gle day
and were summoning women from all parts of the country for service in
Washington and demanding extra work from them at home, telegrams,
letters, influence from the constituencies, etc. There was a vote Jan.
10, 1918, in the Lower House and a continual pressure from that moment
to get a vote in the Senate, which did not come till October and was
adverse. Then the committee pushed on without stopping. Mrs. Shuler,
the corresponding secretary, had been in the Michigan, South Dakota
and Oklahoma campaigns all summer and was exhausted. The three States
were carried for suffrage and when the election was over all the
forces were used to obtain Presidential suffrage in the big
legislative year beginning January, 1919. It was a question of
pressing forward to victory or stopping to prepare for and hold a
convention and lose the opportunities for gains in Congress.

During the first ten months of 1918 the vast conflict in Europe had
gone steadily on; the United States had sent over millions of soldiers
and other millions were in training camps on this side of the ocean;
transportation was blocked; the advanced cost of living had brought
distress to many households; thousands of families were in mourning,
and everywhere suffragists were devoting time and strength to those
heavy burdens of war which always fall on women. By November 1, when
it would have been necessary to issue the call for a convention, there
was no prospect of a change in these hard conditions, and when on
November 11 the Armistice was suddenly declared no one was interested
in anything but the end of the war and its world-wide aftermath.[114]
During the dark days of 1918, however, there had come a tremendous
advance in the status of woman suffrage. The magnificent way in which
women had met the demands of war, their patriotic service, their
loyalty to the Government, had swept away the old-time objections to
their enfranchisement and fully established their right to full
equality in all the privileges of citizenship. Early in the winter the
Lower House of Congress by a two-thirds vote declared in favor of
submitting to the Legislatures an amendment to the Federal
Constitution, the object for which the National Suffrage Association
had been formed, and the Parliament of Great Britain had fully
enfranchised the majority of its women. In the spring the Canadian
Parliament conferred full Dominion suffrage on women. Before and after
the Armistice the nation