Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/512

Rh of children and the ownership of property. Caleb White's words have in them the just consciousness of their own immortality: "I want my vote to be recorded; not to be judged of here, but to be judged of by coming generations, who, at least, will give to woman the rights which God intended she should have."

The constitutional convention to which reference has been so frequently made in this chapter, assembled November 12, 1872, and as early as the 22d, resolutions relative to women holding school-offices and to the property-rights of women were presented. Numberless petitions for these and full suffrage for women were sent in during the entire sitting of the convention. February 3, 1873, John H. Campbell presented the minority report of the Committee on Suffrage and Elections:

The undersigned, members of the Committee on Suffrage, Election and Representation, dissent from that part of the majority report of said committee, which limits the right of suffrage to male electors. We recommend that the question, "Shall woman exercise the right of suffrage," be submitted by the convention to the qualified electors of this commonwealth, and also upon the same day therewith, to those women of the commonwealth who upon the day of voting shall be of the age of twenty-one years and upwards, and have been residents of the State one year, and in the district where they offered to vote at least sixty days prior thereto; and that if the majority of all the votes cast at said election should be in the affirmative, then the word "male" as a qualification for an elector, contained in section, article on suffrage and election shall be stricken out, and women in this State shall thereafter exercise the right of suffrage, subject only to the restrictions placed upon the male voters.

The amendment for full suffrage was lost by a vote of 75 to 25, with 33 absent, while the amendment making women elegible for school offices was carried by a vote of 60 to 32. The debate by those in favor of the amendment was so ably and eloquently conducted that we would gladly reproduce it, had not all the salient points been so often and so exhaustively presented on the floor of congress, and by some of the members from Pennsylvania.

After the passage of the school law of 1873, it was immediately tested all over the State, rousing opposition and conflict everywhere, but the struggle resulted favorably to women, who now hold many offices to which they were once ineligible. At the first election of school directors in Philadelphia the nomination