Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/432

 

CHAPTER XIV.

The Forty-sixth annual convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association had the honor and privilege of holding its sessions in Representatives' Hall at the State Capitol in Nashville, Tenn., Nov. 12-17, 1914. Part of Call: Our task will be to formulate judgment on those great issues of the day which nearly concern women; to choose the leaders who during the coming year are to guide the fortunes of our cause; and finally, to deliberate how the whole national body may on the one hand best give aid and succor to the States working for their own enfranchisement and on the other press for federal action in behalf of the women of the nation at large. . ..

Since the last convention met all the horror of a great war has fallen upon the civilized world. The hearts of thousands of women have been torn by the death and wounds of those they bore, of those they love, yet never has their will and power to help been greater, never man's need of such help been more clearly seen. We, who are spared the anguish of war, well understand that as weight is given in the world's affairs to the voice of women, moved as men are not by all the tragic waste of battles, the chances of such slaughter must perpetually diminish. Now is the time when all things point to the violence that rules the world, now is the very time to press our claim to a share in the guidance of our country's fortunes, to urge that woman's vision must second and ratify that of man. Let us then in convention assembled kindle with the thought that, as we consider methods for the political enfranchisement of our sex, our wider purpose is to free women and to enable their conception of life in all its aspects to find expression. . . . Let us set a fresh seal upon the great new loyalty of woman to woman; let our response be felt in the deep tide of fellowship and understanding among all women which today is rising around the world.

Dr. Anna Howard Shaw was in the chair and it was officially and cordially welcomed in the name of the city by Mayor Hilary Howse; of the State Suffrage Association by its president, Mrs. L. Crozier-French, and of the Nashville Equal Suffrage League by the president, Mrs. Guilford Dudley. As Dr. Shaw rose to respond she was presented by Miss Louise Lindsey, vice-regent of the Ladies' Hermitage Association, with a gavel made from the wood of a hickory tree planted by General Jackson at the Hermitage, his home.