Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/315

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
NATIONAL AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1910
283

By action of the Executive Committee Mrs. McCulloch was advanced to the office of first vice-president; Miss Kate M. Gordon (La.) was made second vice-president and Miss Jessie Ashley (N. Y.), treasurer.

The National College Equal Suffrage League held business sessions Saturday forenoon and afternoon with its president, Dr. M. Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr presiding, and a luncheon was given for its delegates. Miss Caroline Lexow made the annual report. At the evening meeting of the convention Mrs. Alice Duer Miller (N. Y.), representing the Equal Franchise Society, of which Mrs. Clarence Mackay was president, spoke on The Sisterhood of Women, saying in part: '"We have plenty of work to do but it is not that, it is not the organization, the growth of membership and the spread of theories that make me confident of success. It is the extraordinary spirit that animates the women who are working for suffrage, the sense of comradeship and community among them, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, old and young, mothers and daughters. We have been taught to admire the 18th century because it did so much to dissolve class distinctions. It broke down some of the barriers, not between man and woman, but between groups of men, for within groups men have always had this spirit of comradeship, and oh, how they have valued it! They did not get it in domestic relations, however happy; or in friendships, however warm. They got it, or rather they found a field in which to exercise it, in the impersonal activities of their lives, in their crusades, guilds, colleges, labor unions and clubs. But between women the barriers have been of a more serious type. They have been segregated not only class by class but individual by individual and house by house. Now these barriers too are dissolving. Women are finding an expression for their sense of comradeship, for their impersonal loyalty to their own sex; they are waking up to the fact that a sense of equality is more thrilling to those who have the right stuff in them than any sense of superiority could ever have been."

Miss Harriet E. Grim of Wisconsin University described The Call of the New Age to College Women. Miss Juliet Stuart Poyntz, president of Barnard chapter of the College League, discussed Education and Social Progress. Mrs. Elizabeth M. Gil-