hicago,
who will speak in behalf of the medical practitioners.

Dr. Blount. In my city there are 500 women doctors; in my State
there are 750; in the United States in 1900 there were 7,399.
These women doctors know the womanhood of the country perhaps
more intimately than any other class of women know it. I have
talked with many of them and I have yet to find one who does not
believe in woman suffrage. The Woman's Medical Club in Chicago
has joined the suffrage association. Why do we want the ballot?
Partly our reasons are personal to our own profession and partly
they are the same that move the whole mass of mankind to ask for
suffrage today. Some of our personal reasons are these: As women
we are excluded from most of the well-paid positions for
physicians. We know that the dependent womanhood of the country
needs our care; from time to time we hear grewsome tales from the
insane asylums and the pauper institutions of wrongs done the
women because there is no woman doctor there to protect them.
Little children in my own State have gone through a life of
degradation owing to the fact that there was no woman doctor in
charge of them in the public institutions. The best paid
positions are political jobs and no woman can get one. Another
reason why, as physicians, we want the ballot is that at present
we need police protection. We need a city that is well lighted
and safe for women, as we are obliged to go out at all hours of
the night. A few years ago the hunters of women became unusually
active and several respectable women were in the early hours of
the evening hunted to their death and murdered. We were told at
that time by the commissioner of police that it would be well for
all the respectable women of the city to remain indoors after 8
o'clock in the evening unless they were escorted by a gentleman!
Imagine when the telephone rings for a woman doctor to attend
some critical case that she shall be required either to get a
male escort or remain at home! This is also true of nurses and
many others....

I do not think that men can grow to be the best men when they are
in constant association with a subject class. I ask you gentlemen
of the United States Senate, for the sake of womanhood, but most
of all for the sake of manhood, to report th