100 years ago in The Saratogian
Thursday, Aug. 30, 1917
The Woman Suffrage Party of New York believes that “from now on the question of voting for the Woman Suffrage Amendment … should be kept constantly before the public.” At the same time, delegates to this week’s conference in Saratoga Springs feel that lobbying for women’s right to vote can be taken too far.
The Saratogian reports today that delegates have approved a resolution condemning a more militant suffragist group, the Congressional Union, for “attempting to harass the government” by picketing the White House. Ten member of the Congressional Union were arrested in front of the Executive Mansion on August 28. Suffragists have been picketing there since January, amid increased demands that they stand down during the war with Germany.
While the Washington protesters want a constitutional amendment granting suffrage nationwide, the New York suffragists are concentrating on a November state referendum, the second on the question in the last three years. The conference, which closes tonight, plans a massive publicity campaign to get out the sympathetic male vote, after their 1915 effort failed.
National suffragist leader Carrie Chapman Catt “turned a quiet suffrage conference into a rousing, whooping political mass meeting by her speech in Convention Hall this afternoon,” one reporter writes. Her closing speech gets a 25-minute standing ovation from approximately 1,000 delegates and spectators.
“The women have proved all the world around that if their nation is forced to war, if it is in danger, they go to the side of the men and fight with them, however their hearts may be torn by the sorrows of it all,” Catt says.
“But the way to do is not that, but to prevent by looking far ahead, by establishing some kind of system – there are many theories – that will put war forever out of the world.
“We owe that, we owe it to posterity, and when all the nations are tired, when they are all bankrupt, when they are all lacerated by this war, when everybody living can remember its horrors, and though the recounting of those horrors will be loosened when the war is over and we shall hear more of them than we have heard yet – while all of this is fresh is the time to take action.
And then we need the women, the women behind the governments of all the world, in order that the mother as well as the father may say something about the welfare of their common land, about the destiny of their children, about the civilization under which they live. So we cannot wait any longer. We must have the vote now.”