association is not so much to put on record the
opinions of this committee in regard to woman suffrage as to
plead with it to give a favorable report, so that the question
can come before the Congress, be discussed on its merits and then
submitted to the various States for ratification. The Federal
Constitution guarantees to every State a republican form of
government--that is, a government in which the laws are enacted
by representatives elected by the people--and we claim that it
has violated its own principle in refusing to protect women in
their right to select their representatives, so we are asking for
no more than that the Constitution shall be carried out by the U.
S. Government. As the president of the National Suffrage
Association, I stand here in the place of a woman who gave sixty
years of her life in advocacy of that grand principle for which
so many of our ancestors died, Miss Susan B. Anthony. There is
not a woman here today who was at the first hearing, nor a woman
alive today who was among those that struggled in the beginning
for this fundamental right of every citizen. I now introduce Mrs.
Susan Walker Fitzgerald of Massachusetts. It has been said that
women cannot fight. Mrs. Fitzgerald's father was an Admiral of
the Navy and if she can not fight her father could.

Mrs. Fitzgerald spoke at length in the interest of the home and the
family, showing the evolution that had taken place until now "the
Government touches upon every phase of our home life and largely
dictates its conditions while at the same time the woman is held
responsible for them and is working with her hands tied behind her
back and she asks the vote in order to do her woman's work better."
Mrs. James Lees Laidlaw of New York spoke beautifully of the desire of
the mothers of the rising generation that their daughters should not
have to enter the hard struggle for the suffrage and pictured the need
for the highest development of the womanly character. Mrs. Elsie Cole
Phillips of Wisconsin showed the standpoint of the so-called working
classes, saying in part:

The right to vote is based primarily on the democratic theory of
government. "The just powers of government are derived from the
consent of the governed." What does that mean? Does it not mean
that there is no class so wise, so benevolent that it is fitted