Catt, chairman,
began by saying:

The great need of the hour is organization. There can be no
doubt that the advocates of woman suffrage in the United States
are to be numbered by millions, but it is a lamentable fact that
our organization can count its numbers only by thousands. There
are illustrious men and women in every State, and there are men
and women innumerable, who are not known to the public, who are
openly and avowedly woman suffragists, yet we do not possess the
benefit of their names on our membership lists or the financial
help of their dues. In other words, the size of our membership is
not at all commensurate with the sentiment for woman suffrage.
The reason for this condition is plain; the chief work of
suffragists for the past forty years has been education and
agitation, and not organization. The time has come when the
educational work has borne its fruit, and there are States in
which there is sentiment enough to carry a woman suffrage
amendment, but it is individual and not organized sentiment, and
is, therefore, ineffective.

The audience was greatly amused when Miss Anthony commented on this:
"There never yet was a young woman who did not feel that if she had
had the management of the work from the beginning the cause would have
been carried long ago. I felt just so when I was young." There was
much laughter also over one of Mrs. Abigail Scott Duniway's short
speeches in which she said:

There are in Oregon three classes of women opposed to suffrage.
1. Women who are so overworked that they have no time to think of
it. They are joined to their wash-tubs; let them alone. But the
children of these overworked women are coming on. 2. Women who
have usurped all the rights in the matrimonial category, their
husbands' as well as their own. The husbands of such women are
always loudly opposed to suffrage. The "sassiest" man in any
community is the hen-pecked husband away from home. 3. Young
girls matrimonially inclined, who fear the avowal of a belief in
suffrage would injure their chances. I can assure such girls that
a woman who wishes to vote gets more offers than one who does
not. Their motto should be "Liberty first, and union afterwards."
The man whose wife is a clinging vine is apt to be like the oaks
in the forest that are found wrapped in