Mary A. Livermore
and Mrs. Elizabeth Boynton Harbert. Dr. Mary F. Thomas, in the name of
the Indiana W. S. A., the oldest State association in the country,
organized in 1851, presented the association with a bouquet of never
fading chrysanthemums.

On Wednesday evening Mrs. Helen Ekin Starrett gave the address of
welcome. In referring to the influence of the woman suffrage movement
upon the legal status of women, she said that Kansas entered the Union
as a State with women's personal and property rights legally
recognized as never before. This was largely because a delegate to the
Kansas constitutional convention which met in Leavenworth, (Mr. Sam
Wood), wrote to Lucy Stone at her home in Orange, N. J., asking her to
draft a legal form, which she did, with her baby on her knee, and its
suggestions were afterwards incorporated in the organic law of that
State.[137] As one result of School Suffrage in the hands of women,
Kansas had the best schools in the United States while the people
still lived in cabins.

Mrs. Mary B. Clay, of Kentucky, president of the association, made a
special plea for work in the South, saying in part:

Alabama has given married women equal property rights with their
husbands. This monied equality I regard as one of the most
essential steps to our freedom, for as long as women are
dependent upon men for bread their whole moral nature is
necessarily warped. There never was a truer thought than that of
Alexander Hamilton, when he said, "He who controls my means of
daily subsistence controls my whole moral being." I therefore
recommend to the Southern women particularly the petitioning for
property rights, because pecuniary independence is one of the
most potent weapons for freedom, and because that claim has less
prejudice to overcome....

Mississippi also has made equal property laws for women; and
Arkansas allows married women to hold their own property, and all
women to vote on the licensing of saloons within three miles of a
church or school-house. A lady writing from there says: "The
welcome accorded the law by the women of the State refutes all
adverse theories, and establishes the fact that woman's nature
possesses an inherent strength and courage which no surroundings
can extinguish, and which only need the light of hope and the
voice of duty to call them into action." I would recommend