Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 6.djvu/632

 6l6 HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE charter of Lookout Mountain so as to give the women Municipal suffrage. The prime mover was Attorney James Anderson and Mayor P. F. Jones, and the other commissioners voted unani- mously for it. Mrs. Ford, the State president, a lifelong resident, had the previous year registered there in order to call attention to the injustice of "taxation without representation" but her name was removed from the records. Early in 1917 Mrs. Ford called on President Wilson at the White House and asked him to send a message to the Legislature in favor of the pending Presidential suffrage bill, which he did. [Mrs. Ford's thorough account of the fortunes of this bill through the Legislatures of 1917 and 1919 is so largely covered by the report in Part I of this chapter that it is omitted here.] 1 After the law was enacted Mrs. Kenny and Mrs. Kimbrough appeared at the office of the county trustee and made a tender of the amount due as their poll tax. He refused to receive it, acting under instructions from the county attorney who declared that the laws of the State exempted women. They then filed a bill in the Chancery Court of Davidson county asking a decision. Chancel- lor Newman dismissed it with an opinion in part as follows : "It will be observed by Section 686 of the code that those liable for poll taxes are males between the ages of 21 and 50 years on the loth day of January the year the assessment is laid. Women were not liable Jan. 10, 1919, for poll tax and plainly it was never the purpose or intent of Section 1220 that a qualified voter as a condition precedent to the right to vote should produce satisfac- tory evidence that he had paid a poll tax assessed against him for which he was not liable. . . . All women between the ages of 21 and 50 years, otherwise qualified as voters, are entitled to vote in the November election of 1920 without paying a poll tax for 1919." The case was taken to the Supreme Court, which ruled that women did not have to pay in order to vote that year. RATIFICATION. When the Legislature of Washington in March, 1920, ratified the Federal Woman Suffrage Amendment making the 35th, there came an absolute stop. The southeastern 1 The gold pen used by Governor Roberts in signing the bill was one used by Dr. John W. Wester when drafting the first anti-liquor bill ever introduced in the Tennessee Legislature, in December, 1841. With it also Governor Rye signed the Lookout Moun- tain Suffrage Bill. It belongs to Mrs. Ford, grand-daughter of Dr. Wester.