trants, whose names
and numbers they declined to give. As Mr. Lord was unable to complete
his argument in the allotted time, at his request a further hearing
was granted on February 11. Extracts were read from letters by Mrs.
Clara T. Leonard and Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney.[317] Mrs. Howe, Lucy
Stone, Mr. Blackwell, Col. L. Edwin Dudley and Miss Tobey replied.
Chester W. Kingsley, chairman of the legislative committee, said that
as no petitions against suffrage had been sent in he would ask all the
remonstrants present to rise. Not a person rose, but the men standing
in the aisles tried to sit down. Mr. Lord suggested that the
remonstrants were averse to notoriety, whereupon Senator Kingsley
asked all in favor to rise, and the great audience rose in a body.

Among the petitions sent in this year for Municipal Suffrage was one
signed by President Helen A. Shafer of Wellesley College, a number of
the professors and about seventy students who were over twenty-one.
The committee reported in favor of both Municipal and License
Suffrage. The former was discussed March 12 and lost by a vote,
including pairs, of 90 yeas, 139 nays. The _Woman's Journal_ said:
"Although not a majority, the weight of character, talent and
experience was overwhelmingly in favor of the bill, as is shown by the
fact that _the chairmen of thirty of the House Committees_, out of a
total of forty-one, were recorded in its favor."

License Suffrage passed the Senate, 15 yeas, 12 nays, after a long
fight, and was defeated in the House, 101 yeas, 42 nays.

_1890_--Suffrage petitions were presented and also petitions asking
that fathers and mothers be made equal guardians of their children;
that contracts between husbands and wives be legally valid; and that a
widow be allowed to stay more than forty days in the house of her
deceased husband without paying rent. All these were refused.

On March 12 a hearing was given to the petitioners for suffrage. Mrs.
Stone, Mr. Blackwell, the Rev. J. W. Hamilton, Mrs. Ellen B. Dietrick,
the Rev. Frederick A. Hinckley, Mr. Crane of Woburn and Miss Alice
Stone Blackwell spoke in behalf of the W. S. A., and Mrs. Susan S.
Fessenden, Mrs. Amelia C. Thorpe and Miss Tobey in behalf of the W. C.
T. U. Mr. Ropes, Dr. A. P. Peabody and J. B. Wiggin spoke against
woman suffrage. Mr. Lord asked that the hearing be extended for
another day, as he wished to speak in behalf of the remonstrants,
although no petitions had been sent in.