leadership of Miss Mary Garrett Hay, who since 1912 had served as chairman, the City Woman Suffrage Party plunged into strenuous work, holding conventions, sending out organizers, raising $50,000 as a campaign fund, setting a specific task for each month of 1915 up to Election Day, and forming its own committees with chairmen as follows: Industrial, Miss Leonora O'Reilly; The Woman Voter, Mrs Thomas B Wells; Speakers' Bureau, Mrs Mabel Russell; Congressional, Mrs Lillian Griffin; the French, Mrs Anna Ross Weeks; the German, Miss Catherine Dreier; the Press, Mrs Oreola Williams Haskell; Ways and Means, Mrs John B McCutcheon.
The City Party began the intensive work of the campaign in January, 1915, when a swift pace was set for the succeeding months by having 60 district conventions, 170 canvassing suppers, four mass meetings, 27 canvassing conferences and a convention in Carnegie Hall It was decided to canvass all of the 661,164 registered voters and hundreds of women spent long hours toiling up and down tenement stairs, going from shop to shop, visiting innumerable factories, calling at hundreds of city and suburban homes, covering the rural districts, the big department stores and the immense office buildings with their thousands of occupants It was estimated that 60 per cent of the enrolled voters received these personal appeals The membership of the party was increased by 60,535 women secured as members by canvassers.
The following is a brief summing up of the activities of the ten months' campaign.[1]
Voters canvassed (60 per cent of those enrolled) | 390,698 | |
Women canvassed | 60,535 | |
Voters circularized | 826,796 | |
Party membership increased from 151,688 to | 212,223 | |
Watchers and pickets furnished for the polls | 3,151 | |
Numbers of leaflets printed and distributed | 2,883,264 | |
Money expended from the City treasury | $25,579 | |
Number of outdoor meetings | 5,225 | |
Number of indoor meetings (district) | 660 | |
Number of mass meetings | 93 | |
Political meetings addressed by Congressmen, Assemblymen and Constitutional Convention delegates | 25 | |
Total number of meetings | 6,003 |
- ↑ Extended space is given to the two New York campaigns because they were the largest ever made and were used as a model by a number of States in later years—Ed.