1914 — Business session, convention of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage

From the very beginning of our work in Washington, we have followed one consistent policy from which we have not departed a single moment. We began our work with the coming in of the present Congress and immediately went to the Party which was in control of the situation and asked it to act. We determined to get the amendment through the 63d Congress or to make it very clear who had kept it from going through. Now, as has been shown, the Democrats have been in control of all branches of the Government and they are therefore responsible for the non-passage of our measure.

The point is, first, who is our enemy and then how shall that enemy be attacked.

We are all, I think, agreed that it is the Democratic Party which is responsible for the blocking of the suffrage amendment. Again and again, that Party has gone on record through the action of its leaders, its caucus, and its committee so that an impregnable case has been built up against it. We now lay before you a plan to meet the present situation.

We propose going into the nine suffrage states and appealing to the women to use their votes to secure the franchise for the women of the rest of the country. All of these years we have worked primarily in the states. Now the time has come, we believe, when we can really go into national politics and use the nearly four million votes that we have to win the vote for the rest of us. Now that we have four million women voters, we need no longer continue to make our appeal simply to men. The struggle in England has gotten down to a physical fight. Here our fight is simply a political one. The question is whether we are god enough politicians to take four million votes and organize them and use them so as to win the vote for the women who are still disfranchised.

We want to attempt to organize the women’s vote. Our plan is to go out to these nine states and there appeal to all the women voters to withdraw their support from the Democrats nationally until the Democratic Party nationally ceases to block suffrage. We would issue an appeal signed by influential women of the east addressed to the women voters as a whole asking them to use their vote this one time in the national election against the Democratic Party throughout the whole nine states. Every one of those states with one exception is a doubtful state. Going back over a period of fourteen years each state, except Utah, has supported first one party and then another. Here are nine states which politicians are thinking about and in these nine states we have this great power. If we ask those women in the nine suffrage states as a group to withhold their support from this party as a group which is opposing us, it will mean that votes will be turned. Suppose the Party saw votes falling away all over the country because of their action on the Trust question — they would change their attitude on trust legislation. If they see them falling away because of their attitude on suffrage they will change their attitude on suffrage. When we have once affected the result in a national election, no party will trifle with suffrage any longer.

We, of course, are a little body to undertake this — but we have to begin. We have not very much money; there are not many of use to go out against the great Democratic Party. Perhaps this time we won’t be able to do so very much, though I know we can do a great deal, but if the Party leaders see that some votes have been turned they will know that we have at last realized this power that we possess and they will know that by 1916 we will have it organized. The mere announcement of the fact that the suffragists of the east have gone out to the west with this appeal will be enough to make every man in Congress sit up and take notice.

This last week one Congressman from a suffrage state came to us and asked us if we would write just one letter to say what he had done in Congress to help us. He said that one letter might determine the election in his district. This week the man who is running for the Senatorial election in another suffrage state came to us and asked us to go out and help him in his state — asked us simply to announce that he had been our friend. Now if our help is valued to this extent, our opposition will be feared in like degree.

Our plan is this: To send at least two women to each of those nine states. We would put one woman at the center who would attend to the organizing, the publicity, and the distribution of literature. We would have literature printed showing what the Democratic Party has done with regard to suffrage in the 63rd Congress. We would have leaflets printed from the eastern women appealing to the western women for help, and we would have leaflets issued showing how much the enfranchised woman herself needs the federal suffrage amendment because most important matters are becoming national in their organization and can only be dealt with by national legislation. We could reach every home in every one of those nine states with our literature, without very great expense. One good woman at the center could make this message, this appeal, from eastern women, known to the whole state. The other woman would attend to the speaking and in six weeks could easily cover all the large towns of the state.

This is the plan that we are considering, and that we are hoping to put through. We would be very much interested to hear what you think about it and want of course to have your cooperation in carrying it through.

Source: The Suffragist, September 12, 1914.

Also: Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism, eds., Dawn Keetley and John Pettegrew (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997) pp. 180-181.