Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/220

 hearing was held the morning of the 15th, Miss Anthony's birthday. She was not able to attend, greatly to her own disappointment and that of the older speakers, whose inspiration she had been for so long on these occasions. She had arranged the first one ever held in 1869 and had missed but two in thirty-seven years.

The hearing before the Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage took place in the Marble Room, as usual, Senator Augustus O. Bacon of Georgia in the chair and Dr. Shaw presiding. The speakers were Señorita Huidobro of Chili; Mrs. Elizabeth D. Bacon, president of the Connecticut Suffrage Association; Mrs. Mary Bentley Thomas (Md.); the Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell (N. J.); Miss Anne Fitzhugh Miller (N. Y.); Mrs. Upton, Mrs. Steinem and Mrs. Fessenden.

The hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, the Hon. John J. Jenkins (Wis.), chairman, was in charge of Mrs. Florence Kelley, first vice-president of the association. Mrs. Blankenburg told of the herculean efforts of over 2,000 women at the last November election of Philadelphia. Mrs. Harriet A. Eager spoke of the work of a woman's Committee of Moral Education in Boston where there was no law prohibiting the circulation of any kind of literature. They went to the Legislature for such a law with a petition from 32,000 of the representative women of Massachusetts and stayed there six weeks working for it only to have it refused. She told how the women of the State petitioned fifty-five years for a law giving mothers equal guardianship of their children and pointed out the helpless position of women without political power.

Miss Kate M. Gordon of New Orleans, corresponding secretary of the association, began: "My message this morning was particularly for the southern members of the committee but I shall have to ask others present to carry it to them, as I do not believe any of them are here although seven are members." She protested against the attitude of southern members of Congress toward woman suffrage and expressed the deep resentment of southern women at their classification with the disfranchised, saying that their men more than all others should feel the responsibility of lifting them from their present humiliating po-