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with greater hope than ever before because we realize that back of you there are now in many of the States constituencies of women.

Dr. Shaw introduced Mrs. Pattie Ruffner Jacobs of Alabama, who quoted from distinguished southern members of Congress on State’s rights and asked that these sentiments be applied to the National Amendment for Woman Suffrage, saying in part:

If this amendment is adopted it in no wise regulates or interferes with any existing qualification for voting (except sex) which the various State constitutions now exact. It leaves all others to be determined by the various States through their constitutional agencies. It is a fallacy to contend that to prohibit discrimination on account of sex would involve the race problem. The actual application of the principle in the South would be to enfranchise a very large number of white women and the same sort of negro women as of negro men now permitted to exercise the privilege....

However much these chivalrous gentlemen may wish it were so, that southern women might truly be called roses and lilies which toil not, they must know that their compliments do not provide equal pay for equal service, which obtains in all the woman suffrage States and that their flowers of speech do not help us secure a co-guardianship law, which every suffrage State has and which is non-existent in all southern States. The pedestal platitude appeals less and less to the intelligence of southern women, who are learning in increasing numbers that the assertion that they are too good, too noble, too pure to vote, in reality brands them as incompetents. It cannot be sugarcoated into any other significance as long as we remain classed with idiots, criminals and some of the negro men who also are disfranchised. As things stand in the South an incentive is held out to the negro man to become educated that he may meet the tests; to practice industry and frugality and acquire property to meet the taxpaying qualification ; but no such incentive is held out to the white women, who meet the insuperable barrier of sex at every turn which might lead to progress....

We women of the South today, while proud of our past do not live in it. We wish to be proud of our present that we may look forward with confidence to our future. We know that sectionalism should have no place in our hearts or lives. This demand for suffrage is not sectional, it has its adherents in every State and in almost every town in every State. There is little or no organized opposition in my part of the country but there are many thousands of fine, thoughtful, forward-looking southern women banded together seeking the removal of this last badge of incompetency. For them there is no North or South but one great nation, the interest of whose women is the same. We realize that we are not different or better, we southern women, than the women in Montana, Illinois, Maine or Massachusetts but are just human beings as they are. We are not queens but political and industrial serfs. We are not angels but