Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/95

Mrs. Bennett spoke in her humorous and inimitable way on The Authority of Women to Preach the Gospel of Christ in Public Places. Mrs. Rachel Foster Avery (Penn.) under the title What’s in a Name? told of the efforts that were being made by the conservative women of Philadelphia to reform municipal conditions through Civic Betterment Clubs, not by the ballot in the hands of women but through the men voters. “Yet, after all,” she said, “are not these clubs doing good work for woman suffrage under another name? For as these earnest but conservative women find themselves in contact with life at so many new points they are getting so used to all the things which go to make up that awful bugaboo, ‘politics,’ that they will soon begin to realize that politics affects for good or evil all the things which touch the daily lives of every one of them. After awhile, perhaps sooner than most of us think, they will join the ranks of the wiser women who are now suffragists and who know that they want the vote and why they want it.”

Miss Frances Griffin (Ala.) kept the audience in a gale of laughter from the first to the last of her speech, which began: “My address is put down on the program as ‘A Song or a Sermon.’ It is going to be neither, I have changed my mind. Mrs. Catt’s address last night furnished argument enough to lie three feet deep all over Louisiana for three years.”

The talented young lawyer, Miss Gail Laughlin (Me.), gave an address entitled The Open Door, during which she said:

Suffrage is not the ultimate end but it is the golden door of opportunity. Through the open door of suffrage the mother may follow her child and still guard him after he passes the threshold of home, and through it she can extend a helping hand to mothers whose children toil in the mills of Alabama, the factories of the eastern States and the sweat-shops of New York. Through this door the protected women of the world may go out to bind up the wounds of those who have fallen in the battle of life. .... The old-fashioned Chinese man thought his wife was not beautiful unless she had little feet on which she could not walk. Some of the young Chinese are learning that it is pleasanter for a man to have a wife who can walk by his side. Formerly men thought it desirable that a woman’s mind should be cramped. ‘The modern man is beginning to find that it is more satisfactory to have for a wife a woman whose mind can keep pace with his. It is more womanly and dignified for women to sit in legislative halls than to stand around the lobbies. This exclusion of