Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/221

 sition. Mrs. Ella S. Stewart, president of the Illinois Suffrage Association, based her argument on simple justice, and said in conclusion: "Your power is absolute and your responsibility correspondingly great. Humiliating as it is for me to beg for what is mine from strangers, I would a thousand times rather be a defrauded mendicant than to hold in my hand the rights, the destiny and the happiness of millions of human beings and have the heart to deny their just claims."

Mrs. Mary Kenney O'Sullivan (Mass.) spoke "as one representing 3,000,000 women who have been forced out of the home through necessity,' and said in the course of her strong speech: I know that the working women of this country are not receiving the highest wages because they have not a vote. Right here in Washington, in your big bindery of the Government, a trade to which I gave the larger part of my life, the women who do equal work with the men do not receive equal pay. The Government more than any other employer has taken advantage of women of my class because they have not a voteThe workmen, more than any other men, even more than those who are supposed to be statesmen, have seen the necessity for women to have a vote. Ever since 1890 the convention of the American Federation of Labor has unanimously adopted a resolution favoring woman suffrage. I do not believe that any one will deny that the workingmen are the thinking men of the country. I am asking you, in the name of the women I represent at least, to do for us what our working brothers are trying to do—give us our rights."

Mrs. Lucia Ames Mead said in the course of a long address: "The man who talks about home today as if it still gave ample opportunity for woman's productive activity as it once did, is talking about a condition which is as obsolete as the conditions before we had railroads and telegraphs. Woman's educational opportunities and productive capacity are so altered as to require her political status to be alteredThere is a class of women who do not need to earn their living and have a large leisure. They are not idle, they are as active as fireflies, but they are not obliged to be productive as every human being should beThey have more time than men to study and to apply the