# The Part Taken by Women in American History/History of Woman's Suffrage Organization

History of Woman's Suffrage Organization.
Harriet Taylor Upton.
It is seldom that there is a time when a single reform question alone is before the people. There are often many, and it is ​ not until the agitation is over and the question settled that we realize they were all a part of a great whole.
Women, as well as men, were interested in the questions which led up to the war. Northern women took part in the agitation for the abolition of slavery and were among the best and most convincing speakers.
The name of Abby Kelly Foster was known throughout the North, as was that of Lucretia Mott. It was but natural when the World's Abolition Convention was called in London in 1840 that women should be elected delegates to that body. Lucretia Mott, a Quaker preacher of refinement, culture, brain power and influence, was one of these delegates. Henry Stanton, another delegate, had brought with him his bride, Elizabeth Cady, and as these two, with the other women, repaired to the gallery, and there listened to the debates on the question in which they were so vitally interested, they grew more and more incensed each day.
William Lloyd Garrison, probably the most powerful man of the Abolition movement, was delayed in transit, and when he arrived and found that the women delegates had been denied seats he refused to take his place on the floor. He knew the part they had played in the abolition cause, and he believed in justice and equality for all human beings, women as well as slaves.
The action of the men delegates showed clearly to Mrs. Mott and Mrs. Stanton the place the world set apart for them, and they resolved that, upon their return to America, they would make a public demand for the proper recognition of women.
There were then no such easy ways of traveling or communication as there are now. Mrs. Mott's attention was still on the slave, and Mrs. Stanton's on her little family, whose members came close together, and it was not till eight years later, in 1848, that they carried out their determination and ​ called the first woman's rights convention at Seneca Falls, Mrs. Stanton's home. This convention, as is generally supposed, was not called for the consideration of political rights. In fact, at that time it was the least thought of, personal rights, property rights, religious rights were demanded. In fact, there was much opposition to including political rights, and but for Elizabeth Cady Stanton that clause would have been left out.
The storm of ridicule which burst forth as soon as these reports were issued by the press frightened many of the women, but a few held fast. To their bravery, foresight and conviction is due the fact that to-day women vote in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho and Washington upon exactly the same terms as men vote. They vote for all officers, from the lowest to the president, and can hold any office to which they can be elected.
Susan B. Anthony did not attend that convention; in fact, she rather doubted the wisdom of calling it. However, she seldom missed another throughout her long life, her last being at Baltimore in 1906. During all those years she gave her life to the political enfranchisement of women. In the early days, Mrs. Stanton not being able to leave her family, Miss Anthony would go to her home, help with the work and the care of her babies, while she wrote an argument suitable for the legislators, and then, armed with this, Miss Anthony would appear before that legislature and make her demands. In this way these two women caused to be changed most of the old New York laws under which women were not much more than chattels.
The friendship between Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony was one of the most beautiful, strongest and purest of which history writes. Together they worked for a great cause with perfect love and understanding for nearly fifty years. They supplemented each other, and their joint work was powerful.
A little later than the 1848 convention Lucy Stone, a gentle, strong, able, conscientious woman, who had completed a course ​ of study at Oberlin, began to agitate the question of woman's rights, and it was under her direction that a convention was called in March, 1850. Lucy Stone was not at all like Mrs. Stanton in character, except they were both radicals, but Lucy Stone exercised more influence among progressive women of New England than any woman of her time. Their memory is still greatly cherished. These two women, together with Miss Anthony, were the real leaders of the women suffragists, and this trinity is the one which married women should remember, since through them they procured their property rights. To these women should the 6,000,000 working women turn with thankful hearts, since they were the first to demand equal pay for equal work.
Susan B. Anthony was the best known of the three; in fact, she was the figure of her century. Born of well-to-do parents, well educated, capable, loving and charitable to a fault, optimistic and generous, self-effacing, of undoubted will, she saw only a sex in a position in which it could not develop itself, and she fought for its freedom. No one woman had as many friends as she had, because no one woman had ever loved so many people as she had. She was not an orator in its common sense, and yet probably she, in her lifetime, addressed more people than any other American woman. She was at ease with the lowest and the highest, and worked for fifty years without salary, that the women of the United States might have a weapon to fight their own battle. She was the greatest woman of them all.
Delegates to the World's Abolition Convention in 1840:
* Lucretia Mott
* Sarah Pugh
* Abby Kimber
* Elizabeth Neal
* Mary Grew
* Ann Green Phillips
* Emily Winslow
* Abby Southwick
Prominent Suffragists.
The biography of every officer, great or small, in the nation's army would be a prodigious task, but hardly less is that of giving in detail the work of every American woman actively interested in reform movements. It would take volumes to give at length the work of all the women now interested in the enfranchisement of women and in the temperance field. There was a time in our history when the question of women's suffrage, unless it threatened the immediate community in which we lived, was a matter to which the majority of us in America, whether men or women, were, if not indifferent, still somewhat neutral. Now, I think it would be safe to say the majority have the most ardent convictions pro et contra. It is, therefore, with such deep regret that I find it possible to offer at length only the biographies of the pronounced leaders in suffrage and temperance, that I have appended merely a roll-call of notable names. Even this, I fear, can only approximate the number of women dedicating their lives to the work of their sex.
Among those who have done distinguished work for suffrage we find such names as these:
Mrs. Jean Brooks Greenleaf, successor to Lillie Devereux Blake as president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association.
Mrs. Elizabeth Boynton Barbert, who succeeded in inducing the Republicans of Iowa to put into their state platform a purely women's plank, thus being the first woman to design a women's plank and secure its adoption by a great political party in a great state.
Mrs. Rebecca N. Hazard, who, as early as 1867, formed the Woman Suffrage Association of Missouri.
Mrs. Eliza Trask Hill, one of the active leaders in the ​ battle for school suffrage for women in Massachusetts, and later editor of a paper, which is cared for by a stock company of women.
Mrs. Mary Emma Holmes, the earnest and brilliant worker who represented the National American Suffrage Association in the World's Fair at Chicago in 1893.
Mrs. Mary Seymour Howell, who has lectured in behalf of women's suffrage in many of the towns and cities of the North and West, as well as repeatedly pleaded the cause of woman before committees of state legislatures and of Congress.
Mrs. Josephine Kirby Williamson Henry, who has lectured and labored and stood for office in a state where the popular prejudice is against "Women's Rights."
Mrs. Sarah Gibson Humphreys, of Louisiana and Kentucky, who has served on a board of road directors, a unique position for a woman in the South, and has worked all her public life to secure the vote for women.
Mrs. Jane Amy McKinney, who, as president of the Cook County Equal Suffrage Association, effectively furthered the cause in Illinois.
Mrs. Theresa A. Jenkins, daughter of one of the pioneers of Wisconsin, herself became a pioneer as a champion of suffrage in the literary field over that portion of the country, and even farther West. In April, 1889, she contributed to the "Popular Science Monthly" a striking paper, entitled "The Mental Force of Women." She became Wyoming correspondent of the Women's Tribune, the Union Signal and the Omaha Central West. She was a recognized power in Wyoming in bringing about the absolute recognition of the equality of the sexes before the law.
Mrs. Laura M. Johns, of Kansas, was six times president of the State Suffrage Association in that state, and her great work was the arrangement of thirty conventions beginning in ​ Kansas City in February, 1892, and held in various other important cities of the state, and for these meetings she secured such speakers as Rev. Anna H. Shaw, Mrs. Clara H. Hoffman, etc.
Mrs. Cora Scott Pond Pope was invited by Mrs. Lucy Stone to help organize the state of Massachusetts for women suffrage, and continued the work, organizing eighty-seven women suffrage leagues, arranging lectures, speaking in the meeting, and raising the money to carry on the state work for six years. In 1887 she organized a Woman Suffrage Bazaar, which was held in the Music Hall in Boston for one week, and which cleared over six thousand dollars. In 1889 she originated the National Pageant, a dramatic arrangement of historic events, to raise more money for state work for suffrage. This pageant, given in Hollis Street Theatre, May 9, 1889, played to a crowded house, at two dollars a ticket, and over one thousand dollars was cleared at a single matinee performance. Afterwards it was produced in other large cities of the country with equal success. In the Chicago Auditorium, at the time of the Exposition, in one night six thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars was cleared.
​ Mrs. Marrilla M. Ricker's success at the bar and as a political writer has demonstrated so conclusively the intellectual quality of women that her advocacy of female suffrage has influenced as only a concrete object lesson can.
Mrs. Martha Parmelee Rose's writings on the sewing women and on other laboring questions brought to light the frauds and extortions practised upon her sex without the vote.
Mrs. Elizabeth Lyle Saxon, of New Orleans, has literally spent her lifetime carrying out a promise made to her father on his deathbed, "Never to cease working for unfortunate women so long as her life should last." For years she has been in demand as a lecturer on universal suffrage, temperance, social purity and kindred subjects. Her keen, logical and yet impassioned style of oratory fairly takes her audiences by storm, and has won for her a national reputation as a public speaker. Her great work, however, has always been for the most degraded and downtrodden of her sex.
Mrs. Rosa L. Segur, though born in Hesse, Germany, came to the United States when a child, and when quite young began contributing stories and sketches to the Toledo Blade, always expressing herself a staunch supporter of movements in favor of women's suffrage. To her belongs much of the credit for obtaining the repeal of obnoxious laws in regard to the status of women in the state of Ohio.
Mrs. Mary Barr Clay is the daughter of Cassius M. Clay, a noted advocate for freedom and the emancipation of the slave in a slave state. Through her sympathy with his views, his daughter gained the independence of thought and action necessary to espouse the cause of women's political and civic freedom in that same conservative community.
Mrs. Estelle Terrell Smith's famous "Mothers' Mass Meetings," held in the large city hall in Des Moines, have accomplished much good, especially in banishing from her city disrep​ utable posters, cigarettes, cards and other evils. Through those meetings a bill regulating the property rights of women was drafted and presented to the state legislature.
Mrs. Cornelia Dean Shaw is a woman alert in all the movements of the enfranchisement of women, and a tower of strength to the Woman Suffrage Association in Ohio and Illinois.
Miss Mary Crew has preached the rights and equality of women from her pulpit in the Unitarian Church, since in that church there is no distinction based on sex.
Mrs. Adeline Morrison Swain, of Iowa, was, for her prominence in the women's suffrage cause in 1883, unanimously nominated by the Iowa State Convention of the Greenback party for the office of superintendent of public instruction. Being one of the first women so named on an Iowa state ticket, she received the full vote of the party. In 1884 she was appointed a delegate, and attended the national convention of the same party, held in Indianapolis, Ind., to nominate candidates for president and vice-president. Mrs. Swain was, moreover, for many years editor of the Woman's Tribune.
Mrs. Minnie Terrell Todd is one of Nebraska's staunchest woman suffragists, is also a member of the State Board of Charities, and prominent in every reformative and progressive movement.
Mrs. Anna C. Wait is editor of the Beacon, a reform paper started by her in Lincoln, Kan., in 1880, and every page is devoted to prohibition, woman's suffrage and anti-monopoly. To her more than to any other person does the cause of woman's enfranchisement owe its planting and growth in Kansas.
Mrs. Caroline McCullough Everhard is a public-spirited daughter of Ohio, who proved herself well equipped for the office of president of the Ohio Women's Suffrage Association. She had the honor of organizing the Equal Rights Association ​ of Canton, Ohio, the home of the martyred President McKinley.
Mrs. Ellen Sulley Fray is an adopted daughter of the United States who, after marriage had brought her to America, formed suffrage clubs in several different states and in Canada, and became one of the district presidents of the Ohio Women's Suffrage Association.
Mrs. Miriam Howard Du Boise wrote brilliant arguments arguing for the cause while vice-president for the Georgia Women's Suffrage Association.
Mrs. Martha E. Sewell Curtis, descended from Chief Justice Samuel Sewell, of witchcraft fame and, on the mother's side, from Henry Dunster, first president of Harvard College, has delivered brilliant lectures at the meetings of the Women's National Suffrage Association in Boston, proving her worthy of her distinguished ancestors. For years she edited a weekly woman's column in the News, of Woburn, Mass., and was president of the Woburn Equal Suffrage League.
Mrs. Emma Smith Devoe distinguished herself in a brave fight for suffrage in South Dakota, making her home in Huron headquarters of the workers throughout the state.
Mrs. Priscilla Holmes Drake, a lifelong friend of Lucretia Mott, worked with Robert Dale Owen during the Indiana Constitutional Convention of 1850-57 to remove the legal disabilities of women, and before the sections of this instrument, which worked such benefit to women, were presented to the Assembly, they were discussed line by line in Mrs. Drake's parlor.
Mrs. Eleanore Munroe Babcock is well known throughout the East for her work in organizing in New York State.
Mrs. Emma Curtis Bascom, descendant of Miles Standish, is a charter member of the association for the advancement of women in Massachusetts, and for many years was one of its board of officers. When her husband, a professor at Williams ​ College, was deprived of the use of his eyes during a long period, she shared his studies and rendered him every assistance in reading and writing. This training she has found of great advantage in her work for women suffrage in her state.
Mrs. Emma Beckwith was a candidate for the mayoralty of Brooklyn. The campaign, of ten days' duration, resulted in her receiving fifty votes, regularly counted, and many more thrown out among the scattering, before the New York Tribune made a demand for the statement of her vote. Mrs. Beckwith afterwards compiled many incidents relating to that novel campaign in a lecture, which she used with telling effect from the suffrage platform.
Mrs. Marietta Bones, daughter of the noted Abolitionist, succeeded in making the social question of temperance a political question in Dakota.
A further roll-call of noted women suffragists includes the names of Mrs. Adelaide Avery Clafflin, Mrs. Electa Noble Lincoln Walton, Mrs. Frances Dana Gage and Miss Matilda Josslyn Gage.
LUCY STONE.
Of Lucy Stone, Mrs. Stanton says: "She was the first speaker who really stirred the nation's heart on the subject of woman's wrongs. Young, magnetic, eloquent, her soul filled with the new idea, she drew immense audiences, and was eulogized everywhere. She spoke extemporaneously." Her birthplace was West Brookfield, Mass., and she was born August 13, 1818. The family came honestly by good fighting blood, her great-grandfather having been killed in the French and Indian War and her grandfather having served in the War of the Revolution and afterwards was captain of four hundred men in Shays' Rebellion. Her father, Frances Stone, was a prosperous farmer and a man of great energy, much respected by his neigh​ bors, and not intentionally unkind or unjust, but full of that belief in the right of men to rule, which was general in those days, and ruling his own family with a strong hand. Although he helped his son through college, when his daughter Lucy wished to go he said to his wife, "Is the child crazy?" and she had to earn the money herself. For years she taught district schools, teaching and studying alternately at the low wages then paid to women teachers. It took her till she was twenty-five years of age to earn the money to take her to Oberlin, then the one college in the country that admitted women. In Oberlin she earned her way by teaching during vacations, and in the preparatory department of the college, and by doing housework in the ladies' boarding hall, at three cents an hour. Most of the time she cooked her food in her own room, boarding herself at a cost of less than fifty cents a week. At her graduation we have the first hint of the stand she was to take for woman's rights. Graduating with honors, she was appointed to write a commencement essay, but finding that she would not be allowed to read it herself, but that one of the professors would have to read it for her (the young women in those days not being allowed to read their own work in public) she declined to write it. After her return to New England she discovered her ability as a speaker, and her first woman's rights lecture was given from the pulpit of her brother's church, in Gardner, Mass., in 1847. Soon after she was engaged to lecture for the Anti-Slavery Association. It was still a great novelty for a woman to speak in public, and curiosity attracted great audiences. She always put a great deal of woman's rights into her anti-slavery lectures, and finally when Powers' "Greek Slave" was on exhibition in Boston the sight of the statue moved her so strongly that in her next lecture there was so much woman's rights and so little anti-slavery that Rev. Samuel May, who arranged her lectures, said to her, "Lucy, that was beautiful, but on the anti​ slavery platform it will not do." She answered, "I know it, but 1 was a woman before I was an Abolitionist, and I must speak for the women." Accordingly, it was arranged that she should lecture for woman's rights on her own responsibility all the week and should lecture for the anti-slavery society on Saturday and Sunday nights. Her adventures during the next few years would fill a volume. She arranged her own meetings, putting her own handbills up with a little package of tacks which she carried and a stone, picked up in the street. Of course, woman's rights was still considered a subject for ridicule when not the object of violent attack. One minister in Maiden, Mass., being asked to give a notice of her meeting, did so, as follows: "I am asked to give notice that a hen will attempt to crow like a cock in the town hall at five o'clock to-morrow evening. Those who like such music will, of course, attend." At a meeting in Connecticut one cold night a pane of glass was removed from the church window and a hose inserted and Miss Stone was suddenly deluged from head to foot. She wrapped a shawl about her, however, and went on with her lecture. At an open air meeting in a grove on Cape Cod, where there were a number of speakers, the mob gathered with such threatening demonstration that all the speakers slipped away, till no one was left on the platform but Miss Stone and Stephen Foster. She said to him, "You had better go, Stephen, they are coming."
He answered, "Who will take care of you?" At that moment the mob made a rush and one of the ringleaders, a big man with a club, sprang up on the platform. Turning to him without a sign of fear she remarked in her sweet voice, "This gentleman will take care of me." And to the utter astonishment of the angry throng he tucked her under one arm and holding his club with the other, marched her through the crowd. He then mounted her upon a stump and stood by her ​ with his club while she addressed the mob upon the enormity of their attack. They finally became so ashamed that, at her suggestion, they took up a collection of twenty dollars to pay Stephen Foster for his coat, which they had rent from top to bottom.
In 1855 she became the wife of Henry B. Blackwell, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, then the Unitarian Pastor, performing the ceremony. She had protested against the marriage, particularly the taking of the husband's name by the wife as a symbol of her subjection to him and of the merging of her individuality in his, and as Ellis Gay Loring, Samuel E. Sewell and other eminent lawyers told her that there was no law requiring a wife to take her husband's name she retained her own name with her husband's full approval and support.
In 1869, with William Lloyd Garrison, George William Curtis, Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Livermore and others, she organized the American Woman Suffrage Association and was chairman of its executive committee during the twenty years following, except during one year when she was its president. She took part in the campaigns in behalf of Woman Suffrage Amendments, submitted in Kansas in 1867, m Vermont in 1870, in Colorado in 1877 and in Nebraska in 1882. For over twenty years she was editor of the Woman's Journal. The following eloquent appeal from her faithful, fearless pen, appearing in that magazine during the presidential activities of Centennial Year, gives a characteristic glimpse of her ardor for woman's rights. "Women of the United States, never forget that you are excluded by law from participation in the great question which at this moment agitates the whole country—a question which is not only who the next candidate for president will be, but what shall be the policy of the government under which we live for the next four years.
But have you ever thought that the dog on your rug and the cat ​ in your corner has as much political power as you have? Never forget it, and when the country is shaken, as it will be for months to come, over the issue, never forget that this law-making power states every interest of yours. It states your rules to a right in your child. You earn or inherit a dollar and this same power decides how much of it shall be yours and how much it will take or dispose of for its own use. Oh, woman, the only subjugated one in this great country, will you be the only adult people who are ruled over! Pray for fire to reveal to you the humiliation of the unspeakable laws which come of your unequal position." Lucy Stone died in Dorchester, Mass., the 18th of October, 1893.
ELIZABETH CADY STANTON.
Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the daughter of Judge Daniel Cady, and Margaret Livingston Cady, and was born November 12, 1816, in Johnstown, New York, not far from Albany. A noted Yankee once said that his chief ambition was to become more noted than his native town. Whether this was Mrs. Stanton's ambition or not, she has lived to see her historic birthplace shrink into mere local repute while she herself has been quoted, ridiculed, abused and extolled into national fame.
She took the course in the academy in Johnstown and then went to Mrs. Emma Willard's Seminary in Troy, New York, where she was graduated in 1832. In the office of her father, Mrs. Stanton first became acquainted with the legal disabilities of women under the old common law, and she early learned to rebel against the inequity of law, which seemed to her made only for men. When really a child she even went so far as to hunt up unjust laws with the aid of the students in her father's office and was preparing to cut the obnoxious clauses out of ​ the books supposing that that would put an end to them, when she was informed that the abolition of inequitable laws could not be thus simply achieved. But she devoted the rest of her life in an effort toward the practical solution of women's rights. She has said that her life in this village seminary was made dreary in her disappointment and sorrow in not being a boy, and her chagrin was great when she found herself unable to enter Union College, where her brother was graduated just before his death.
In 1837, in her twenty-fourth year, while on a visit to her distinguished cousin, Gerrit Smith, at Peterboro, in the central part of New York State, she made the acquaintance of Henry Brewster Stanton, a fervid young orator, who had won distinction in the anti-slavery movement, and in 1840 they were married. They immediately set sail for Europe, the voyage, however, being undertaken not merely for pleasure and sightseeing, but that Mr. Stanton might fulfill the mission of delegate to the World's Anti-Slavery Convention, to be held in London, in 1840.
There Mrs. Stanton met Lucretia Mott and learned that there were others who felt the yoke women were bearing as well as herself. It was with Mrs. Mott that she signed the first call for a woman's rights convention and when she was once asked, "What most impressed you in Europe?" she replied, "Lucretia Mott." Their friendship never waned, and they worked together for reform all the long years after that meeting.
Mrs. Stanton and her husband removed to Seneca Falls, N. Y., and it was in that town, on the 19th and 20th of July, 1848, in the Wesleyan Chapel that the first assemblage known to history as a woman's rights convention was held. Mrs. Stanton was the chief agent in calling that convention. She received and cared for the visitors; she wrote the resolutions ​ of declaration and aims, and she had the satisfaction of knowing that the convention, ridiculed throughout the Union, was the starting point of the woman's rights movement, which is now no longer a subject of ridicule. Judge Cady, hearing that his daughter was the author of the audacious resolution, "That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure for themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise," imagined that she had gone crazy, and he journeyed from Johnstown to Seneca Falls, to learn whether or not her brilliant mind had lost its balance. He tried to reason her out of her position but she remained unshaken in her faith that her position was right.
​ In 1867 she spoke before the legislature and Constitutional Convention of New York, maintaining that during the revision of its constitution the state was resolved into its original elements and that citizens of both sexes therefore had a right to vote for members of the convention. In Kansas, in 1867, and Michigan, in 1874, when those states were submitting the woman suffrage question to the people, she canvassed the state and did heroic work in the cause. From 1855 to 1865 she served as president of the national committee of the suffrage party. In 1863 she was president of the Woman's Loyal League. Until 1890 she was president of the National Woman's Suffrage Association. In 1868 she was a candidate for Congress in eighth congressional district of New York and in her address to the electors of the district she announced her creed to be: "Free speech, free press, free men and free trade." In 1868, the Revolution was started in New York City and Mrs. Stanton became the editor, assisted by Parker Pillsbury. She is joint author with Miss Susan B. Anthony of the "History of Woman Suffrage."
Religious and worshipful by temperament, she cast off in her later life the superstition of her earlier, but she never lost her childhood's faith in good, and her last work was the "Woman's Bible," a unique revision of the Scriptures from the standpoint of women's recognition. She is said to have declared that she would willingly give her body to be burned for the sake of seeing her sex enfranchised, and when this desire of her heart is gratified, her name will be gratefully remembered by those who fought for the emancipation of womankind.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY.
Susan B. Anthony, according to Mrs. Stanton, was born at the foot of the Green Mountains, South Adams, Massachusetts, February 15, 1820. Her father, Daniel Anthony, was a stern Quaker; her mother, Lucy Read, a Baptist, but being liberal and progressive in their tendency they were soon one in their religion. In girlhood years Miss Anthony attended Quaker meetings with aspirations toward high-seat dignity, but this was modified by the severe treatment accorded the father, who, having been publicly reprimanded twice, the first time for marrying a Baptist, the second for wearing a comfortable coat with a large cape, was finally expelled from "meeting" because he allowed the use of one of his rooms for the instruction of a class in dancing, in order that the youth might not be subjected to the temptations of a liquor-selling public house.
Miss Anthony's father was a cotton manufacturer, and the first dollar she ever earned was in his factory, for, though a man of wealth, the idea of self-support was early impressed on all the daughters of the family. Later, after their removal to Rochester, she became a teacher and fifteen years of her life were passed in teaching school in different parts of the state of New York. Although superintendents gave her credit for the best disciplined schools and the most thoroughly taught scholars in the county, yet they paid her eight dollars a month, while men received from twenty-four to thirty dollars. After fifteen years of great labor and the closest economy she had saved but three hundred dollars. This experience taught her the lesson of woman's rights. She became an active member of the New York State Teachers' Association and in their conventions made many effective pleas for higher wages and for the recognition of the principle of equal tights for ​ women in all the honors and responsibilities of the association. The women teachers from Maine to Oregon owe Miss Anthony a debt of gratitude for the improved conditions they hold to-day.
Miss Anthony had been from a child deeply interested in the subject of temperance. In 1847, she joined the Daughters of Temperance, and in 1852 organized the New York State Women's Temperance Association, the first open temperance organization of women. Of this Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was president. As secretary, Miss Anthony for several years gave her earnest efforts to the temperance cause, but she soon saw that woman was utterly powerless to change conditions without the ballot and from 1852 she became one of the leading spirits in every women's rights convention, and was acting secretary and general agent for the suffrage organization for many years. She left others to remedy individual wrongs while she devoted herself to working for the weapon by which she believed women might be able to do away with the producing causes. She used to say she had "no time to dip out vice with a teaspoon, while the wrongly adjusted forces of society are pouring it in by the bucketful." From 1857 to 1866 Miss Anthony was also an agent and faithful worker in the anti-slavery cause. She has, moreover, been untiring in her efforts to secure liberal legislation, now enjoyed by the women in the state of New York.
The most harassing, though probably the most satisfactory, enterprise Miss Anthony ever undertook was the publication for three years of a weekly paper, The Revolution. This formed an epoch in the woman's rights movement and roused widespread interest in the question. Ably edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Parker Pillsbury, with the finest intellects of the nation among its contributors, and rising immediately to a recognized position among the papers of the nation, there was no reason why it should not have been a financial success, save that Miss ​ Anthony's duties kept her almost entirely from the lecture field. After three years of toil and worry, and the accumulation of a debt of ten thousand dollars, Miss Anthony set bravely about the task of earning money to pay the debt. Every cent of this was duly met from the earnings of her lectures.
The most dramatic event of Miss Anthony's life was her arrest and trial for voting at the presidential election of 1872. Owing to the mistaken advice of her counsel, who was unwilling that she should be imprisoned, she gave bonds which prevented her taking her case to the Supreme Court, a fact she always regretted. When asked by the judge, "You voted as a woman did you not?" She replied, "No sir, I voted as a citizen of the United States." The date and place of trial being set, Miss Anthony thoroughly canvassed her county so as to make sure that all of the jurors were instructed in citizens' rights. And yet, at the trial, after the argument had been presented, the judge took the case out of their hands, saying, "It is a question of law and not of fact," and he pronounced Miss Anthony guilty, fining her a hundred dollars and costs. She said to the judge, "Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God, and I shall never pay a penny of this unjust claim," and she gloried in the fact that she never did.
Miss Anthony was always in great demand on the platform, and she had probably lectured in every city that can be marked. She made constitutional arguments before Congressional Committees, and spoke impromptu to assemblies in all sorts of places. Whether it was a good word in introducing a speaker, or a short speech to awaken a convention, or the closing appeal to set people to work, or, again, the full hour address of argument or helpful talk at suffrage meetings she always said just the right thing and never wearied her audience. A fine sense of humor pervaded her arguments, and often by reductio ad absurdum she disarmed and won her opponents. ​ Moreover, a wonderful memory which carried the legislative history of each state, the formation and progress of political parties, the parts played by prominent men in our national life, and whatever has been done the world over to ameliorate conditions for women, made Miss Anthony a genial and instructive companion while her unfailing sympathy made her as good a listener as talker. The change in public sentiment toward woman suffrage was well indicated by the change which came in the popular estimate of Miss Anthony. Where once it was the fashion of the press to ridicule and jeer it came to pass that the best men on the papers were sent to interview her. Society, too, threw open its doors, and into many distinguished gatherings she carried the refreshing breadth of sincerity and earnestness. Her seventieth birthday, celebrated by the National Woman's Suffrage Association, of which she was vice-president at large, from its formation in 1869 until its convention in 1892, when she was elected president, was the occasion of a spontaneous outburst of gratitude, which is without any doubt unparalleled in the history of any living woman. Miss Anthony is truly one of the most heroic figures in American History, and her death in 1906 was the occasion of national sorrow.
ISABELLA BEECHER HOOKER.
Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker was the first child of the second wife of Doctor Lyman Beecher, the illustrious preacher of New England, and was born February 22, 1822, at Litchfield, Connecticut.
Individually and collectively, the Beecher family is considered the most remarkable in the United States, each member of it having been the possessor of a commanding talent, great energy and force of character and great gifts of the highest ​ order. Isabella Beecher inherited her personal beauty from her mother and her great individuality came to her from her father. She married John Hooker, of Hartford, Connecticut, in 1841, and he was a descendant in the sixth generation of Thomas Hooker who founded the city of Hartford. He was a man of note in his day, a famous theologian, earnest patriot and an enlightened statesman. Mrs. Hooker kept pace intellectually with her husband, accompanying him in his theological researches and speculations, learning from him much of his profession and making a study of the phases and evolution of the law that governed the United States. She thus became an earnest and profound student of social, political, and religious questions, and when she adopted the idea that women should be allowed to vote as a fundamental right she at once, in characteristic style, began to do all she could to bring about the great reform. She considered women's suffrage the greatest movement in the world's history, claiming that the ballot would give women every social and intellectual, as well as political, advantage. She wrote and lectured, and studied and explained the doctrine of equal suffrage for women for thirty years. She was at the front of this and other reform movements, going cheerfully through the ridicule and abuse that fell to the lot of earnest agitators and reformers. During several seasons she held a series of afternoon talks in Boston, New York and Washington, and at these assemblages she discussed political economy and other topics. When well along in life she published a book entitled "Womanhood—Its Sanctities and Fidelities," which treated of the marriage relation and of the education of children to lives of purity in a courageous yet delicate way. It attracted wide attention and brought to her many earnest expressions of gratitude from intelligent mothers. For many years she held the office of vice-president for Connecticut, in the National Women's Suffrage Association, and in ​ the yearly conventions of the organization in Washington, D. C., she delivered a number of able addresses. In the International Council of Women in 1888 in the session devoted to political conditions, she delivered an address on the "Constitutional Rights of the Women of the United States," and gave an unanswerable presentation of the subject. In 1878 she took a leading part and acted as spokesman before the committee of Congress upon a petition asking for legislation in favor of the enfranchisement of women. One of her later efforts in behalf of women was in the Republican National Convention in Chicago, where, in company with Miss Susan B. Anthony, she prepared an open letter reviewing work of women, claiming that they had earned recognition and ending with a powerful plea that the convention would include women in the term "citizens."
When Mr. and Mrs. Hooker celebrated their golden wedding on August 5, 1891, the celebration took place in City Mission Hall, in Hartford, Senator Joseph R. Hawley acting as master of ceremonies. The whole city turned out to honor the venerable couple, whose fame shed a luster on the place they called home. Many prominent persons attended the reception, the judges of the Supreme Court of Connecticut going in a body to tender their respects. The National American Women's Suffrage Association was represented by Susan B. Anthony, Mrs. Mary Seymour Howell, Mrs. Rachel Foster Avery, Miss Phebe Couzins, and many others. Mrs. Hooker's long life was one of zealous toil, heroic endurance of undeserved abuse and exalted effort. She died in 1907, but her name stands for one of the best known exponents of the claims of the women of America who desire the right to vote.
ZERELDA GRAY WALLACE.
A self-made woman in every sense of the word, was Mrs. Zerelda Gray Wallace, reformer and suffragist. She was born in Millersburg, Bourbon County, ​ Kentucky, August 6, 1817, the daughter of John H. Sanders and Mrs. Polly C. Gray Sanders. Her father was of South Carolina descent and her mother was of the Singleton family. She was the oldest of five daughters and received as good an education as could be had in the Blue Grass region schools of those early days. At a sale of public lands in Indianapolis, then the frontier, her father purchased his homestead and after leaving Kentucky his daughters had only limited opportunities for education. Mrs. Wallace, however, assisted her father in his practice and became interested in medicine. She educated herself by reading works on hygiene, mental philosophy and other subjects, and was acquainted with many prominent men. In 1837 she became the wife of Honorable David Wallace, soldier and jurist and then lieutenant-governor of Indiana. In 1837 he was elected governor of the state and in 1840 he went to Congress as a Whig. During his term Mrs. Wallace spent some time in Washington with him, ever urging him to vote against the Fugitive Slave Law, and she shared all his reading in law, politics and literature. At the time she married, Mr. Wallace was a widower with a family of three sons, and six children were born to them. This large family Mrs. Wallace reared, carefully cultivating their particular talents and developing all their powers in every way. All her living children have succeeded in life. Her husband's children by the first wife included General Lewis Wallace, the soldier, scholar, statesman and author of the immortal "Ben Hur," and General Wallace never referred to her as "stepmother," but always as mother. She was one of the first of the women crusaders, and joined the Women's Christian Temperance Union, in which she did much valuable service. She spoke before the Indiana legislature in advocacy of temperance, and was soon after lecturing before them in favor of women's suffrage. As delegate to temperance conventions she addressed large audiences in Boston, Saratoga Springs, St.Louis, Detroit, Washington, Philadelphia and other cities. She lived to a splendid old age, her physical and intellectual powers unimpaired, and recently died in Indianapolis surrounded by her children and grandchildren.
AMELIA BLOOMER.
The ridicule of the press has often dimmed a worthy name and such seems to have been the case with Mrs. Amelia Bloomer, who was born May 27, 1818. An insignificant myth of American history lies in the supposition that Mrs. Bloomer originated the garment to which her name was attached in ridicule, but which has become one of the commonest words in the English language. Mrs. Bloomer was not the originator of the style, but adopted it after seeing it worn by others and introduced it to the public through her paper. But, be that as it may, Mrs. Bloomer's life and work is no subject for the cartoonist; she should be ranked among the foremost workers for the betterment of her sex in America. The facts of her life substantiate this. It was in 1840 that she first appeared in public life as an advocate for temperance reform. The study of that question soon led her to understand the political, legal, and financial necessities and disabilities of women, and having seen the depth of the reform needed she was not slow to espouse the cause of freedom in its highest, broadest, most just sense. At that ​ early day no woman's voice had yet been heard from the platform pleading the rights or wrongs of her sex, so Mrs. Bloomer employed her pen to say the thoughts she could not utter. She wrote for the press over various signatures, her contributions appearing in the Water Bucket, Temperance Star, Free Soil Union and other papers. On the first of January, 1849, a few months after the inauguration of the first Women's Rights Convention, she began the publication of the Lily, a folio sheet devoted to temperance and the interests of women. That journal was a novelty in the newspaper world, being the first enterprise of the kind ever owned, edited and controlled by a woman and published in the interests of woman. It was received with marked favor by the press and continued a successful career of six years in Mrs. Bloomer's hands. In the third year of the publication of her journal Mrs. Bloomer's attention was called to the neat, convenient and comfortable, if not esthetic costume afterwards called by her name. The press handed the matter about and commented more or less on this new departure to fashion's sway until the whole country was excited over it, and Mrs. Bloomer was overwhelmed with letters of inquiry. Many women adopted the style for a time, yet under the rod of tyrant fashion and the ridicule of the press they soon laid it aside. Mrs. Bloomer herself finally abandoned it after wearing it six or eight years, but the grotesque caricature remained forever attached to her name.
In 1852 Mrs. Bloomer made her debut on the platform as a lecturer, and in the winter of that year, in company with Susan B. Anthony, she visited and lectured in all the principal cities and towns of her native state, from New York to Buffalo. At the outset her subject was temperance, but temperance strongly spiced with the wrongs and rights of women. In 1849 Mr. Bloomer was appointed post-master of Seneca Falls, and on receipt of the office he at once appointed Mrs. Bloomer his deputy. Upholding her theory of woman's brain equality with man's she soon made herself thoroughly acquainted with the details of the office, and discharged such duties throughout the four years of the Taylor and Fillmore administration. In the winter of 1853 she was chairman of the committee appointed to go before the legislature of New York with petitions for a prohibitory liquor law, and she continued her work throughout the state, lecturing on both temperance and woman's rights and attending to the duties of her house and office until the winter of 1853-1854, when she moved to Mt. Vernon, Ohio. Here she continued the publication of the Lily and was also associate editor of the Western Home Visitor a large literary weekly paper published in that place. In the columns of The Visitor, as in all her writings, some phase of the woman question was always made her subject. At the same time that she was carrying on her literary work she visited and lectured in all the principal towns and cities of the North and West, going often where no lecturer on women's enfranchisement had preceded her. In January, 1854, she was one of the committee to memorialize the legislature of Ohio on a prohibitory liquor law. The rules were suspended and the committee received with mock respect and favor, but the same evening the legislature almost in a body attended a lecture given by her on women's right of suffrage. In the spring of 1855 Mr. and Mrs. Bloomer removed to Council Bluffs, Iowa, making it their permanent home. Mrs. Bloomer intended henceforth ​ to rest from her public labors, but this was not permitted to her. Calls for lectures were frequent, and to these she responded as far as possible, but was obliged to refuse to go long distances on account of there being at that day no public conveyance except the old stage coach. In the winter of 1856, Mrs. Bloomer, by invitation, addressed the legislature of Nebraska on the subject of woman's right to the ballot. The Territorial House of Representatives shortly afterwards passed a bill giving women the right to vote, and in the council it passed to a second reading, but was finally lost for want of time, the limited session drawing to a close and the last hour expiring before the bill could come up for final action. Mrs. Bloomer took part in organizing the Iowa State Suffrage Association, and was at one time its president. Poor health eventually compelled her to retire from active work in the cause. She died on the thirtieth of December, 1894.
LILLIE DEVEREUX BLAKE.
Both the parents of Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake were descended from the Reverend Jonathan Edwards, D.D., so her inclination to reform might have been a matter of direct inheritance. But the vehicle she used for her preaching was much milder than the invectives of her distinguished ancestor. She was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, August 12, 1835, but was brought to New Haven, Connecticut, by her widowed mother that she might have every advantage of education. She took the Yale college course with tutors at home, and continued her studies until after she was married in 1855 to Frank Q. Umsted. When in 1859 he died leaving her a widow with two children she had already begun to write; one of her first stories, "A Lonely House," having appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. A novel, "Southwold" had also achieved its success. The large fortune she had inherited was sadly impaired and it was necessary that the young widow begin to work in earnest, writing stories, sketches and letters for several leading periodicals. In 1862 she published a second novel "Rockford" and afterwards several romances. It was not until 1869, after her second marriage to Grenfill Blake, a young merchant of New York, that she became actively interested in the women's suffrage movement. In 1872 she published a novel called "Fettered for Life," designed to show the many disadvantages under which women labor. In 1873, she made an application for the opening of Columbia College to young women, and as an argument she presented a class of qualified girl students. The agitation then begun by Mrs. Blake eventually led to the establishment of Barnard College. In 1879 she was unanimously elected president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association, and she held that office for eleven years. She has also lectured a great deal, but being a woman of strong affection and marked domestic tastes, her speaking out of New York has been done almost wholly in the summer when her family was naturally scattered. Her lectures printed under the title of "Woman's Place To-Day," had a large sale. Among the many reforms in which she has been actively interested has been that of securing matrons to take charge of women detained in police stations. As early as 1871 Mrs. Blake spoke and wrote on this subject but it was not until 1891 that public sentiment was finally aroused to the point of passing a law enforcing this much-needed reform. ​ The employment of women as census-takers was first urged in 1880 by Mrs. Blake. The bills giving seats to saleswomen, ordering the presence of a woman physician in every insane asylum in which women are detained and many other beneficent measures were presented or aided by her. In 1886 Mrs. Blake was elected president of the New York City Women's Suffrage League and throughout this office she attended conventions and made speeches in most of the states and territories besides addressing committees of both houses of Congress and the New York and Connecticut legislatures.
A graceful and logical writer, witty and eloquent as a speaker, Mrs. Blake has proved herself a charming hostess, her weekly receptions through the season in New York having been for many years among the attractions of literary and reform circles.
DOCTOR MARY E. WALKER.
Because of her determination to wear male attire, Doctor Mary Walker has been made the subject of abuse and ridicule by people of narrow minds. The fact that she persists in wearing the attire in which she did a man's service in the army blinds the thoughtless to her great achievements and to her right to justice from our government. It should be remembered that she is the only woman in the world who was an assistant army surgeon; that she was the first woman officer ever exchanged as a prisoner of war for a man of her rank, and that she is the only woman who has received the Medal of Honor from Congress and a testimonial from the President of the United States.
She belongs to a family of marked mental traits and was as a child distinguished for her strength of mind and her decision of character and grew up an independent young woman, attending medical college in Syracuse, New York, and New York City. When the Civil War broke out she left her practice and went to the front and served the Union army in a way that in any other country would have caused her to be recognized as a heroine of the nation. Of all the women who participated in the scenes of the war, Doctor Walker was certainly among the most conspicuous for bravery and for self-forgetfulness. She often spent her own money and she often went where shot and shell were flying to aid the wounded soldiers. Her bravery and services in the field were rewarded by a medal of honor, and she draws a pension from the Goverment of exactly eight dollars and fifty cents a month, a half pension of her rank, in spite of the fact that she really deserves the highest recognition of the Government and the public for her patriotic services in the army.
MAY WRIGHT SEWALL.
Mrs. May Wright Sewall's life work has been founded on the conviction that all avenues of culture and usefulness should be opened to women, and that when that result is obtained the law of natural selection may safely be trusted to draw women to those employments, and only those to which they are best fitted. This is the theory she has striven to propagate in her educational work as well as on the suffrage platform. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, May 27, 1844, she is descended on both sides from old New England stock and her father, Philander Wright, was one of the early settlers of Milwaukee. Miss Wright entered the Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and was graduated in 1866. She received the Master's Degree in 1871. After an experience of some years in the common schools of Michigan she accepted the position of principal of the Plainwell High School and later was principal of the High School in Franklin, Indiana. From that position she was called to the Indianapolis High School as teacher of German, and subsequently engaged to work in English literature. That was in the year 1874, and since that date she has resided in Indianapolis. In 1880 she resigned her position in the Indianapolis High School, receiving the unprecedented compliment of a special vote of thanks for her conspicuous and successful work. In October of the same year she became the wife of Theodore L. Sewall and Mr. and Mrs. Sewall opened a classical school for girls making the course identical with the requirements of the Harvard entrance examinations A private school for girls, which made Latin, Greek and mathematics through trigonometry a part of its regular course, was then a novelty in the West, but the immediate success of this girls' school showed that the public was quick to appreciate thorough work in the education of girls. This school established by Mr. and Mrs. Sewall now has an annual enrollment of several hundred pupils. In spite of all her public work for suffrage and civic welfare Mrs. Sewall continues to give much time to the details of supervising her school. The girls in the school are taught to dress plainly and comfortably, to which end they wear a school uniform, and above all they are encouraged to believe that all departments of knowledge are worthy of their attention and of right ought to be open to them.
About the time of her removal to Indianapolis, Mrs. Sewall became prominent in various lines of women's work. She soon became known as a lecturer and as a delegate to conventions called to the interest of higher education of women and the promotion of the cause of women's equality before the law. She edited for two years a women's column in the Indianapolis Times, and she has written largely in the line of newspaper correspondence. She is the author of the Indiana chapter in the "History of Women's Suffrage," edited by Miss Anthony, Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Gage, and of the "Report on Women's Industries in Indiana," "Work of Women in Education in the Western States" and of many slighter essays. Her first public appearance in the reform work outside of local letters was as a delegate from the Indianapolis Equal Suffrage Society to the Jubilee Convention in Rochester, New York, in 1878. Since that time she has been one of the mainstays of the cause of women's advancement and has enjoyed the fullest confidence and unqualified support of its leaders. She has delivered addresses ​ before most of the suffrage organizations all over the country and also before committees of the Indiana legislature, committees of the United States Senate, and the National Teachers' Association. In 1889 Mrs. Sewall was the delegate from the National Women's Suffrage Association and from the Women's National Council of the United States to the International Congress of Women assembled in Paris by the French Government in connection with the Exposition Universelle. In that congress she responded for America when the roll of nations was called and later in the session gave one of the principal addresses, her subject being, "The National Women's Council of the United States." Her response for America, which was delivered in French, was highly praised for its aptness and eloquence, by M. Jules Simon, who presided over the session.
Mrs. Sewall's writings and addresses are characterized by directness, simplicity and strength. Her extemporaneous addresses are marked by the same closeness of reasoning, clearness, and power as her written speeches and they display a never-failing tact. She is conspicuously successful also as a presiding officer, a position in which she has had a long and varied experience.
THE REVEREND ANNA H. SHAW.
Mrs. Anna H. Shaw was born in New Castle-on-Tyne, England, on the fourteenth of February, 1847. Her descent is interesting as illustrating the force of heredity. Her grandmother refused to pay tithes to the Church of England and year after year allowed her goods to be seized and sold for taxes. She sat in the door knitting and denouncing the law while the sale went on in the street. Her granddaughter evidently inherited from that heroic ancestor her sense of the injustice of taxation without representation. Mrs. Shaw's parents came to America when she was four years old, and after living four years in Massachusetts they moved to the then unsettled part of Michigan where the young girl encountered all the hardships of pioneer life. She was, however, a child of strong individuality and those pioneer days were an inspiration to her. She may be said to have been self-educated, for her schooling consisted in making herself master of every book and paper that fell in her way. At fifteen years of age she began to teach, remaining a teacher for five years. When about twenty-four years old, despite her descent from a family of English Unitarians, she became a convert to Methodism and joined the Methodist Church. Her ability as a speaker was soon recognized, and in 1873 the District Conference of the Methodist Church in her locality voted unanimously to grant her a local preacher's license. This was renewed annually for eight years. In 1872 she had entered Albion College, Michigan, and in 1875 she entered the theological department of the Boston University, from which she graduated with honor in 1878. She worked her way through college and while in the theological school she was constantly worn with hard work, studying on weekdays and preaching on Sundays. At length when her health was becoming seriously impaired a philanthropic woman offered to pay her the price of a sermon every Sunday during the remainder of her second year if she would omit the preaching and take the day for rest. That help was accepted and afterwards when Miss Shaw was earning a salary and wished to return the ​ money she was bidden to pass it on to aid in the education of some other struggling girl, which she did. She often says that when she was preaching those Sundays while in college she never knew whether she would be paid with a bouquet or a greenback. After graduation she became pastor of a church in East Dennis, on Cape Cod, where she remained seven years. She had been asked there merely to supply their pulpit until they secured a regular minister, but they were so well satisfied that they made no further effort to obtain a pastor and for six years she preached twice every Sunday in her own church in the morning, and in the afternoon in the Congregational Church. During her pastorate in East Dennis she applied to the New England Methodist Episcopal Conference for ordination, but though she passed the best examination of any candidate that year, ordination was refused her on account of her sex. The case was appealed to the general conference in Cincinnati in 1880 and the refusal was confirmed. Miss Shaw then applied for ordination to the Methodist Protestant Church and received it on the twelfth of October, 1880, being the first woman to be ordained in that denomination. But her remarkable mind was never satisfied, and she sought still further to break down the limitations sex had placed upon her, so she supplemented her theological course with one in medicine and receiving the degree of M.D., from the Boston University. But becoming more and more interested in practical reform she finally resigned her position in East Dennis and became a lecturer for the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association.
After entering the general lecture field and becoming widely and favorably known as an elegant speaker on reform topics, she was appointed national superintendent of franchise in the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Soon after, however, at the urgent request of leading suffragists, she resigned this office and accepted in place, that of national lecturer for the National American Women's Suffrage Association, of which, in 1892, she was elected vice-president at large.
Her old parishioners at times have reproached her for no longer devoting herself to preaching the Gospel but she replies that in advocating the franchisement of women, the temperance movement and other reforms, she is teaching applied Christianity and that she exchanged the pulpit where she preached twice a week for the platform where she may preach every day and often three times on Sunday.
She is indeed one of the most eloquent,witty and popular speakers in the lecture field. Her face is very beautiful, even in its aging lines, and she is possessed of the most remarkable personal magnetism, a magnificent voice and great power of pointed argument. Much of her strength and force and thought of expression are believed to result from the experiences of her pioneer life in Michigan, and her power of moving audiences from the touch of humanity which came to her while practicing medicine in the city of Boston. She is believed to be the first woman to have the double distinction of the titles Reverend, and M.D. Her family were opposed to her studying for the ministry, on the ground that she would be a disgrace to them if she persisted in such an unheard of course, but it may be added that her career has effectually reconciled them to that "disgrace."
Dr. Shaw has spoken before many state legislatures and several times before ​ committees in both houses. Her appearance in Washington as presiding officer of the Woman's Suffrage Convention in 1910 made many converts to the cause of equal suffrage from the ranks of national legislators. In appearing before the joint committee of senators and representatives and in the open-air meetings, in which she was the moving spirit on this occasion, her splendid characteristic of keen humor and ready wit enabled her to carry her points where logic alone would have failed.
HELEN M. GOUGAR.
A naturally gifted woman and supported by an unflinching enthusiasm for the right, about the richest possession any cause can have! Such has been the record of Mrs. Helen M. Gougar, author and woman suffragist, born in Litchfield, Mich., July 18, 1843. At forty years of age her head was prematurely whitened by a bitter and hard-fought attempt to weaken her power in political circles by defamation, but the battle over and her enemies completely vanquished, she went on to contest heroically, fighting for what she believes to be the right and patriotic cause to a higher civilization. In this battle she decided forever the right of women to take an active part in political warfare without being compelled to endure ridicule or defamation. Her special work in reforms lies in legal and political lines and constitutional law, and statistics she quotes with marvelous familiarity when speaking in public. Mrs. Gougar is the author of the law granting municipal suffrage to women in Kansas, and the adoption of the measure was wholly due to her efforts. She proved the correctness of her theory by redeeming Leavenworth, the largest city in the state at that time, from slum rule by the votes of women. The success which has attended this law in the interest of political honor and exaltation of public service is well known. As a writer she has a concise, direct and fluent style. For many years she was a contributor to the Chicago Inter-Ocean, and no better evidence of her ability and enthusiasm could be found than the high esteem in which she was held by the management of that old Republican organ.
BELVA ANN LOCKWOOD.
In the summer of 1884 Mrs. Belva Ann Lockwood was nominated for the presidency of the Equal Rights party in San Francisco, California, and this was the first step toward giving woman suffrage a similar recognition to that accorded the male vote. In 1888 she was renominated by the same party in Des Moines, Iowa, and on this occasion awakened the people of the United States as never before to the consideration of the right of suffrage for women. The notoriety given to her by these bold movements called forth much censure ; nevertheless, in a history of what women have done for the United States, Mrs. Lockwood's life should figure prominently. She was born in Royalton, Niagara County, New York, on the 24th of October, 1830. Her parents' name was Bennett, and they were of the farming class in moderate circumstances, so their daughter was educated first in the district school, and later in the academy of her native town. At fourteen years of age she taught the district school in summer and attended school in ​
​ Mrs. Lockwood is interested, not only in equal rights for men and women, but in temperance and labor reforms, the control of railroads and telegraphs by the Government, and in the settlement of all difficulties, national and international, by arbitration instead of war. In the summer of 1889, in company with the Rev. Amando Deyo, Mrs. Lockwood represented the Universal Peace Union at the Paris Exposition, and was there delegated to the International Congress of Peace in that city, which opened its sessions in the Salle of the Trocadero, under the patronage of the French government. She made nearly all the opening speeches, and later presented a paper in the French language on international arbitration, which was well received. In the summer of 1890 she again represented the Universal Peace Union in the International Congress in London, and here she presented a paper on "Disarmament." Before returning to the United States Mrs. Lockwood took a course of university extension lectures in the University of Oxford. She was elected for the third time to represent the Universal Peace Union, of which she was then corresponding secretary, in the International Congress of Peace, held in November, 1891, in Rome. Her subject in that gathering was "The Establishment of an International Bureau of Peace."
Mrs. Lockwood now lives in retirement in Washington, D. C, but her appearance upon a woman suffrage platform is always greeted with applause. Mrs. Lockwood has always been a student, and one of the most valuable acts of her career was when she became prime mover in the university extension course in this country.
CARRIE LANE CHAPMAN CATT.
Mrs. Carrie Lane Chapman Catt, for some years one of the most active and prominent workers for women's suffrage in the United States, was born in Ripon, Wisconsin, on the 9th of January, 1859. Her maiden name was Lane. While yet a child her parents moved to northern Iowa, where her youth was passed. In 1878 she entered as a student the scientific department of the Iowa Agriculture College, and was graduated therefrom in 1880 with the degree of D.S. She was an earnest student, and attained first rank in her class. For three years she devoted herself to teaching, first as principal of the high school in Mason City, Iowa, from which position she was soon promoted to city superintendent of schools in the same place In 1885 she became the wife of Leo Chapman, and carrying out her ideas of the wife as economic helpmate she entered into partnership with him as a joint proprietor and editor of the Mason City Republican. Within a year Mr. Chapman died. Disposing of her paper, Mrs. Chapman went to California where, for a year, she was engaged in newspaper work in San Francisco. In 1888 she entered the lecture field, and for some time spoke only in lecture courses, but the cause of women's enfranchisement soon enlisted her warmest sympathies, and she accepted a position as state lecturer for the Iowa Women's Suffrage Association. Since that time all her energies have been devoted to the cause, and her earnest, logical eloquence has won her many friends. At every convention of the national association she has been called upon as a speaker. As the work for the cause in America has expanded and the suffrage army has grown, Mrs. Catt has come to be more and more acknowledged as one of its gen​ erals. Her health having suffered from her constant devotion to the cause, she has gone abroad. She said, on sailing, that it was her purpose to study the possibilities and status of equal suffrage in all of the countries throughout which she passed on her tour of the world, and it is safe to conclude that her deep, powerful voice will be heard in advocacy of the cause as often as possible. In 1890 she became the wife of George W. Catt, civil engineer of New York City. Her home is in Bensonhurst-by-the-sea, on Long Island.
RACHEL FOSTER AVERY.
The father of Mrs. Avery was J. Heron Foster, editor of the Pittsburg Dispatch, and her mother was a native of Johnstown, New York, the birthplace of her Sunday school teacher and lifelong friend, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. From this heredity it might have been forecasted that the daughter would develop a strong, quick mentality and an advocacy for the independence of her sex. Mrs. Avery was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, December 30, 1858. When she was still a child Mrs. Stanton lectured in Pittsburgh, and shortly after a suffrage meeting was held in the Foster home, and a society was formed, of which Mrs. Avery's mother was made vice-president. Thus the young girl grew up in an atmosphere of radicalism and advanced talk, and she became a suffragist from conviction, as well as by birthright. In 1871 the family, consisting of her mother, her sister and herself, the father having died shortly before, moved to Philadelphia, where they at once identified themselves with the Citizens' Suffrage Association in that city. When about seventeen years old Miss Foster began to write for the newspapers, furnishing letters weekly from California, and afterwards from Europe, to the Pittsburgh Leader. In the winter of 1879 she attended the eleventh convention of the National Women's Association, and this determined her career. With characteristic promptitude she began to plan the series of conventions to be held in the West during the summer of 1880, and in the spring of 1881 she planned the series of ten conventions in the different states, beginning at Boston. In 1882 she conducted the Nebraska Amendment campaign, with headquarters in Omaha. But perhaps the act which best illustrated her ability to propagate the cause was when she engaged Governor John W. Hoyt, of Wyoming, to give a lecture in Philadelphia on "The Good Results of Thirteen Years' Experience of Women's Voting in Wyoming," had the lecture stenographically reported, collected the money to publish twenty thousand copies, and scattered them broadcast over the state of Pennsylvania. In February, 1883, Miss Foster sailed for Europe with Susan B. Anthony, and by reason of her superior linguistic attainments she served for ears and tongue in their journey through France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany. Miss Foster's management of the International Council of Women, held in Washington, D. C, in February, 1888, under the auspices of the National Women's Suffrage Association, was the crowning effort of her executive genius. The expenses of this meeting made a grand total of fourteen thousand dollars, the financial risk of which was assumed beforehand by Miss Anthony, supported by Miss Foster.
Her marriage to Cyrus Miller Avery took place November 8, 1888, the Rev​ erend Anna H. Shaw assisting in the ceremony. But she continued her suffrage work even more ardently, and for years held the office of corresponding secretary of the National Suffrage Association and of the National and the International Councils of Women. Mrs. Foster Avery is, moreover, a philanthropist in the broadest sense, giving constantly from her independent fortune to reforms and charities.
HARRIOT STANTON BLATCH.
Mrs. Harriot Stanton Blatch is the brilliant daughter of Mrs. Cady Stanton, who was one of the founders of the Woman's Suffrage Organization. Her father's name was Henry Brewster Stanton and her grandfather was Daniel Cady, a noted lawyer who, after serving a term in Congress, became a judge of the Supreme Court of New York.
Mrs. Blatch is now one of the leading spirits in the woman's suffrage movement in this country and president of the Woman's Political Union of 46 East Twenty-ninth Street, New York City. She is a woman of great strength of character and marked ability which has brought her to the front rank in this great wave of suffrage which is sweeping over our country.
Mrs. Blatch was the organizer of the league for Self-supporting Women which has to-day 19,350 members. It is a league of working women of New York City and has affiliated with it such divisions of organized labor as The Typographical Union, The Pipe-Caulkers' Union, The Painters' and the Bookbinders' Union. For several years Mrs. Blatch has devoted much of her time to amalgamating women workers and teaching them the value of the franchise. The national suffragists count their greatest gain to be the working women and the college women, who for many years held aloof from each other in suspicion and conservatism, but in the past few years both classes, for various reasons, now are united against tyranny or taxation without representation and for the advancement and rights of women.
ELLEN C. SARGENT.
Mrs. Ellen C. Sargent, of San Francisco, has just died of old age at the house of her son, George C. Sargent, a lawyer. Mrs. Sargent has been for many years one of the great women of California, broad-minded, interested in all progressive work, most of all in woman suffrage, and always optimistic. She lived in Washington many years while her husband, Hon. Aaron A. Sargent, was senator from California, and was a regular attendant at National Suffrage Conventions. She and Susan B. Anthony were very close friends and often visited each other and always were in correspondence. When her husband was minister to Germany, she accompanied him to Berlin, and on their return to California lived in Nevada City and in San Francisco. She had the advantages of New England birth, of Washington society, foreign travel, and a fortune, but she was at all times unassuming, helpful, sympathetic and regarded with deepest esteem and fondest affection by all of her friends. Mrs. Sargent was president of the California Equal Suffrage Association during the campaign of 1896, and ​ the campaign headquarters was in her house. Miss Anthony was her guest during a large part of the time. While suffrage has been her first thought, she has always seen the relation of other movements toward suffrage and has distributed much literature on peace, direct legislation and other related work.
AMALIA BARNEY SIMONS POST.
Mrs. Amalia Barney Simons Post, like so many others of the women suffragists can boast of ancestors who were prominent in early American History. Thomas Chittenden, the first governor of Vermont, was one of her ancestors and several were officers in the Revolutionary War, and in the army and navy in the war of 1812. Mrs. Post's father was William Simons and her mother Amalia