Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/588

 months after the one of 1917. As it was the intention to launch the organization of Women Voters it was decided to meet in the central part of the country and the invitation of St. Louis was accepted. Call: The National American Woman Suffrage Association calls its State auxiliaries, through their elected delegates, to meet in annual convention at St. Louis, Statler Hotel, March 24 to March 29, 1919, inclusive.

In 1869, Wyoming led the world by the grant of full suffrage to its women. The convention will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of this event. In 1869, the National and the American Woman Suffrage Associations were organized—to be combined twenty years later into the National American. The convention will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the organization which without a pause has carried forward the effort to secure the enfranchisement of women. As a fitting memorial to a half-century of progress the association invites the women voters of the fifteen full suffrage States to attend this anniversary and there to join their forces in a League of Women Voters, one of whose objects shall be to speed the suffrage campaign in our own and other countries.

The convention will express its pleasure with suitable ceremonials that since last we met the women of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, Canada and Germany have received the vote, but it will make searching inquiry into the mysterious causes which deny patriotic, qualified women of our Republic a voice in their own government while those of monarchies and erstwhile monarchies are honored with political equality. Suffrage delegates, women voters, there is need of more serious counsel than in any preceding year. It is not you but the nation that has been dishonored by the failure of the 65th Congress to pass the Federal Suffrage Amendment. Let us inquire together; let us act together.

The Report of the annual convention of 1901, with which this volume begins, filled 130 printed pages; the Report of 1919 filled 322, which makes a complete account of its proceedings impracticable. Their character had been changing from year to year and at this convention it was almost transformed. At the public evening meetings there were no longer eloquent pleas and arguments for the ballot and the daytime sessions were not devoted to discussions of the many phases of the work. Now there was business and political consideration of the best and quickest methods of bringing the movement to an end and the most effective use that could be made of the suffrage already so largely won. It was a little difficult for some of the older workers to accustom themselves to the change, which deprived