Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/795

 such rules for their meetings as they deemed proper and amend the constitution by a two-thirds vote. The Board should continue to consist of nine officers and eight directors, with the power to summon the Executive Council. This Council should comprise the Board and the presidents and executive members of State auxiliaries as they existed in 1920. The name of the association would be retained.

The abridged constitution was sent to every member of the Council to be voted on.

The Executive Council was called to meet at the headquarters of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in New York at 10:30 a.m., June 22, 1921. for final action on the new constitution. Mrs. Catt presided and Mrs. Lewis J. Cox, State executive member from Indiana, acted as secretary. It was voted that the following sentence he added to the objects of the association: "To remove as far as it is possible all discriminations against women on account of sex." Sixty-six of the eighty-two members of the Council having voted in the affirmative and none in the negative the constitution was declared to be legally adopted.

It is literally true that a nation mourned the death of Anna Howard Shaw. Having lectured from ocean to ocean for several decades she was universally known and there were few newspapers which did not contain a sympathetic editorial on her public and personal life. Telegrams were received at her home from all parts of the world and the letters were almost beyond counting. Friend and foe alike yielded to the unsurpassed charm of her personality and the rare qualities of her mind and heart.

In February, 1919, the Woman's Council of National Defense, of which Dr. Shaw had been chairman since its beginning in April, 1917, dissolved with its duties ended. For the past two years she had practically given up her platform work for woman suffrage. then at its most critical stage with the Federal Amendment pending. Now she had made a large number of speaking engagements for the spring in its behalf and had accepted the invitation of Dr. M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College, to he her guest on a trip to Spain afterwards. Everything was put aside when in May came an urgent request from former President Taft and President Lowell, of Harvard University, to join them in a speaking tour of fourteen States from New Hampshire to Kansas to arouse sentiment in favor of the League of Nations as a means of assuring peace forevermore. She was to speak but once a day but she could not resist the appeals in the different cities and it became four or five times a day. At Indianapolis she made speeches, gave interviews, etc., eight times. The next day at Springfield, Ill., she was stricken with pneumonia and was in the hospital two weeks. By June 12 she was able to leave for her home in Moylan, a residence suburb of Philadelphia, with her beloved friend and companion, Lucy Anthony, who had gone to her and who wrote to anxious