Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/345

 believe that election day administers to each of us the sacrament of citizenship, and we go, most of us, prayerfully and thankfully to partake in this outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual

The first time I went to vote I was out of the house just nine minutes. The second time I took my little girl along to school, stopped in to vote, and then went down town and did my marketing; and J was gone twenty minutes. While I was casting my vote the men gave my little one a flower. They always decorate the polling-places with flowers now, for they know women love beauty.

The tone of political conventions has improved since suffrage was granted to women. So has the character of the candidates.: There is no character-builder like responsibility. Every woman's club in the State has been turned into a study club, and the women are examining public questions for themselves. This is one of the best results of equal suffrage.:

When women obtained the ballot they wanted to know about public affairs, and so they asked their husbands at home (every woman wants to believe that her husband knows everything}, and the husbands had to inform themselves in order to answer their wives' questions. Equal suffrage has not only educated women and elevated the primaries, but it has given back to the State the services of her best men, large numbers of whom had got into the habit of neglecting their political duties.

Mrs. Emmeline B. Wells said in describing the conditions in Utah:

After the ballot was given to women the men soon came to us and asked us to help them. We divided on party lines but not rigidly so. We helped not only the good men and women of our own party, but those of the other. If they put up a Republican or a Democrat who is not fit for the position, the women vote against him. In all the work I do for the Republicans, I never denounce the Democrats.

This year the men were more willing to have us go to the primaries than we were to go. Even the women who had not wished for suffrage voted. I do not mind going to the primaries. I am not afraid of men—not the least in the world. I have often been on committees with men. I don't think it has hurt me at all, and I have learned a great deal. They have always been very good to me. We must stand up for the men. We could not do without them. Certainly we could not have settled Utah without them. They built the bridges and killed the bears; but I think the women worked just as hard, in their way.

When Mrs. Mell C. Woods came forward to speak for Idaho the audience arose and received her with cheers and the waving of handkerchiefs. She brought letters of greeting from most of