Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/194

 each told of the most effective work within the year, and the discussion which followed gave much practical and helpful information.

At the second afternoon session Dr. Shaw read a number of letters from Governors of the equal suffrage and other States answering favorably an appeal from the California Suffrage Association that they would appoint one or more women to the national commission soon to meet to consider uniform marriage and divorce laws. She had emphasized this necessity in her president's address. The report of Mrs. Florence Kelley, chairman of the Committee on Industrial Problems Affecting Women and Children, was heard with deep interest and feeling. As executive secretary of the National Consumers' League for many years and a close student of labor conditions, she spoke with accurate knowledge when she told of the employment of children. A Baltimore woman in her welcome to the convention had said that Maryland women were satisfied with what they could secure by petition without the ballot, and Mrs. Kelley, referring with fine sarcasm to the "sadly modest results of their petitions," said:

Last night while we slept after our evening meeting there were in Maryland many hundred boys, only nominally fourteen years old, working all night in the glass-works; and here in Baltimore the smallest messenger boys I have ever seen in any city were perfectly free to work all night. No law was broken in either case, for the women of Maryland have not yet by their right of petition brought to the children of the State protection from working all night. Here in this city children must go to school until they are nominally twelve years old but outside of Baltimore and three other counties there is no limit whatever to the work of any child. Moreover, here in Baltimore where the law nominally applies children are free to work at any age if they have a dependent relative or if they are liable to become dependent themselves!

It is five years since the first delegation of women went to Atlanta to ask for legislation on behalf of the working children of Georgia, carrying petitions with them, and they have gone in vain every year since. Each year the number of women joining in the protest has been greater and, alas, the number of little girls under ten years old, who work in Georgia cotton mills all night, has also been greater. The number of working children grows faster than the number of petitioning womenIn New York, where women can vote on school questions in the country only, not in the city, children five, six, seven and eight years old, who ought to be in the kindergarten