Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/1028

 part in the defeat of the strong lobby that sought to abolish the existing State Board of Public Examiners, which prevents incompetents from practicing medicine. She introduced a bill compelling the State to educate the deaf, mute and blind; another requiring seats for women employes; what was known as the Medical Bill, by which all the sanitary measures of the State are regulated and put in operation; and another providing for the erection of a hospital for the State School of the Deaf, Dumb and Blind, carrying with it the necessary appropriation. All the bills introduced or championed by Dr. Cannon became laws. She served on the Committees on Public Health, Apportionment. Fish and Game, Banks and Banking, Education, Labor, etc.

At the close of their second term the Senate presented her with a handsome silver-mounted album containing the autographs of all the Senators and employes. She had drawn what is known as the long term, and at its close she was chosen to present a handsome gavel to the president of the Senate in behalf of the members. Thus far she has been the only woman Senator.

In 1899 Mrs. Alice Merrill Horne (Dem.), the third woman elected to the House, was appointed chairman of the State University Land Site Committee, to which was referred the bill authorizing the State to take advantage of the congressional land grant offered for expending $301,000 in buildings and providing for the removal of the State University to the new site. At a jubilee in recognition of the gift, held by the faculty and students, at which the Governor and Legislature were guests, Mrs. Horne was the only woman to make a speech and was introduced by President Joseph T. Kingsbury in most flattering terms for the work she had done in behalf of education. She championed the Free Scholarship Bill giving one hundred annual Normal School appointments, each for a term of four years; and one creating a State Institute of Art for the encouragement of the fine arts and for art in public school education and in manufactures, for an annual exhibition, a course of lectures and a State art collection, both of which passed. She was a member of committees on Art, Education, Rules and Insane Asylum; was the only member sent to visit the State Insane Asylum, going by direction of the Speaker of the House, as a committee of one, to surprise