n soldiers would need cots to lie on and
fuel to cook with, and that a swamp was not a desirable place in which
to pitch a camp.... What the government needs at such a time is not
alone bacteriologists and army officers but also women who know how to
take care of sick boys and have the common sense to surround them with
sanitary conditions."[416] At this her audience, at first hostile,
burst into applause.

More and more disturbed by the inefficient care of the wounded and the
feeding of enlisted men, she wrote Rachel, "Every day's reports and
comments about the war only show the need of women at the front--not
as employees permitted to be there because they begged to be--but
there by right--as managers and dictators in all departments in which
women have been trained--those of feeding and caring for in health and
nursing the sick."[417]

The war over, the problem of governing the Philippines, Puerto Rico,
and Hawaii was of great interest to her, and she at once asked for the
enfranchisement of the women of these newly won island possessions.
She regarded it as an outrage for the most democratic nation in the
world to foist upon them an exclusively masculine government, a "male
oligarchy," as she called it. "I really believe I shall explode," she
wrote Clara Colby, "if some of you young women don't wake up and raise
your voice in protest.... I wonder if when I am under the sod--or
cremated and floating in the air--I shall have to stir you and others
up. How can you not be all on fire?"[418]

The unwillingness of her "girls" to relate woman suffrage to
contemporary public affairs such as this, repeatedly disappointed her.
Yet she was well aware that the younger generation would never see the
work through her eyes, or exactly follow her pattern.

* * * * *

Disappointed that her National American Woman Suffrage Association did
not attract members as did the W.C.T.U. or the General Federation of
Women's Clubs, she confessed to Clara Colby, "It is the disheartening
part of my life that so very few women will work for the emancipation
of their own half of the race."[419] Watching women flock into these
other organizations and contributing to all sorts of charities, she
was obliged to admit that "very few are capable of seeing that the
cause of nine-tenths of all the misfortunes which come to women, and
to men also, lies in the subjection of women, and therefore the
important thing is to l