of negro
voters; although the women would never vote so solidly as do the
negroes, because they would represent a much more thoughtful and
independent body....

After showing what had been the results in the South from admitting a
great body of illiterate voters she said:

A conference of southern women suffragists at Memphis a few years
ago, in asking for woman suffrage with an educational
qualification, pointed out that there were over 600,000 more
white women in the southern States than there were negroes, men
and women combined. If the literate women of the South were
enfranchised it would insure an immense preponderance of the
Anglo-Saxon over the African, of the literate over the
illiterate, and would make legitimate limitation of the male
suffrage to the literate easily possible....

Conditions of life in the South have made and kept Southerners
individualists. The southern man believes that he should
personally protect his women folk and he does it. He is only now
slowly realizing that, with the coming of the cotton mills and
other manufactories and with the growth of the cities, there has
developed a great body of women, young girls and children who
either have no men folk to protect them or whose men folk,
because of ignorance and economic weakness, are not able to
protect them against the greed and rapacity of employers or of
vicious men. It is a shock to the pride of southern chivalry to
find that women are less protected by the laws in their most
sacred possessions in the southern States than in any other
section of the Union; that the States which protect their women
most effectively are those in which women have been longest a
part of the electorate....

In the community business of caring for the sick, the incurable,
the aged, the orphaned, the deficient and the helpless, women of
the South bear already so important a part that to withdraw them
from public affairs would mean sudden and widespread calamity.
Women in the South are in politics, in the higher conception of
the word. "Politics," says Bernard Shaw, "is not something apart
from the home and the babies--it is home and the babies." Women
have long since gotten into politics in the South in the sense
that they have labored for the passage and enforcement of
l