ogress in four
eastern States. Thousands of women are working with voice and pen and
tens of thousands are contributing in time and money to win political
freedom for women in these States. Other States are rapidly preparing
for active campaigns in 1916. At the same time the National
Association is putting forth the strongest efforts to win nation-wide
suffrage through the passage of its historic Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States.

We shall come together at this, our forty-seventh annual convention,
larger in numbers, more united in spirit and effort, more assured of
early success than ever before....and, with renewed zeal and
inspiration, rejoicing that the long struggle for the new freedom for
women is nearing an end. Public opinion for equal suffrage has
increased a hundredfold in this fateful year. It seems borne in upon
the most conservative that it is only a matter of time when
nation-wide political freedom will be granted to women as an
inevitable outcome of our democracy and the last step in the great
experiment of self-government....

ANNA HOWARD SHAW, President.
KATHARINE DEXTER MCCORMICK, First Vice-President.
NELLIE NUGENT SOMERVILLE, Second Vice-President.
KATHARINE BEMENT DAVIS, Third Vice-President.
NELLIE SAWYER CLARK, Corresponding Secretary.
SUSAN WALKER FITZGERALD, Recording Secretary.
EMMA WINNER ROGERS, Treasurer.
HELEN GUTHRIE MILLER,} Auditors.
RUTH HANNA MCCORMICK,}

[100] Although Dr. Shaw was but sixty-eight years old and in perfect
health she afterwards asked the custodians of this fund--George Foster
Peabody, James Lees Laidlaw and Norman de R. Whitehouse, New York
bankers--to hold it in trust, paying her only the annuity each year
and giving her the right to dispose of it at her death in some way to
advance the cause of woman suffrage, which was done.

[101] The speakers were Mrs. William Spencer Murray, secretary of the
Women's Political Union of Connecticut; Mrs. Annie G. Porritt, press
chairman of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association; Mrs. Dana
Durand of Minnesota; Miss Julia Hurlburt, vice-chairman of the Women's
Political Union of New Jersey; Mrs. Agnes Jenks, president of the
Rhode Island W. S. A.; Mrs. Alden H. Potter, chairman of the
Congressional Union in Minnesota; Mrs. Glendo