e women
suffragists will base their claim to vote upon the broad ground of
good government and not demand suffrage for the ignorant woman because
it is exercised by the ignorant man, they will make ten friends where
they now have one."

The audience had the northern and the southern point of view on
Educated Suffrage. Mrs. Gilman, who spoke on whether it would serve
the best interests of the laboring classes, was alone in objecting to
it. "Will exclusion from the suffrage educate and improve the
illiterate masses more quickly than the use of it?" she asked. "We
shall educate them sooner if we dread their votes and this is our work
in common." A great deal of sentiment was developed in favor of an
educational requirement for the suffrage and an informal rising vote
showed only five opposed, but most of the officers were absent. This
vote was due largely to the southern delegates and to the arguments
which had been made for its necessity in this section of the country.
The policy of the association had always been and continued to be to
ask and work only for the removal of the sex qualification.

One of the most popular speakers was Mrs. Elizabeth M. Gilmer, known
far and wide as "Dorothy Dix," whose home was in New Orleans. Her
address, quaintly entitled The Woman with the Broom, filled more than
four columns of the _Woman's Journal_ and an adequate idea of its wise
philosophy illuminated with the sparkling wit for which she was
renowned cannot be conveyed by quotations. "A few years ago," she
said, "a famous poet roused the compassion of the world by portraying
the tragedy of hopeless toil by the Man with the Hoe. He might have
found nearer home a better illustration of the work that is never
done, that has no inspiration to lighten it and looks for no
appreciation to glorify it, in the Woman with a Broom." "She is
understudy to a perpetual motion machine," was one of her epigrams.
She referred to the many successful business and professional women at
the convention and said:

But I am not here to speak for the wage-earning woman, she can
speak for herself. My plea is not for justice for her but for the
domestic woman--the woman who is the mainstay of the world, who
is back of every great enterprise and who makes possible the
achievements of men--the woman behind the broom, who is the
hardest-worked and worst-paid laborer on the face of the
earth....

Of the housekeeper we d