owa women will love these States better
than our own until it shall arouse and place its laws and
institutions on an equality for women and men....

We ask suffrage in order to make womanhood broader and motherhood
nobler. Men and women are inextricably bound together. If we are
to have a great race, we must have a great motherhood. Do you ask
why people can not see this? In all history no class has been
enfranchised without some selfish motive underlying. If to-day we
could prove to Republicans or Democrats that every woman would
vote for their party, we should be enfranchised.

Do you say that whenever all women wish the ballot they will have
it? That time will never come. Not all of any class of men ever
wanted to vote till the ballot was put into their hands. When the
first woman desired to study medicine, not one school would admit
her. Since that time, only half a century ago, 25,000 women have
been admitted to the practice of medicine. If a popular vote had
been necessary, not one of them would yet have her diploma. We
have gained these advantages because we did not have to ask
society for them. If woman suffrage were granted in Iowa, women
would soon wish to vote, and every home would become a forum of
education....

There never had been so many deaths in the ranks as during the past
year. The following were among the names presented by Mrs. Clara
Bewick Colby as those whom the association would ever hold in reverent
memory:

Hannah Tracy Cutler of Illinois, former president of the American
Association and one of the earliest and most self-sacrificing of
woman suffrage lecturers; Sarah B. Cooper of California, auditor
of this association, whose labors for the enfranchisement of the
women of the Pacific coast will be remembered and honored equally
with her beneficent work in founding and sustaining free
kindergartens, and in whatever promoted justice, truth and mercy,
so that on the day of her funeral all the flags in San Francisco
were placed at half-mast; Mary Grew, who began her work for
freedom as corresponding secretary of the Philadelphia Female
Anti-Slavery Society in 1834, one of the founders of the New
Century Club of Philadelphia, and of the Pennsylvania Woman
Suffrage Association, of which she was president for twenty-three
years;