Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/755

 convention in Chicago and a plank was drawn up. Miss Hay, Mrs. Richard Edwards, Mrs. Maud Wood Park, Mrs. George Gellhorn, Miss Ada Bush and Mrs. Pattie Ruffner Jacobs constituted a committee to present this plank to the Resolutions Committee of which Senator James E. Watson (Ind.) was chairman. Miss Hay made the principal speech and Mrs. Gellborn and Miss Bush spoke briefly. A sub-committee of the Resolutions Committee accepted the plank which was given out to the press on June 10. It read:

As soon as this appeared in the Chicago papers, members of the Connecticut delegation rushed to leaders of the Platform Committee and protested that it was a gross insult to their Governor, Marcus H. Holcomb, and they wanted the wording changed. Accordingly the offending sentence was revised and in the plank adopted by the convention read: "We earnestly hope that Republican Legislatures in States which have not yet acted upon the suffrage amendment will ratify it, to the end that all the women of the nation of voting age may participate in the election of 1920 so important to the welfare of our country."

Republican women in attendance at the convention united in a demand for a fifty-fifty recognition inside of the party. They asked for a woman vice-chairman of the National Republican Committee and for men and women to be represented on it in equal numbers. The Committee on Rules, responding to this demand, changed the rules for representation and provided that seven members be added to the National Executive Committee, all to be women. With this concession the women had to be content.

The Democratic National Convention met in San Francisco June 28-July 5. Prior to the convention the National Committee had yielded to the pressure from the suffrage leaders and Demo-