Page:Woman Triumphant.djvu/300

 1917, those of South Dakota, Michigan and Oklahoma in 1918. Presidential suffrage was secured in 1917 in North Dakota, Nebraska, and Rhode Island, and in 1919 in Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri and Maine.

For many years efforts had also been made by the friends of Woman Suffrage to induce Congress to act on the so-called "Susan Anthony Amendments to the Constitution," reading as follows:

"Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power by appropriate legislation to enforce the provisions of this article."

In 1914 the Senate again voted these amendments down by 11 votes. Again, in September, 1918, it was rejected by two votes, and again in February, 1919, by one vote. The House voted upon the resolution three times, rejecting it in 1915 by 78 votes, passing it in 1918 by a margin of one vote, and again, on May 21st, 1919, by a vote of 304 to 89. The fight ended on June 4, 1919, when the Senate adopted the resolution by a vote of 56 to 25.

"The credit of having won this victory," so the "New York American" said in an editorial, "belongs chiefly to the resourceful women of the land who have, for generations, been pushing this issue to the front in spite of stupid opposition and almost as stupid indifference.

"Liberal-minded men, a few in the early days, many more recently, have helped. But, primarily, it is a woman's victory, and no man will begrudge the acknowledgment. Equal partners in the economic and social life of the nation, American women will now be equal sharers in its political life and in the responsibilities which this will involve.

"The joy of triumph will be of brief duration. The period of responsibility will be long and trying. But the women of America will certainly meet it equally with the men, and if they do that the men will have no just basis of complaint. Political rule by men has been full of blunders. Women, too, will blunder, but they will not be likely to make the same kind of blunders that men make. The blunders that men make will tend to be corrected by the superior insight and intuition of women; and probably in time the blunders to which women will be prone will have counteraction by the men. So instead of the blundering being increased by the widened circle of electoral responsibility it is more likely to be lessened, for the cure for the ills of democracy is always more democracy.

"Anyhow, the change is here. It is world-wide. It comes as a resultant of increased freedom and it presages more freedom."