Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/1174

 chosen. A scheme was arranged for the purpose. On the ground that she was a woman, the election officers at a local election refused the vote of Mrs. Nevada Bloomer, a saloon-keeper's wife, who was opposed to suffrage. They accepted the votes of all the other women. She made a test case by bringing suit against them. In the ordinary course of things, the case would not have come up till after the election of the constitutional convention. But cases for the restoration of personal rights may be advanced on the docket, and Mrs. Bloomer's ostensible object was the restoration of her personal rights, though her real object was to deprive all women of theirs. Her case was put forward on the docket and hurried to a decision.

The Supreme Court [George Turner and Wm. G. Langford] this time pronounced the woman suffrage law unconstitutional on the ground that tt was beyond the power of a Territorial Legislature to enfranchise women. The Organic Act of the Territory said that at the first Territorial election persons with certain qualifications should vote, and at subsequent elections such persons as the Territorial Legislature might enfranchise. But the court took the ground that in giving the Legislature the right to regulate suffrage, Congress did not at the time have it specifically in mind that they might enfranchise women, and that therefore they could not do so.(!) The suffragists wanted to have the case appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, but Mrs. Bloomer refused.

The women themselves being prevented from voting, their friends were notable to overcome the combined “machines” of both political parties, and the intense opposition of all the vicious and disorderly elements, at that time very large on the Pacific Coast. A convention opposed to equal suffrage was elected, and framed a constitution excluding women. A friend of the present writer talked with many of the members while the convention was in session. He says almost every lawyer in that body acknowledged, in private conversation, that the decision by which the women had been disfranchised was illegal. “But,” they said, “the women had set the community by the ears on the temperance question, and we had to get rid of them.” One politician said, frankly, “Women are natural mugwumps, and I hate a mugwump.”

The convention, however, yielded to the pressure sufficiently to submit to the men a separate amendment proposing to strike out the word “male” from the suffrage clause of the new State constitution, but no woman was allowed to vote on it. In November, 1889, this amendment was lost, the same elements that defeated it in the convention defeating it at the polls, with the addition of a great influx of foreign immigrants.

This is the most democratic of organizations. Its sole object is to secure for women citizens protection in their right to vote. The general officers are nominated by an informal secret ballot, no one being put in nomination. The three persons receiving the highest number of votes are considered the nominees and the election is decided by secret ballot. Those entitled to vote are three delegates-at-large for each auxiliary State society and one delegate in addition for every one hundred members of each State auxiliary; the State presidents and State members of the National Executive Committee; the general officers of the association; the chairmen of standing committees. The delegates present from each State cast the full vote to which that State is entitled. The vote is taken in the same way upon any other question whenever the delegates present from five States request it. In other cases