Note 95 — Chapter XLII

Mrs. Jane Marsh Parker, a newspaper woman of Rochester, attempted to organize a club there and secure a petition in opposition to the amendment. Her efforts evidently did not meet with marked success for, in a letter to the New York Evening Post, she says, "In offering the 'protest' for signatures, quality rather than quantity has been considered." That prince of editors, Joseph O'Connor, at that time in charge of the Rochester Post-Express, gave the lady a delicious dressing down in an editorial beginning: "What is 'quality'?" and ending: "Probably she means no more by the offensive words 'quality' and 'quantity' than this—that she has secured to the protest only the signatures of a few representative women, no better and no worse than many of their opponents. Such an interpretation saves the statement from being insulting; but unhappily very many women in Rochester give it a different interpretation."