Volume 5 — CHAPTER X. (continued 2)

Mrs. Robins gave a number of special instances and in answer to the question how the ballot would remedy these evils, she said: "The women, an unorganized group, get together and take collective action and they find themselves not fighting their industrial battles in the economic field but in the political field and the weapons that are constantly used against them with the greatest success are political weapons. The power of the police and of the courts is used against them in many instances and whenever they try to meet that expression of political power, they are handicapped because there is no force in their hands to help change it...."

In the course of a speech punctuated with lively questions and answers Mrs. Upton said: "I represent the industry of wifehood and housekeeping. I spent many of my childhood days in the room of this committee, my father having been a member of the Judiciary Committee for thirteen years and chairman for several years. He was the only one who ever reported a bill favorably for woman suffrage.... I want to ask you to report against us if you will not report for us. Just tell the world that we must not vote because we cannot fight, because it will destroy the home, anything you please, but break your long years of silence. Is it fair for you not to tell us why you are opposed to us? Women are not fools; on the contrary, they are very intelligent people and sure to be enfranchised before long. If this committee does not help some other will; it is going to be done and it is for you to decide whether your daughters will be able to say years from now, 'My father was one of the men who helped get woman suffrage!' While men of this country have been running after dollars at a terrific rate in recent years women have been studying and preparing themselves in clubs and all sorts of organizations for this right, so that they will be the most intelligent class—if you call them a class—that was ever enfranchised in all history. Are you afraid of intelligence? All we ask is to let the mother heart, the home element, be expressed in the government.... I beg of you to let all the world know why the women of the United States, who by hundreds of thousands have petitioned you to submit this amendment, ought not have at least this request considered and a report on it made."

Miss Laura J. Graddick, representing a labor union in the District of Columbia, said during an able and earnest address:

They say that politics is too corrupt for woman to enter the field as a voter but does she not live under a Government dominated by politics? Shame on the manhood of our country that our government housekeeping is so administered that woman can not come in contact with it and escape contamination.... If our Government is built on moral law it should be clean enough for a woman to have a voice in it. We assure you there are no better house-cleaners than women and the above statement certainly indicates the need of women in politics. There is no great cry on the part of men because of the contaminating influences which woman meets in the business and industrial world. They are not keeping her out of the various vocations of life because of the evil which she might encounter. Are not sweat-shop conditions and overwork and underpaid work evils far more destructive to the physical, mental and moral welfare of women than any condition in which suffrage might place them? Because of the great economic and political changes of the last century the working woman of to-day is entitled to the same rights accorded the working man in the political world. These changes have taken her from the home and brought her into business and industrial life, where she has become more and more man's equal and competitor, leaving behind those conditions which so long made her dependent upon him. This has not been of her choosing. Men, in their pursuit of wealth, have taken the work formerly done in the home, from the spinning and weaving even down to the baking and laundering, and massed it in great factories and shops. Instead of woman taking man's work, it is the reverse and he has appropriated to himself what was long supposed to be hers. Woman finds that what was formerly with her a work of love is now done under new conditions and strange environments.

This experience in the outside world is educating her, for she is studying conditions. She sees that she is forced to compete with those who have full political rights while she herself is a political nonentity. She finds that she must contend with and protect herself against conditions which are more often political than economic, thus forcing upon her the conviction that she too is entitled to be a voter. She sees that politics, business and industrial life generally are so united that one affects the other and that since she is a factor in two she should be granted the rights and privileges of the third. Think of the number of women wage-earners in this country who are without political representation, there being no men in the family, and at present laws all made without a woman's point of view!... The working woman does not ask for the ballot as a panacea for all her ills. She knows that it carries with it responsibilities but all that it is to man it will be and even more to woman. Let her remain man's inferior politically and unjust discriminations against her as a wage-earner will continue, but let her become his equal politically and she will then be in a position to demand equal pay for equal work.

In a speech of deep feeling Miss Laura Clay, president of the Kentucky Suffrage Association, said in part: "Gentlemen, when I hear our women making the pleas that they have made, brought up, as I have been, to believe that the manhood of the United States is the grandest in the world, I ask, 'Shall we not find any members of Congress except those who say, 'Can you not get some one else to protect you? Go to your States, go anywhere but do not come to us?' It has been said to me when I have spoken for childhood, 'You have no child?' And I have answered: 'No, I have no child, but just as surely as men in the order of nature are the protectors of womanhood, so surely in the order of nature women are the protectors of childhood. I would dishonor my womanhood to say that I will not do what I can for a child because I have none and I hope the time will never come when women must be ashamed of men because they are not willing to sacrifice something to take this action for women.' Think of it! Must we crawl on our knees to ask you for that which we feel we have a right to demand? You should see that every protection which every lifting hand that it is possible for manhood to offer to womanhood should be extended and your position gives you a great opportunity. I urge that, as far as your official power extends, you will show that the manhood of the United States responds to the pleas of the womanhood of the United States."

The closing address of Mrs. Kelley and the many questions it called for from the committee with her answers filled nearly twelve pages of the printed report of the hearing. A small part only can find space here.

Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, it is sixty years last month since my father, Judge William D. Kelley, became a member of the House of Representatives and in those days it took a great deal of courage for a man to do what he did year after year—introduce this resolution which you are considering to-day. He did it partly, I think, out of chivalrous regard for Miss Anthony, Mrs. Stanton and the few brave women who fifty years ago patiently came before your predecessors; but very much more he introduced that resolution because he believed it was essentially just. He saw in those days the beginnings of the industrial change in the midst of which we now live and they appalled him. He saw how difficult it had been for his widowed mother to get an education for himself and his sisters, and how infinitely difficult life was for the whole great class of women, not only widows but those who by the circumstances of our changing industries had been forced out into the industrial market. He believed they ought to have the same power to protect their own interests as had been given to the American workingman and which he helped give to the negro....

Women now do not count in our communities at all in proportion to the responsibilities which they carry. One of the gentlemen has asked: "What is the relation of all this labor talk to the ballot?" I will give you some examples: I was for four years the head of the factory inspectors of Illinois. During that time we had an eight-hour law enacted for the protection of women and children employed in manufacturing industries. The Supreme Court held that it was contrary to the constitutions of the State and of the United States for women to be deprived of the right to work twenty-four hours whenever it suited the convenience of the employers. The court said—and it took 9,000 words to say it—that women could not be deprived of working unlimited hours, because they were citizens, although it said the term "citizenship" was limited; the Court said they could not be allowed to work underground in mines; they could not be allowed to work out their taxes on the roads, as farmers do; they could not be called to the militia; they could not vote except for school committees and once in four years for the trustees of the State University, but, with those minor deductions, they were citizens and could not be deprived of the freedom of contract.

The Supreme Court of the United States has proclaimed that the Judges of Illinois guessed wrong on that occasion, that it is not contrary to the Constitution of the United States to limit the working hours of women but that it is the obvious duty of every Legislature to do this in the interest of public health and morals. A year ago, largely through the efforts of Mrs. Robins, the Legislature tried it again and passed this time a ten-hour law for women. A Judge was found who held that it was a legitimate object for an injunction and he enjoined my successor, the present factory inspector, and the prosecuting attorney from enforcing this law. To-day under that injunction the women are again free to work twenty-four hours, as they do one day in the week quite regularly in the laundries in Chicago, and to work sixteen hours a day as they do in the stores during the Christmas rush, and as they do in the box factories and candy factories. Yet the women of Illinois have not had one word to say as to the personnel of these courts which decide what is a matter of life and death for every woman who is rushed into her grave by work in the laundries and other sweat shops of that State.

Mrs. Kelley gave some tragic instances of occurrences during her eight years in Hull House with Miss Jane Addams, where the working of women overtime caused death and permanent invalidism, and continued:

During the fifteen years since that Illinois court so decided, the miners who work underground in sixteen States, from Missouri to Nevada and from Montana to Texas and Arizona, have been able to change the constitutions of their States so that they work but eight hours a day. They are voters, they have power, they have intelligence and organization; they obtained from the Supreme Court of the United States the famous decision of Holden vs. Hardy, in which it held that it is not only the right but the duty of the State to restrict the hours of those who work underground. In Illinois the women must have unlimited hours because they are not voting citizens....

For twelve years a body of influential women of New York City appeared before the board of estimate and apportionment to ask for the pitiable sum of $18,000 to be appropriated to pay the salaries of eighteen inspectors to look after the welfare of 60,000 women and girls in retail stores but we never got it. One candid friend, Mayor Van Wyck, in listening to our plea, told us the whole trouble. Said he: "Ladies, why do you waste your time year after year in coming before us and asking for this appropriation? You have not a voter in your constituency and you know it and we know it and you know we know it," and they never did give it to us....

A spirited discussion ensued here between Representative Robert L. Henry (Tex.) and Mrs. Kelley as to whether Congress has the power to coerce a State through a Federal Amendment into giving women the right to vote. Representative Edwin Y. Webb (N. C.) asked if the majority of women wanted to vote and she answered that there was not the slightest doubt of it, that as reasoning beings women could not help desiring a full share in the Government under which they live. Representative Goebel (O.) said that at any time man might be called on to uphold the laws and the Constitution and asked: "Do you think that woman is physically and temperamentally fitted to give any return to the Government for any privilege she might have in the exercise of her right as a citizen?" Mrs. Kelley answered: "Yes, I think we have always done it. We pay taxes, we teach the children to obey the laws, we fill their hearts with patriotism, but the principal thing is that we furnish the army at the risk of our own lives. Every time an army has been called for in the United States it has been the sons of American women on the whole who have carried the weapons and every son has been born at the risk of his mother's life. Her service is a very much greater contribution than the two or three years of the son's carrying a gun or perhaps dying of typhoid fever while in the service."

Miss Clay could not keep silent but asked if they realized how much the order of society depended on the teaching and the restraining influence of women, on their power to maintain decency of life, not alone by their presence but also by their high ideals of law and society. "When they are recognized as voting citizens," she said, "their idea of civic duty will reach a still higher point and they will have power to see that it is enforced." Members of the committee began to bring forward the stock misrepresentations about the voting of women in Colorado, which called Mr. Rucker to his feet with statistics to show that women voted in quite as large a proportion as men; that, instead of men's controlling the women's votes, women often controlled the men's; that in the hundreds of cases of election frauds only one or two women had been implicated; that less than 15 per cent. of the so-called "ostracized" women go to the polls.

In closing Chairman Parker said: "I wish to render the thanks of the committee for this large and representative audience, which is almost an American Congress. I am all the more pleased and interested to find such strong presentations by those whom I might call, possibly without offense, 'Daughters of the American Congress,' two of whom claim an acquaintance with this committee that goes back at least as far as any of us. I wish to offer all of you our thanks for the earnest consideration that you seem to have given to the great problems, industrial and social, as well as those of the family, which confront us all, and in comparison with which the political powers and actions of this country are but as nothing. Those who think and work for the good of the family, the home, the workshop, the farm and the school are those to whom the American Congress always owes its thanks."

Although the speakers who addressed these committees represented the very highest of American womanhood; although it was conceded that their arguments had never been exceeded in logic, directness and force; although there was no doubt that they represented a large proportion of the women of the country in the homes, colleges, professions and trades, yet this committee, like that of the Senate, ignored the petitions and the hearing completely and made no report whatever, either favorable or unfavorable.

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