Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 6.djvu/225

 ridge, chairman, and Mrs. Hubbard, vice-chairman. The resolution was presented in the Senate by Thomas A. Combs and in the House by W. C. G. Hobbs, both of Lexington and both Democrats. It passed the Senate by 26 ayes, 8 noes. In the House it was held in the committee and although three test votes were made in an effort to bring it out and a majority was obtained on one of them, a two-thirds vote was necessary and it was not allowed to come to a vote. No Republican in the Senate gave an adverse vote and only three in the House. Governor A. O. Stanley (Democrat) used the full strength of the administration, even invoking the aid of the Kentucky delegation in Congress, to kill the measure in the House.

This year the Republican and Progressive State conventions endorsed woman suffrage, the Democrats refusing to do so. At the national Republican convention in Chicago the Kentucky member of the Resolutions Committee voted for the suffrage plank in its platform. At the national Democratic convention in St. Louis all the twenty-six delegates, on account of the "unit ruling," cast their votes for the State's rights suffrage plank.

During 1917 suffrage work was displaced by war work, of which Kentucky suffragists did a large share. They were asked to raise $500 for the Women's Oversea Hospitals of the National Association and more than doubled the quota by the able management of Mrs. Samuel Castleman of Louisville. Under the, direction of Mrs. E. L. Hutchinson of Lexington a plan to raise money for an ambulance to be named in honor of Miss Laura Clay, the pioneer suffragist, was successfully carried through.

In 1918 for the first time there was every reason to believe that a resolution to submit a State amendment would pass the Legislature, but a majority of the State suffrage board voted to conform to the desire of the National Association to avoid State campaigns and concentrate on the Federal Amendment and no resolution was presented.

At the State convention, held March 11, 1919, resolutions were adopted calling upon all Kentucky members of Congress to vote for the Federal Suffrage Amendment; calling on the Legislature to ratify this amendment, when passed, at the first opportunity and asking it to enact a law giving to women a vote