Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/635

 Among many who openly espouse woman suffrage are ex-Gov. and Mrs. John W. Hoyt of Wyoming, now living in Washington, Mrs. John B. Henderson, Mrs. A. L. Barber, Mrs. Judith Ellen Foster, president of the Woman's Republican Association of the United States, and Miss Clara Barton, founder and president of the National Red Cross Society; to whom might be added hosts of others.


 * The suffrage association has been largely instrumental in securing most of the District legislation in favor of women, as the records of the past twenty years will show. What is regarded as the most important . achievement of this nature since 1884 is the passage by Congress, in 1896, of the Married Woman's Property Rights Bill.

The removal of the disabilities of wives had been agitated for a number of years by the association. In 1893 a bill for this purpose, drafted by one of its members, Miss Emma M. Gillett, attorney-at-law, was passed by the Senate. When it reached the House it went through the usual stages, was tossed about from: one committee to another and deferred and delayed in the most exasperating manner. It was championed by Miss Gillett, however, with an unswerving courage and fidelity which never allowed it to be forgotten or neglected, and she was treated always with the utmost courtesy when appearing before congressional committees.

In 1894 Mrs. Ellen Spencer Mussey, always an ardent suffragist, as chairman of the committee on legislation for the District Federation of Women's Clubs, began a vigorous prosecution of this bill before Congress. Miss Gillett and Mrs. Mussey were ably assisted by Mrs. Belva A. Lockwood, Mrs. Lucia B. Blount, Mrs. M. E. Coues and Mrs. Mary S. Lockwood.

At this time married women had no legal right to hold property, and in most respects the District laws remained about as arbitrary as they were in the reign of King Charles II. A mother had no right by law to her own child, the father having legal sanction to dispose of the offspring even before it was born. At the time this committee was urging Congress to pass the bill, the public was horrified by a notorious case in the courts of the District in which a profligate father, who had never done