er election of no avail.[51]

* * * * *

A conference of the suffrage leaders was held in Des Moines the next
month after the election. Every one was sad but no one was resigned
and those who had worked the hardest and sacrificed the most were the
first to renew their pledges for further effort. It was decided that
while their forces were well organized they should at once begin
another campaign. The half-century-old resolution was presented to the
General Assembly of 1917, and, though there were arguments that the
voters had just spoken and that the question ought not again be
submitted in so brief a time, the resolution passed by a vote of 35
ayes, 13 noes in the Senate and 85 ayes, 20 noes in the House.

The women continued their work for the second vote, which must be
given by the Legislature of 1919. When it convened the discovery was
made that the Secretary of State, William S. Allen, did not publish
notice of the passage of the resolution the first time, as required by
law and it had to be voted on again as if the first time. It passed
with but one dissenting voice in each House but the second vote could
not be taken till 1921.

A bill for Primary suffrage passed the Lower House in 1919 by 86 ayes,
15 noes, but met with great opposition in the Senate even from men
posing as friends of woman suffrage. In a one-party State, as Iowa had
been for many years, the dominant party hardly could feel that its
supremacy would be threatened by women's votes in the primary, but, as
one speaker naively disclosed in the debate, the "machine" might be
thrown entirely out of gear. "Why," said he dramatically to the
listening Senate, "the Republican party would be in hopeless
confusion. Nobody could tell in advance what candidate the women might
nominate in the primary!" The bill was postponed by 31 ayes, 17 noes.

The next step was to have a bill introduced to give women a vote for
Presidential electors. One of the contributing factors to its success
was the ever-increasing number of victories for similar bills in other
States, particularly the recent victory in Missouri, which had
completed the circle of "white" States surrounding Iowa. One of the
features of the debate in the Senate was the reading of a letter from
John T. Adams, vice-chairman of the National Republican Committee,
heretofore an anti-suffragist, by Senator Eugene Schaffter, the
sponsor of the bill, in which he impressed upon t