NATIONAL-AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1897.
275
Do you say that whenever all women wish the ballot they will have it? That time will never come. Not all of any class of men ever wanted to vote till the ballot was put into their hands: When the first woman desired to study medicine, not one school would admit her. Since that time, only half a century ago, 25,000 women have been admitted to the practice of medicine. If a popular vote had been necessary, not one of them would yet have her diploma. We have gained these advantages because we did not have to ask society for them. If woman suffrage were granted in Iowa, women would soon wish to vote, and every home would become a forum of education. ....
There never had been so many deaths in the ranks as during the past year. The following were among the names presented by Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby as those whom the association would ever hold in reverent memory:
Hannah Tracy Cutler of Illinois, former president of the American Association and one of the earliest and most self-sacrificing of woman suffrage lecturers; Sarah B. Cooper of California, auditor of this association, whose labors for the enfranchisement of the women of the Pacific coast will be remembered and honored equally with her beneficent work in founding and sustaining free kindergartens, and in whatever promoted justice, truth and mercy, so that on the day of her funeral all the flags in San Francisco were placed at half-mast; Mary Grew, who began her work for freedom as corresponding secretary of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1834, one of the founders of the New Century Club of Philadelphia, and of the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association, of which she was president for twenty-three years; Elizabeth McClintock Phillips, who in 1848 signed the call for the first convention which demanded the ballot for women; J. Elizabeth Jones of New York, a pioneer in anti-slavery and woman suffrage; Judge E. T. Merrick of New Orleans, whose home was ever open to the woman suffrage lecturers in that section, and who by his eminent position as Chief Justice of Louisiana for many years, Sustained his wife in work which in earlier days but for him would have been impossible; Eliza Murphy of New Jersey, who bequeathed five hundred dollars to this association; Harriet Beecher Stowe of Connecticut, who, although the apostle of freedom in another field, yet held as firmly and expressed as steadfastly her allegiance to the cause of woman suffrage; Dr. Caroline B. Winslow, the earliest woman physician in the District of Columbia, intrepid as a journalist, successful in practice, a leader in many lines of reform; Maria G. Porter of Rochester, N. Y.; Sarah Hussey Southwick of Massachusetts, a worker in the cause of liberty for more than sixty years; Kate Field of Washington, D. C.; Gov. Frederick T. Greenhalge of Massachusetts; Dr. Hiram Corson of Pennsylvania, who stood for the full opportunities of women in medicine, and se-
