Colby-Speeches, Women's Rights, Suffrage Leaders, undated (Clara Berwick Colby papers, 1860-1957; Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, Box 8, Folder 4)

Report on Woman Suffrage in the United States.

By Clara Berwick Colby, president of the Nebraska Woman Suffrage Association, Editor of the Woman's Tribune, Washington D.C.

Dear Sisters and Fellow Workers in the Cause of Woman and Humanity.

The report which I have the honor to transmit to you will touch briefly on the success of woman's political enfranchisement as far as it has been established in this country.

The development of the United States as a nation has been so rapid and recent, and woman's part therein has been so well recognized, that it has brought about an exceptionally favored condition for women. Still there are not wanting everywhere traces of her degradation under the old common law of England which prevailed at all time in this country, and which still is in force in several of the States. Until June of this year this law as far as it related to women was in force in the District of Columbia making a married woman a non-entity in relation to all business and property

2 and giving the father the right to will away from the mother the guardianship of their children For the last year and a half a mother has been suing in the courts of the District of Columbia for the custody of her two daughters whose guardianship had been willed by their father to his sister. Had the mother not had powerful friends and plenty of money to prosecute her case, she would doubtless have had to lose her children as so many mothers have had to before.

But wherever woman's political equality is established it begins at once to right all unfavorable laws and conditions. In our three States, where women are full voters, Wyoming, Colorado, & Utah, and in two others there are laws providing that for all public service - such as teaching &c there shall be no discrimination in wages because of sex. Only when woman is equal with man before the law will new rights be fully protected and her opinion have its due weight in the affairs of government. However limited in the first place are the efforts of any organization for the benefit of women or for any moral reform they soon grow to a realization of the fact that the elective franchise is the all inclusive right which gives and protects all others. To this end will your Congress point.

3 It will therefore be a matter of interest to you to learn that as far as the franchise has been extended among us it has proved beneficial. Not only has it not produced any of the predicted evils but it has been invariably followed by good results.

In half our States women have some form or other of school Suffrage, and this is exercised to the great benefit of the Schools and with the immediate result of increasing the interest which men take in these too-much neglected elections. To give but one instance of resulting benefit: In Michigan women received school suffrage by a State law from which Chartered cities were exempt and these had to give the franchise to women by amending their Charters. When a bill was before the legislature to amend the charter of Detroit, the largest city in Michigan, a member from Detroit opposed the measure on the ground that the School election was conducted in the liquor saloons. However the amendment was passed when immediately this same member proposed another amendment to prohibit holding these elections in saloons and this beneficent change was made.

When women became municipal voters in the State of Kansas a law was passed prohibiting electioneering within fifty feet of the polls in order to ensure orderly voting.

4 When women were voters in the Territory of Washington the immediate good effect of their ballot was attested by who [Jane Robson, Secretary of the province of British Columbia, introduced a woman suffrage bill in the British Columbian Parliament as a government measure: saying the women of Washington are voting all the gamblers and blacklegs out of their Territory, and if the women of Seattle have the ballot, in self-protection we must give it to the women of Victoria.] It may be added that it was because the voices of women were feared by the vicious element that their disfranchisement in this Territory was at last secured by the decision of an alien judge whose appointment had been maneuvered for this very purpose.

Some years ago the women of Utah were voters by Territorial law but they were disfranchised by Act of Congress. When the bill passed to admit Utah as a state, the men of Utah put woman suffrage in the new State Constitution and carried it by a large majority, thus, as they proudly said, giving back to their women at the very first opportunity, the ballot which they had used satisfactorily for several years and of which they had been so unjustly deprived.

From Colorado, which adopted women suffrage by an amendment to the State Constitution in 1893, came only good words for woman suffrage. Hon. John F. Shafroth, U.S. Congressman from Colorado, represented the general opinion concerning woman suffrage in that state when he appeared before the United States Judiciary

5 Committee asking for the passage of a woman suffrage amendment to the Federal Constitution. In the course of his remarks he said: "We have had what we think is a determination that woman suffrage is a success, and a complete refutation of the arguments that are made that woman suffrage will have a tendency to degrade or lower the standard of woman. It is often claimed by those who are against woman suffrage that as quick as you give the power to vote to woman, immediately she will be contaminated by having to go to the polls. Now I want to say that in Colorado the direct opposite has been the experience. Instead of the caucus for the primary being held in questionable places, they are held in the parlors of the most fashionable people in Denver. Instead of those caucuses being attended by a few persons, they are public, and are attended by all of that political party.

In the election of 1894 a greater per cent of ladies voted than men; and instead of their being contaminated by anything of a bad nature at the polls, the effect has been that here are no loafers, there are no drunkards, there are no persons of questionable character standing around the polls."

Women have possessed in Wyoming the same political rights as men, both as to voting and holding office, since 1869. From that day until the present every Governor of the Territory and later of the State has given his official testimony as to the success of woman suffrage. To quote from the official message of but one Gov. John W. Hoyt in 1882 said:

Elsewhere objectors persist in calling this honorable statute of ours, 'an experiment." We know it is not; that under it we have better laws, better officers, better institutions, better morals and higher social conditions in general than could otherwise exist -- that none of the predicted evils such as loss of native delicacy and disturbance of home relations, has followed in its train; that the great body of our women, and the best of them, have accepted the elective franchise as a precious boon and exercise it as a patriotic duty - in a word, that after twelve years of happy experience, woman's suffrage is so thoroughly rooted and established in the minds and hearts of the people that among them all, no voice is ever uplifted in protest against it or in question of it."

As this is Republican testimony I will quote from a Democrat, Hon. U. L. Andrews, Speaker