woman.

This growth of public sentiment has been occasioned by the needs
of the children and the working women of that great State. I come
here to ask you to make a niche in the statesmanship and
legislation of the nation for the domestic interests of the
people. You recognize that the masculine thought is more often
turned to material and political interests. I claim that the
mother-thought, the woman-element needed, is to supplement the
statesmanship of American men on political and industrial affairs
with domestic legislation.

In her closing address Miss Anthony took up the question of obtaining
suffrage for women through the States instead of Congress and said:

My answer is that I do not wish to see the women of the
thirty-eight States of this Union compelled to leave their homes
to canvass each one of these, school district by school district.
It is asking too much of a moneyless class. The joint earnings of
the marriage co-partnership in all the States belong legally to
the husband. It is only that wife who goes outside the home to
work whom the law permits to own and control the money she earns.
Therefore, to ask of women, the vast majority of whom are without
an independent dollar of their own, to make a thorough canvass of
their several States, is asking an impossibility.

We have already made the experiment of canvassing four
States--Kansas in 1867, Michigan in 1874, Colorado in 1877,
Nebraska in 1882--and in each, with the best campaign possible
for us to make, we obtained a vote of only one-third. One man out
of every three voted for the enfranchisement of the women of his
household, while two out of every three voted against it....

We beg, therefore, that instead of insisting that a majority of
the individual voters must be converted before women shall have
the franchise, you will give us the more hopeful task of
appealing to the representative men in the Legislatures of the
several States. You need not fear that we shall get suffrage too
quickly if Congress submits the proposition, for even then we
shall have a long siege in going from Legislature to Legislature
to secure the vote of three-fourths of the States necessary to
ratify the amendment. It may require twenty years after Congress
has taken the initiative step, to obta