ever
speech portraying the results if women voted, by Miss Inez Milholland
(N. Y.) and the sparkling play, How the Vote Was Won, read by Miss
Fola La Folette. A striking address was given one afternoon by Mrs. T.
P. O'Connor, an American woman but long a resident of England and
Ireland, who took for her subject, Let Our Watchword be Unity.

One of the most valuable contributions to the convention was Mrs.
McCulloch's report as Legal Adviser. This was the result of a list of
forty-four questions sent to presidents of State suffrage
associations, Woman's Christian Temperance Unions, Federations of
Clubs and leading lawyers, followed up by many letters. One of these
questions related to the guardianship of children, of which she said:

The subject of the guardianship of children could have been
treated a century ago in a few words. The father of the
legitimate child was his sole guardian and the mother had no
authority or right concerning their child except such as the
husband gratuitously allowed her. She had, however, all the
duties which the husband might put upon her. This meant that the
husband decided about the children's food, clothing, medicine,
school, church, home, associates, punishments, pleasures and
tasks and that he alone could apprentice a child, could give him
for adoption and control his wages. Many mothers were kept in
happy ignorance of such unjust laws because their husbands
voluntarily yielded to them much of the authority over the
children but this was not so in all families and many mothers
took cases to Supreme Courts, protesting against the absolute
paternal power. When mothers learned what this sole guardianship
meant they urged legal changes. Our present guardianship laws,
very few alike, show how women, each group alone in their own
States, have struggled to mitigate the severest evils of sole
fatherly guardianship, especially of the child's person. This to
mothers was more important than the guardianship of the child's
property.

Perhaps the greatest suffering came from the father's power to
deed or to bequeath the guardianship to a stranger and away from
the mother. Most of the States now allow a surviving mother the
sole guardianship of the child's person with certain conditions.
Six States have not yet thus limited the father's power and in
those where t