Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/83

 the lives of America's alien citizen, should have stirred the warm hearts of America's cultured womanhood as it has done, and shown them the way to help their less fortunate fellow-creatures. The campaign for the political franchise in those still voteless States is only part of a great wave of passion for humanity and of aspiration and idealism which is passing over the United States and which promises to make it a new world indeed.

The State of Wyoming granted the franchise to women in 1869, Colorado in 1893, Utah and Idaho in 1896, Washington in 1910, California in 1911, and Kansas, Oregon, and Arizona in 1912. It is a significant fact that the last Presidential election campaign, for the first time in the history of politics, drew great hosts of women into the service of the several candidates for the high office of President. Ex-president Roosevelt, the nominee of the new Progressive Party, and a one-time opponent of votes for women, made woman suffrage a part of his party's programme, and was supported by a host of splendid women, headed by America's most famous woman citizen, Miss Jane Addams, of Chicago.

Nothing would excuse the dismissal of this great Republic with a few words only about the position of its women, except the confession that the task of describing the feminist movement in each of the forty-eight States