Twenty-six States
and Territories are represented with live women, traveling all the
way from Kansas, Arkansas, Oregon, and Washington Territory. It
does seem to me that after all these years of coming up to this
Capitol an impression should be made upon the minds of legislators
that we are never to be silenced until we gain the demand. We
have never had in the whole thirty years of our agitation so many
States represented in any convention as we had this year.
This fact shows the growth of public sentiment. Mrs. Duniway is
here all the way from Oregon, and you say, when Mrs. Duniway is
doing so well up there, and is so hopeful of carrying the State
of Oregon, why do not you all rest satisfied with that plan of
gaining the suffrage? My answer is that I do not wish to see the
women of the thirty-eight States of this Union compelled to leave
their homes and canvass each State, school district by school
district. It is asking too much of a moneyless class of people,
disfranchised by the constitution of every State in the Union. The
joint earnings of the marriage copartnership in all the States
belong legally to the husband. If the wife goes outside the home
to work, the law in most of the States permits her to own and
control the money thus earned. We have not a single State in the
Union where the wife's earnings inside the marriage copartnership
are owned by her. Therefore, to ask the vast majority of women who
are thus situated, without an independent dollar of their own, to
make a canvass of the States is asking to much.
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