Wood Swift, Mrs. Sarah Knox Goodrich, Mrs. Mary S. Sperry, Mrs. Ida Husted Harper and Miss Mary G. Hay, members of the campaign committee. Miss Anthony and Miss Shaw addressed the Committee on Resolutions, and the next day a plank declaring for the amendment was adopted by the big convention with only one dissenting voice.
On May 12 most of these ladies attended the Populist Convention in Sacramento. They were received with cheers, escorted to front seats, invited to address the convention and the plank was unanimously adopted. From here a part of them went to the Prohibition Convention in Stockton, meeting a most cordial reception and a similar result. The Socialist Labor and the National parties also indorsed the amendment.
There was little hope for the indorsement of the Democratic Convention, but the ladies, reinforced by Mrs. Sarah B. and Miss Harriet Cooper, Mrs. Henry Krebs, Jr., Mrs. Alice M. Stocker and Mrs. E. O. Smith attended it on June 16. They were permitted to address the Resolutions Committee and present a petition signed by about 40,000 men and women of the State asking for the amendment, but it was laid on the table almost before they had left the room.[1]
A minority report was at once prepared by Charles Wesley Reed and signed by himself, William H. Alford, chairman of the committee, and two other members, but it was prevented from coming before the convention by order of its chairman, Frank Gould of San Joaquin County. After the platform had been adopted Miss Anthony and Miss Shaw were invited to address the convention, which they did to such effect that when they had finished the minority report was demanded. It was too late for this but, in spite of the efforts of John P. Irish and W. W. Foote of Alameda County,[2] and others, the original resolution declaring for an amendment was brought to a vote, receiving 149 ayes, 420 noes, more than one-fourth the whole number.
- ↑ Dr. Elizabeth Sargent was chairman of the Committee on Petitions for Northern and Mrs. Alice Moore McComas for Southern California. As the names had to be collected in the winter months preceding the spring campaign, the distances to be covered were long and the labor was the free offering of busy women, it is surprising that the list was so large. It by no means represented the suffrage sentiment in the State.
- ↑ Alameda had sent in the largest petition for woman suffrage of any county in the State, and San Joaquin afterwards gave a big majority vote for the amendment.
