But not once during the campaign did the party speakers or newspapers apply this declaration to the women citizens of the United States.
In 1896, when the prospects of success seemed certain enough to justify the party in assuming some additional "load," the women made the most impassioned appeal to the committee at the St. Louis convention, with the following remarkable result:
A whole plank to exploit Republicanism and a small splinter to cajole the women, who had not asked for the suffrage to "rescue" or to defeat any political party!
No Democratic national platform ever has recognized so much as the existence of women, in all its grandiloquent declarations of the "rights of the masses," the "equality of the people," the "sovereignty of the individual" and the "powers inherent in a democracy."
The Populists at the beginning of their career sounded the slogan, "Equal rights to all, special privileges to none," and many believed that at length the great party had arisen which was to secure to women the equal right in the suffrage which thus far had been the special privilege of men. Full of joy and hope there went to the first national convention of this party, held in Omaha, July 4, 1892, Susan B. Anthony and the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw, president and vice-president-at-large of the National Suffrage Association. To their amazement they were refused permission even to appear before the Committee on Resolutions, a courtesy which by this time was usually extended at
all political conventions. The platform contained no woman suffrage plank and no reference to the question except that in the long preamble occurred this sentence:
