NATIONAL AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1912
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est praise Representative Taylor said that all who had introduced the resolution would be pleased to speak in support of it at any time and that personally he wished to put in the record a statement of the results of woman suffrage in Colorado during the past eighteen years with a brief mention of 150 of the wisest, most humane and progressive laws in the country for the protection of home and the betterment of society, which the women of Colorado had caused to be put upon its statute books.
Miss Addams called the attention of the committee to the fact that more than a million women would be eligible to vote for the President of the United States in November. She named the countries where women could vote, saying: "America, far from being in the lead in the universal application of the principle that every adult is entitled to the ballot, is fast falling behind the rest of the world," and continued:
As I have been engaged for a good many years in various philanthropic undertakings, perhaps you will permit me, for only a few moments, to speak from my experience. A good many women with whom I have been associated have initiated and carried forward philanthropic enterprises which were later taken over by the city and thereupon the women have been shut out from the opportunity to do the self-same work which they had done up to that time. In Chicago the women for many years supported school nurses who took care of the children, made them comfortable and kept them from truancy. When the nurses were taken over by the health department of the city the same women who had given them their support and management were excluded from doing anything more, and I think Chicago will bear me out when I say that the nurses are not now doing as good work as they did before this happened. I could also use the illustration of the probation officers who are attached to the juvenile court. For a number of years women selected and supported these probation officers. Later, when the same officers, paid the same salary, were taken over by the county and paid from the county funds, the women who had been responsible for the initiation and beginning of the probation system and for the early management of the officers, had no more to do with them and at the present moment the juvenile court has fallen behind its former position in the juvenile courts of the world. I think the fair-minded men of Chicago will admit that it was a disaster when the women were disqualified by their lack of the franchise to care for it. The juvenile court has to do largely with delinquent and dependent children and there is no doubt that on the whole women can deal with such cases better than men because their natural interests lie in that direction. I could give you many other examples.
