Today in Herstory: Suffragists Take Aim at Senator O’Gorman (30 april 1915)
(note that the "states' rights crap is the same argument now being used again marriage equality. we are the UNITED states, and our rights should be the same in ALL the states, PERIOD)
Today in Herstory: Suffragists Take Aim at Senator O’Gorman
April 30, 1915: There was a quite frustrating and somewhat heated exchange of views this afternoon as Inez Milholland Boissevain, Doris Stevens and several other members of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage met with U.S. Senator James O’Gorman, Democrat of New York.
Despite their best arguments on behalf of the Susan B. Anthony (nationwide woman suffrage) Amendment, the Senator still remains opposed, saying: “I will not vote for this or any other woman suffrage amendment.” At one point in the debate, he actually asked: “Aren’t you women going too hastily?” Noting that the Anthony Amendment had first been introduced into Congress in 1878, one woman retorted: “Too quickly? After forty years?” She was immediately seconded by Boissevain, who asked: “Can freedom come too quickly?” The Senator then politely insisted that women already have a great deal of influence and don’t need an amendment. As the laughter died down, someone said: “It is too late to say anything like that to us now.” (just like: you don't need the ERA, the courts will protect your rights"
O’Gorman was reminded that there are already a number of States in which women can vote, and it was only a question of time until they would be powerful enough to force the issue nationwide. He replied that there are only 8 million people in all eleven full-suffrage States, not much more than the population of New York City, and that in one suffrage State there were more square miles than people. “What is good for Utah and Colorado may not be good for New York,” he cautioned.
Mary Prendergast noted how unfair and illogical it was that the President must listen to women in States where they can vote, while freely ignoring those in the rest of the nation. Then the difficulty and indignity of the burden women face in winning the vote was brought up by her as well:
******** Our country ought to be too big and magnanimous to stand by and see the flower of its womanhood spending itself in this hard struggle to which it has consecrated itself and which it is determined never to relinquish until it is won, when with one single act of justice it can place its women, who have never failed it in time of need, in a position of dignity which they surely merit and which they will always cherish.*******
Doris Stevens added:
The slow, tedious process of converting the male electorate of half the country is a task that we feel is too wasteful. It is too humiliating and unjust and that is the reason we women have come to Congress in such numbers the last two years to ask for a Federal Amendment.
. . . .
http://feminist.org/blog/index.php/2015/04/30/today-in-herstory-suffragists-take-aim-at-senator-ogorman/