Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/668

 long advocated, namely, the granting to women by State Legislatures of the right to vote for Presidential electors. That of Illinois had been persuaded to do this in 1913; they had exercised it in 1916 and its constitutionality had been established by the acceptance of the State's vote in the Electoral College. As soon as the Legislatures of the various States met in 1917 they received from the headquarters of the National American Association in New York the opinion of Chief Justice Walter Clark of North Carolina that the Federal Constitution empowered Legislatures to determine who should vote for Presidential electors, with the authorities and arguments to support it. The presidents of the State suffrage associations affiliated with the National were prepared to take up the matter at once with their Legislatures and as a result those of North Dakota, Nebraska, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Rhode Island conferred this vote on women during the winter. That of Arkansas gave to women full suffrage in all Primaries, equivalent to a vote in regular elections, and that of Vermont gave the Municipal franchise. The following November came the great victory in New York.

This was the situation when Congress met in December, 1917. Mrs. Roessing could not serve longer as chairman of the Congressional Committee and the National Association had appointed Mrs. Maud Wood Park (Mass.), a founder and organizer of the National College Women's Suffrage League, who had taken up the work in March. The association, whose headquarters were in New York City, had enlarged its staff in Washington and taken a large house for this committee and its work. There on April 2 the first woman ever elected to Congress, Miss Jeannette Rankin of Montana, was entertained at breakfast, made a speech from an upper balcony and was escorted to the Capitol by Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, national president, at the head of a cavalcade of decorated automobiles, filled with suffragists. That day the President asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany. The resolution for the Federal Suffrage Amendment was to have been the first introduced in the Senate but the War Resolution took its place and it became Number Two on the calendar. Senator Thomas had given up the chairmanship of the Committee on Woman Suffrage and Senator Andrieus A. Jones