Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/845

 suffrage workers in the State. Miss Martha Scott Anderson, on the staff of the Minneapolis Journal, gives efficient help to the cause. Three presidents of the State W. C. T. U., Mesdames Harriet A. Hobart, Susanna M. D. Fry and Bessie Laythe Scoville have been noted as advocates of equal rights.

In February, 1891, at the request of Mrs. Julia B. Nelson, president, and Mrs. A. T. Anderson, chairman of the executive committee of the State association, S. A. Stockwell introduced in the House a bill conferring Municipal Suffrage upon women. Mrs. Nelson spent several weeks at the capital looking after the petitions which came from all parts of the State, interviewing members of the Legislature, distributing literature and trying to get the bill out of the hands of the Committee on Elections, to which it had been referred. After repeated postponements a hearing finally was granted, at which she made a strong plea and showed the good results of woman suffrage in Kansas and Wyoming. The bill was indefinitely postponed in Committee of the Whole, by a vote of 52 yeas, 40 nays.

Among the leaflets placed on the desk of each member was one especially prepared by Mrs. Nelson, entitled Points on Municipal Suffrage. One of its twelve points was this: "If the Legislature has the power to restrict suffrage it certainly has the right to extend it. The Legislature of Minnesota restricted the suffrage which had been given to women by a constitutional amendment, when it granted to the city of St. Paul a charter taking the election of members of the school board entirely out of the hands of women by giving their appointment to the mayor, an officer elected by the votes of men only."