Chapter's End

Women

Chapter's End

Hard by the man-made National capitol which it had stormed and captured, the Executive Council of the National American Woman Suffrage Association held a meeting-- probably the last.

Fully 300 "votes-for-women" veterans were there. Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, Miss Mary Garrett Hay, Mrs. Maud Wood Park. Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton--they were there. The Vice Presidents of the Republican and Democratic National Committees (Mrs. Hert and Mrs. Blair respectively)--they were there. Nonagenarian Mrs. Hester M. Poole of New Hampshire--she, the eldest, was there. Heroic memories of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Anna Howard Shaw--they were there.

The women spoke, were spoken to spoke together. They shook their heads--with laughter for the past, with apprehension for the present:

Laughter. The first generation of suffragists "got the bad eggs." said Mrs. Upton. "The next got--just eggs. All we got was stuck-up noses. ... I remember somebody asking me once if it was not a terrible sacrifice being a suffragist and losing all my social position, and I replied that it wasn't all gone because I had dined two nights before with the President of the United States."

Mrs. Catt revealed a secret 35 years old. When first elected President of the Association, in 1890, she flung herself on a bed and cried for three hours.

She recorded the epithets which successive ages of good Americans had flung at progressive women: "In delicate" when they first wanted to study geography; "immodest" when they asked for physiology; "free lov ers," "frumps and freaks," "screaming sisterhood"; "pro-Germans" during the War; "Bolsheviki" after the war.

Everyone present had a good story of the bygone battle, had a good laugh.

Apprehension. Mrs. Catt, the leader, made the chief speech: "Why don't women vote? What's wrong with the political parties? Why aren't there more women in the Legislature? Why aren't women more effective in politics?" These were her sombre, rhetorical questions. Her answer: "I wish Mrs. Hert and Mrs. Blair would call a mass meeting to find out. . . . The old National American Suffrage Association will pay one-third of the expenses." Her other points:

"They say that women are generally disappointed in politics."

"They don't get the fun out of it that men do."

"They haven't the fighting instinct."

Reformer to the end, Mrs. Catt made yet one more attack:

"Women's clothes still need to be reformed. That's the last task left you. The pioneers couldn't do it. Today we've got the vote, we've got education, we've got everything else they fought for. It's up to you women of today to study clothes.

"Clothes are designed by men, made by men, sold by men, and we women buy any old fool thing they give us without even asking where it came from. The vested interests of the world are tied up in clothes and so is politics. France sends us silken garments and so we won't wear the woolen things that English mills turn out, and recently we had to gather our cloaks together with our hands, because buttons were not manufactured in France."

In the winding up of the Association's affairs, it was reported that left-over literature had been shipped to help the cause in the Philippines, Porto Rico, Hawaii, South Africa, Newfoundland; also, that the following mementos had been deposited at the Smithsonian Institution:

Miss Anthony's shawl.

Miss Anthony's purse.

The table over which was concocted the Women's Bill of Rights in 1848.

Gold pen used by Vice President Marshall and Speaker Frederick H. Gillett in signing the 19th Amendment.