Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/381

 man; Brandegee (Conn.); Bourne (Ore.); Brown (Neb.); Johnston (Ala.); Wetmore (R. I.). Senator John D. Works of California, who had introduced the resolution in the Senate, presented Dr. Anna Howard Shaw as "one of the best known and most distinguished of those connected with the movement for the enfranchisement of women." As she took charge of the hearing she said in part:

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Committee, this is the forty-third year that the women suffragists have been represented by delegations appointed by the national body to speak in behalf of resolutions which have been introduced to eliminate from the Constitution of the United States in effect the word "male," to eliminate all disqualifications for suffrage on account of sex. The desire of our association is not so much to put on record the opinions of this committee in regard to woman suffrage as to plead with it to give a favorable report, so that the question can come before the Congress, be discussed on its merits and then submitted to the various States for ratification. The Federal Constitution guarantees to every State a republican form of government—that is, a government in which the laws are enacted by representatives elected by the people— and we claim that it has violated its own principle in refusing to protect women in their right to select their representatives, so we are asking for no more than that the Constitution shall be carried out by the U. S. Government. As the president of the National Suffrage Association, I stand here in the place of a woman who gave sixty years of her life in advocacy of that grand principle for which so many of our ancestors died, Miss Susan B. Anthony. There is not a woman here today who was at the first hearing, nor a woman alive today who was among those that struggled in the beginning for this fundamental right of every citizen. I now introduce Mrs. Susan Walker Fitzgerald of Massachusetts. It has been said that women cannot fight. Mrs. Fitzgerald's father was an Admiral of the Navy and if she can not fight her father could.

Mrs, Fitzgerald spoke at length in the interest of the home and the family, showing the evolution that had taken place until now "the Government touches upon every phase of our home life and largely dictates its conditions while at the same time the woman is held responsible for them and is working with her hands tied behind her back and she asks the vote in order to do her woman's work better." Mrs. James Lees Laidlaw of New York spoke beautifully of the desire of the mothers of the rising generation that their daughters should not have to enter the hard struggle for the suffrage and pictured the need for the high-