Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/411

 

The Thirty-second annual convention of the suffrage association, held in Washington, D. C., Feb. 8-14, 1900, possessed two features of unusual interest — it closed the century and it marked the end of Miss Susan B. Anthony's presidency of the organization. The latter event attracted wide attention. Sketches of her career and of the movement whose* history was almost synonymous with her own, appeared in most of the leading newspapers and magazines of the country; special reporters were sent to Washington, and the celebration of her eightieth birthday at the close of the convention was in the nature of a national event. On the opening morning the Post said in a leading editorial:

Washington entertains the National Woman Suffrage Association from year to year with entire complacency, apart from any political prejudice, without any sense of partisanship and in a spirit of keen interest in the great propaganda which is being thus conducted. There was a time, not so very long ago, when the plea for suffrage was ridiculed far and wide; but the women have worked ahead undaunted by the scoffings of the world, until they have actually won the battle in such a marked degree as to give them unbounded assurance for the future. . ..

The world is beginning to take a new view of this suffrage question. The advent of women into the professions and even the trades, their appearance as wage-earners in virtually every branch of modern activity, and their success in these various enterprises which they have entered, have worked a reform even more significant than the absolute and universal grant of the suffrage would have been. It can not be denied by men to-day that the women have become economic factors of marked importance, and this appreciation has had a great influence in softening the sentiments of the male population toward the suffragists.

One of the foremost arguments formerly urged against the extension of the suffrage to women was that it would be harmful to woman's moral nature to thrust her into contact with the rough conditions of campaigning. The women answered that their entrance would perhaps redeem the immoral character of the politics of many communities. In the minds of impartial observers the