NATIONAL AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1911
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and encouraging convention and we are daily excited with news of the good prospects of more campaign States and more victories in the very near future.... We all have votes-for-women tags on our baggage, yellow badges and pins, California poppies and six-star buttons on our dresses and coats and dainty votes for women butterflies on our shoulders, and as we go about in dozens or scores or hundreds the onlookers receive the fitting psychological impression and we find them thinking of us as victors and conquerors."
The opening of this convention, with Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, the national president, in the chair, was a proud moment for Miss Laura Clay, who was one of the organizers of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association in 1888 and had been continually its president. In her address of greeting she said:
We welcome you with hearts tender with the remembrance of the past, when two of the great historic figures which have made this convention possible gave their labors to Kentucky. In the early fifties, Lucy Stone, in the vigor and freshness of her lovely youth and enthusiasm for high ideals, spoke in the cities and towns on both sides of the Ohio River; and in 1881 she held in Louisville a convention of the American Woman Suffrage Association. She established the Woman's Journal, which is now edited, with all the noble moral principles and polished literary ability which have characterized it throughout, by her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, who is with us today. In 1879 that other heroic woman, Susan B. Anthony, made a tour through central Kentucky and left an enduring monument of her visit in the Equal Rights Association of Richmond, Madison County, which has had the longest continuous existence of any woman suffrage society in the State....
We welcome you with hearts strong with hope for the future. The glorious victories that we have had inspire us and in all the harbingers of hope we see none greater than the Men's Leagues for Woman Suffrage. These prove to us that the men of our country are preparing to extend equal political rights to women, who, since the time when this vast continent was a wilderness, have stood side by side with them in the heroic labors which have made it blossom like the rose with the fairest civilization the world has ever known. In the great International Alliance Congress at Stockholm men of many nations formed themselves into a Suffrage League, and the Men's League of California did grand service in the glorious victory in their State. This noble land extends from California across the continent to Virginia where the latest league of men has just been formed. We see in this generous cooperation of the men of our nation a better exposition of the legend on Kentucky's shield, "United
