Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/794

 Mrs. Clara T. Leonard and Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney. Mrs. Howe, Lucy Stone, Mr. Blackwell, Col. L. Edwin Dudley and Miss Tobey replied. Chester W. Kingsley, chairman of the legislative committee, said that as no petitions against suffrage had been sent in he would ask all the remonstrants present to rise. Not a person rose, but the men standing in the aisles tried to sit down. Mr. Lord suggested that the remonstrants were averse to notoriety, whereupon Senator Kingsley asked all in favor to rise, and the great audience rose in a body.

Among the petitions sent in this year for Municipal Suffrage was one signed by President Helen A. Shafer of Wellesley College, a number of the professors and about seventy students who were over twenty-one. The committee reported in favor of both Municipal and License Suffrage. The former was discussed March 12 and lost by a vote, including pairs, of 90 yeas, 139 nays. The Woman's Journal said: "Although not a majority, the weight of character, talent and experience was overwhelmingly in favor of the bill, as is shown by the fact that the chairmen of thirty of the House Committees, out of a total of forty-one, were recorded in its favor."

License Suffrage passed the Senate, 15 yeas, 12 nays, after a long fight, and was defeated in the House, 101 yeas, 42 nays.

1890 — Suffrage petitions were presented and also petitions asking that fathers and mothers be made equal guardians of their. children; that contracts between husbands and wives be legally valid; and that a widow be allowed to stay more than forty days in the house of her deceased husband without paying rent. All these were refused.

On March 12 a hearing was given to the petitioners for suffrage. Mrs. Stone, Mr. Blackwell, the Rev. J. W. Hamilton, Mrs. Ellen B. Dietrick, the Rev. Frederick A. Hinckley, Mr. Crane of Woburn and Miss Alice Stone Blackwell spoke in behalf of the W. S. A., and Mrs. Susan S. Fessenden, Mrs. Amelia C. Thorpe and Miss Tobey in behalf of the W. C. T. U. Mr. Ropes, Dr. A. P. Peabody and J. B. Wiggin spoke against woman suffrage. Mr. Lord asked that the hearing be extended for