Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/428

 paper. You may say for me that the statement is wholly without foundation and that woman suffrage has not proved to be a failure in my State."

Mrs. McCulloch referred to the "poor, misguided working girl" among the "antis" who said wage-earning women didn't want the vote and asked Miss Rose Winslow, a prominent working woman, to read the resolution demanding the suffrage which was passed by the National Women's Trade Union League. She did so and in a few sentences scored one of the flowery anti-suffrage speakers, saying: "I have not had any choice as to whether I should walk on the Bowery or on Fifth Avenue, because I walk nowhere in the sunshine. I am one of the millions of women who work in the shadow of these women of whom men speak as though they are the only ones in the country, in order that they may parade the avenue in all the beauty and glory of everything brought from all over the world for their decoration, but I do not come with merely my personal opinion and experience. I have the opinion of the organized working women of America in convention assembled. These women represent all the trades that women work at in the United States and they have passed this resolution demanding the ballot without a dissenting vote."

Mrs. Emma S. South, wife of former Representative Oliver South of Illinois, said the opponents had given alleged facts that would require weeks of investigation to prove or disprove. She answered their favorite assertion that women had more influence without the vote by convincing illustrations of what the women of Chicago had been able to accomplish with even their partial suffrage, retaining Mrs. Ella Flagg Young as superintendent of schools, for instance. She showed how in the appointment of the new school board the fact that their power had been doubled and trebled by the recently granted Municipal vote was manifest. Mrs. William Kent, after showing why the women of California had asked for the ballot, gave her time to Miss Helen Todd, who said in the course of an impassioned speech: "My conversion to suffrage came through six years of work as factory inspector in Illinois. I have always thought that the reason there could be such a thing as women 'antis' was simply that the screen of ignorance and the comfort and protection of home