ent Wilson at the White House and asked
him to send a message to the Legislature in favor of the pending
Presidential suffrage bill, which he did.

[Mrs. Ford's thorough account of the fortunes of this bill through the
Legislatures of 1917 and 1919 is so largely covered by the report in
Part I of this chapter that it is omitted here.][172]

After the law was enacted Mrs. Kenny and Mrs. Kimbrough appeared at
the office of the county trustee and made a tender of the amount due
as their poll tax. He refused to receive it, acting under instructions
from the county attorney who declared that the laws of the State
exempted women. They then filed a bill in the Chancery Court of
Davidson county asking a decision. Chancellor Newman dismissed it with
an opinion in part as follows: "It will be observed by Section 686 of
the code that those liable for poll taxes are males between the ages
of 21 and 50 years on the 10th day of January the year the assessment
is laid. Women were not liable Jan. 10, 1919, for poll tax and plainly
it was never the purpose or intent of Section 1220 that a qualified
voter as a condition precedent to the right to vote should produce
satisfactory evidence that he had paid a poll tax assessed against him
for which he was not liable.... All women between the ages of 21 and
50 years, otherwise qualified as voters, are entitled to vote in the
November election of 1920 without paying a poll tax for 1919." The
case was taken to the Supreme Court, which ruled that women did not
have to pay in order to vote that year.

RATIFICATION. When the Legislature of Washington in March, 1920,
ratified the Federal Woman Suffrage Amendment making the 35th, there
came an absolute stop. The southeastern States had rejected it and it
had been ratified by all the others except Vermont and Connecticut,
whose Governors refused to call special sessions. It looked as if the
women of the United States would be prevented from voting at the
presidential election in November for the lack of one ratification.
There was every reason to believe that the Legislature of Tennessee
would give this one if it were not prevented by a clause in the State
constitution. Meanwhile the ratification of the Federal Prohibition
Amendment by the Ohio Legislature had been sent to the voters by a
recent law, they had rejected it and an appeal had been taken to the
U. S. Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the referendum law. On
June 1, in Hawk vs. S