en at every hearing and Lucy Stone at every one
until her death.

_1884_--Petitions were presented for Municipal Suffrage, for the
appointment of police matrons; also for laws permitting husbands and
wives to contract with each other and make gifts directly to each
other; allowing a woman to hold any office to which she might be
elected or appointed; and requiring that a certain number of women
should be appointed on Boards of Overseers of the Poor, on State
Boards of Charities and as physicians in the women's wards of insane
asylums. Hearings were given on most of these petitions. At that of
January 25 for Municipal Suffrage the speakers were William I.
Bowditch, Mrs. Stone, Mr. Blackwell, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Ednah
D. Cheney, the Rev. J. W. and Mrs. Jennie F. Bashford, Mary F.
Eastman, Mrs. H. H. Robinson, Mrs. Harriette Robinson Shattuck and
Miss Nancy Covell.

On January 29 a hearing was given to the remonstrants conducted by
Thornton K. Lothrop. The speakers were Francis Parkman (whose paper
was read for him by Mr. Lothrop) Louis B. Brandeis, Mrs. Kate Gannett
Wells, William H. Sayward, Mrs. Lydia Warner and George C. Crocker. A
letter was read from Mrs. Clara T. Leonard. Mr. Parkman asserted that
the suffragists "have thrown to the wind every political, not to say
every moral principle;" that "three-fourths of the agitators are in
mutiny against Providence because it made them women;" and that "if
the ballot were granted to women it would be a burden so crushing that
life would be a misery."

This year 315 petitions for suffrage with 21,608 signatures were
presented. The remonstrants who set out with the avowed intention of
getting more secured about 3,000. A number of persons who signed the
anti-suffrage petition in Boston published letters afterwards over
their own names and addresses saying that they had signed without
reading, upon the assurance of the canvasser employed by the
remonstrants that it was a petition to permit women to vote on the
question of liquor license.

In the House Municipal Suffrage was discussed March 12, 13, and
finally was defeated by 61 yeas, 155 nays. A bill to let women vote on
the license question, which had not been asked for by the suffrage
association, was voted down without a count.

A law was enacted requiring two women trustees on the board of every
State lunatic hospital, and one woman physician in each. Samuel E.
Sewall, Frank B. Sanborn, Mr. Blackwell and Miss