a wish to get there. I present to you Miss Frances
E. Willard."

This was the only time Miss Willard ever appeared before a Suffrage
Committee in the Capitol, and she was heard with much interest.
Beginning with the playful manner which rendered her speeches so
attractive, she closed with great seriousness:

I suppose these honorable gentlemen think that we women want the
earth, when we only want half of it. We call their attention to
the fact that our brethren have encroached upon the sphere of
woman. They have definitely marked out that sphere, and then they
have proceeded with their incursion by the power of invention.
They have taken away the loom and the spinning-jenny, and they
have obliged Jenny to seek her occupation somewhere else. They
have set even the tune of the old knitting-needle to humming by
steam. So that we women, full of vigor and desire to be active
and useful and to react upon the world around us, finding our
industrial occupations largely gone, have been obliged to seek
out a new territory and to pre-empt from the sphere of our
brothers some of that which they have hitherto considered their
own.

I know it is a sentiment of chivalry in some good men which
hinders them from giving us the ballot. They think we might not
be what they admire so much; they think we should be lacking in
womanliness of character. I ask you to notice if the women who
have been in this International Council, if the women who are
school teachers all over this nation, if these hundreds of
thousands are not a womanly set of women, and yet they have gone
outside of the old sphere. We believe that in the time of peace
women can come forward and with peaceful plans can use weapons
which are grand and womanly, and that their thoughts, winged with
hope and the force of the heart given to them, will have an
effect far mightier than physical power. For that reason we ask
you that they shall be allowed to stand at the ballot-box,
because we believe that there every person expresses his
individuality. The majesty or the meanness of a person comes out
at the ballot-box more than anywhere else. The ballot is the
compendium of all there is in civilization, and of all that
civilization has done for us. We believe that the mothers who had
the good sense to train noble men,