heartily sustains her
when she has successfully done so. There are fewer large centers
in the South than in the North, and much less attrition of mind
against mind; the people are homogeneous and slower to change,
and public opinion is much less fluctuating. But once let the
tide of woman suffrage fairly turn, and I believe it will be
irresistable and advance far more steadily and rapidly in the
South than it has done in the North. Let the Southern women be
won over and the cause will have nothing to fear from the
opposition of the men. But, after twenty years' experience as a
journalist, my honest opinion is that until the Southern women
can be made to feel the pecuniary advantages to them of suffrage,
they will not lift a finger or speak a word to obtain it.

In 1881, at the March meeting of the Raleigh Typographical Union,
No. 194, my son, being then a member of that Union, introduced
and, after some hard fighting, succeeded in carrying a resolution
placing women compositors on a par in every respect with men.
There was not at that time a single woman compositor in the
State, to my son's knowledge; there is one now in Raleigh and two
apprentices, who claimed and receive all the advantages that men
applying for admission to the Union receive.

Mrs. C. Harris started the _South Atlantic_ at Wilmington. The
Misses Bernheim and their father started a magazine in the same
city called _At Home and Abroad_, which was afterwards moved to
Charlotte; both were short-lived. We have now the _Southern
Woman_. This is the only journal ever edited and managed by a
woman alone, with no man associated with or responsible for it. I
have been for twenty years connected with the press of this State
in one way and another, and am called the "Grandmother of the
North Carolina Press Association." In 1880 I delivered an
original poem before the association, and another Masonic one
before the board of the orphan asylum; making me, I believe, the
first native North Carolina woman that ever came before the
public as a speaker. I was both denounced and applauded for my
"brass" and "bravery." Public sentiment has changed since then.

Mrs. Marion A. Williams, president of the State National Bank at
Raleigh for several years, is probably the first woman ever
elec