Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/352

13 of the former and one of the latter were opposed; 29 and 23 non-committal. The letters received were almost without exception of a pleasant nature. The District Suffrage Association paid a stenographer and rent of headquarters for the work of sixteen months. Contributions of only $214 were received for it, $100 from U. S. Senator Isaac Stevenson of Wisconsin.

The report on official endorsements of conventions showed the usual large number, political, religious, agricultural, labor, etc. Mrs. Dennett estimated that such endorsements had now been given by organizations representing 26,000,000 members.

Mrs. Pauline Steinem, chairman of the Committee on Education, reported sub-committees in sixteen States working for suitable text books, encouraging the placing of women on school boards, organizing mothers’ and parents’ clubs, offering prizes for essays on woman suffrage, encouraging methods of selfgovernment in schools, etc. The chairman for New Jersey announced that Governor Woodrow Wilson approved of School suffrage and that State Senator Joseph S. Frelinghuysen, president of the State Board of Education, recommended it in his last report.

College Women’s Evening, as always, attracted one of the largest audiences of the week. In the course of an address on What Women Might Accomplish with the Franchise, Miss Jane Addams said:

Sydney Webb points out that while the wages of British working men have increased from 50 to 100 per cent. during the past sixty years the wages of working women have remained stationary. The exclusion from all political rights of five million working women in England is not only a source of industrial weakness and poverty to themselves but a danger to English industry. Working women can not hope to hold their own in industrial matters where their interests may clash with those of their enfranchised fellow workers or employers. They must force an entrance into the ranks of responsible citizens, in whose hands lies the solution to the problems which are at present convulsing the industrial world. Much of the new demand for political enfranchisement arises from a passionate desire to reform the unsatisfactory and degrading social conditions which are responsible for so much wrong doing. The fate of all the unfortunate, the suffering, the criminal, is daily forced upon woman’s attention in painful and intimate ways. It is inevitable that humanitarian women should wish to vote concerning