to be quiet very much longer.... " Mrs. Dodge made an analysis of the number of enfranchised women to show that the parties had nothing to fear and said in closing: "I wish to say that the suffragists who make these threats are not representing the women of the country. It is the women of the country whom we try to represent and we have tried for several years against the noisy, insistent and persistent demands of a group."
The other women speakers were Mrs. Henry White, member of the executive committee of the Massachusetts Association; Miss Alice Hill Chittenden, president of the New York Association; Miss Marjorie Dorman, secretary of the Women Wage-earners' Anti-Suffrage League of New York City[1]; Mrs. O. D. Oliphant of New Jersey, who was not able to reach Washington but whose paper on Feminism was put into the report; Miss Minnie Bronson, secretary of the National Association. Miss Bronson's address, which was largely statistical, called out many questions from the suffrage members of the committee. She said the association had approximately 100,000 members.[2]
The first of the men speakers against the amendment was J. N. Matthews (N. J.) who began by saying it would be difficult for him to put aside his Democratic partisanship even for a moment. He was soon involved in a wrangle with the committee which occupied over half of the space filled by his speech in the report. This was true also of the speech of Representative Thomas J. Heflin (Ala.), which ended with a long poem entitled The Only Regeneration, beginning: "There's no earthly use in prating of eugenics' saving grace." Mrs. Dodge had scored the suffragists for having more than one association but delegates from three of the "antis" were present at this hearing, the Guidon Society of New York City, represented by a New York lawyer, John R. Don Passos, who stated that he represented also the Man Suffrage Association. He filed a "brief" of its president, Everett P.
- ↑ The most persistent efforts of the suffragists never succeeded in locating this league.
- ↑ At the request of the committee the exact figures were furnished later and showed a membership of 105,000, of whom 85,600 lived in the five non-suffrage States of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Of the remaining 19,400 the non-suffrage States of New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Ohio had 11,500; Virginia, 2.100, and 6,500 were divided among other non-suffrage States and the District of Columbia. Not one member was reported from States where the franchise had been given to women, although it was a stock argument of the "antis" that it had been forced on them and they would gladly get rid of it.
