ms to me in the highest degree ungenerous for women like these
in this audience, who are cared for and protected in every way,
not to desire equal suffrage for the sake of other less fortunate
women, and it is not only ungenerous but short-sighted of such
women not to desire it for their own sakes. There is nothing
dearer to women than the respect and reverence of their children
and of the men they love. Yet every son who has grown up
reverencing his mother's opinion must realize, when he reaches
the age of twenty-one, with a shock from which he can never
wholly recover, that in the most important civic and national
affairs her opinion is not considered equal to his own....

I confidently believe that equal suffrage is coming far more
swiftly than most of us suspect. Educated, public-spirited women
will soon refuse to be subjected to such humiliating conditions.
Educated men will recoil in their turn from the sheer unreason of
the position that the opinions and wishes of their wives and
mothers are to be consulted upon every other question except the
laws and government under which they and their husbands and
children must live and die. Equal suffrage thus seems to me to be
an inevitable and logical consequence of the higher education of
women. And the higher education of women is, if possible, a still
more inevitable result of the agitation of the early woman
suffragists....

We who are guiding this educational movement today owe the
profoundest debt of gratitude to those early pioneers--Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe and, above and beyond
all, to Susan B. Anthony. Other women reformers, like other men
reformers, have given part of their time and energy. She has
given to the cause of women every year, every month, every day,
every hour and every moment of her whole life and every dollar
she could beg or earn, and she has earned thousands and begged
thousands more.

Turning to the honored guest of the evening Dr. Thomas said:

To most women it is given to have returned to them in double
measure the love of the children they have nurtured. To you, Miss
Anthony, belongs by right, as to no other woman in the world's
history, the love and gratitude of all women in every country of
the globe. We, your daughters in the spiri