it. It is an actual fact that we represent a very much larger number. The opponents say that only 8 per cent, of the women of this country favor suffrage. They have no authority for this, nobody knows how many there are, but it is a fact that less than one per cent, of the women of the United States have expressed any objection to equal suffrage. The anti-suffragists claim to be organized in seventeen States. The suffragists are organized in forty-seven: the only State without an organization is New Mexico. The anti-suffrage movement maintains only three periodicals two monthlies and one quarterly. The suffrage movement maintains seven weekly papers, one fortnightly and four or five monthlies.

In every State where petitions for suffrage and remonstrances against it have been sent to the Legislature, the petitioners have always outnumbered the remonstrants and generally by 50 or TOO to one. At the time of the last New York constitutional convention as far back as 1894 the suffragists obtained more than 300,000 individual signatures to their petitions. Suppose only one-half of those were women, that would make 150,000. At the same time the anti-suffragists obtained only 15,000, men and women. In Chicago, a few years ago. 104 organizations, with an aggregate membership of more than 100,000 women, petitioned for a municipal womansuffrage clause in the new city charter, while only one small organization of women petitioned against it....

One of the opposing speakers claimed that the majority of the grangers were opposed to suffrage. The National Grange passes a strong resolution in favor of woman suffrage every year and a long list of State granges have done the same. Individual working women have appeared before this committee and have said that they believed that the majority of working women were opposed to suffrage, but all the great organizations of working men and working women have repeatedly passed strong resolutions in favor of it. We have been told that all kinds of terrible things will happen if suffrage is granted. With the exception of Illinois, every State that has adopted it borders directly upon some State which has it. If. as has been claimed here, homes were broken up and made desolate, if husbands found that their wives were neglecting their home duties and their children, it is not likely that suffrage would spread from the State which first adopted it to one adjoining State after another. You have had one California woman here who claimed that woman suffrage there does not work well. California adopted the initiative