tion of literature; to secure and present to
Congress at an early date a petition asking for a 16th Amendment
enfranchising women, the chair to appoint a committee to superintend
this work; to try to obtain the appointment of a U. S. Senate
Committee on Woman Suffrage favorable to it; to send letters
simultaneously to the President of the United States in advance of the
time for writing his message, followed by telegrams one week preceding
the opening of Congress, expressing the wishes of women for the
ballot; to ask their Legislatures for some form of suffrage and follow
up this request with systematic legislative work; to urge that States
having any form of partial suffrage take measures to secure the
largest possible use of it by women. It was decided to appropriate
$125 for two months' work in South Dakota to ascertain conditions with
a view to the submission of a State amendment.

The resolutions presented by Mr. Blackwell, chairman of the committee,
reviewed the wonderful progress made by women since the first
convention whose 60th anniversary they were celebrating. They told of
the progress of suffrage, as outlined in the Call for the convention,
and said: "When that first convention met, one college in the United
States admitted women; now hundreds do so. Then there was not a single
woman physician or ordained minister or lawyer; now there are 7,000
women physicians and surgeons, 3,000 ordained ministers and 1,000
lawyers. Then only a few poorly-paid employments were open to women;
now they are in more than three hundred occupations and comprise 80
per cent. of our school teachers. Then there were scarcely any
organizations of women; now such organizations are numbered by
thousands. Then the few women who dared to speak in public, even on
philanthropic questions, were overwhelmingly condemned by public
opinion; now the women most opposed to woman suffrage travel about the
country making speeches to prove that a woman's only place is at home.
Then a married woman in most of our States could not control her own
person, property or earnings; now in most of them these laws have been
largely amended or repealed and it is only in regard to the ballot
that the fiction of woman's perpetual minority is still kept up."

Mrs. Catt's powerful address was entitled The Battle to the Strong but
nothing is preserved except newspaper clippings. She ended by saying:
"In all history there has been no event fraught with more impor