if the future legislation of this country shall fall
short of the demands of justice and equality."
The response to this call was general. All
over the country women determined to try to
vote. Sometimes they succeeded-sometimes
they passed the registrar and were stopped by
the inspector; again the registrars held them
back. Out of
these attempts
came a series of
most interesting
lawsuits, which
resulted in set-
tling definitely
that under this
government the
ballot is not a
natural right,
moreover, that
it is not one of
those privileges
which the Con-
stitution guaran-
tees-but that it

is a political privilege given as a state believes wise.

The first of these suits came out of an attempt to vote made in the District of Columbia by some fifty women. They were refused. On the ground that they had been denied a natural right guaranteed by the Constitution

Among these was Susan B. Anthony herself. "Women already Citizens and therefore Voters," had been Miss Anthony's text from the hour she had read Mr. Minor's argument and she had been watching for the time when she should be long enough at her home in Rochester to test her claim. That happened in the fall of '72.

ESTHER MORRIS-PIONEER SUFFRAGIST
OF WYOMING

From a photograph courteously loaned by her son, Robert C.
Morris of Green River, Wyoming

they brought
suit against the
Board of In-
spectors. The
case, which was
carried to the
Supreme Court
of the United
States, was lost, the court holding that the
right to vote was not a natural but a political
right, and that declaring a person a citizen
as the XIVth Amendment did, was not
making him a voter. The decision was not
taken as final, however, and at various points
women decided to attempt to exercise the fran-
chise in the presidential election of 1872.

It would be difficult to find a more typical woman pioneer of
the nineteenth century than Mrs. Morris. She was born near
enough to the Revolution to feel its inspiration. She shared in
all the liberal intellectual movements which followed. She worked
out a successful independent career and later joined the West-
ward pioneer movement. In each community in which she
settled she was a forceful advocate of new ideas and a determined
apostle of law, order and progress. She deserves the place she
holds in the history of Wyoming

She not only registered, but she persuaded some fifty other women to do the same. The excitement over the registration produced a great stir in Rochester and frightened all but fifteen of the women from voting, but fifteen did vote. Two weeks later these fifteen women were ar

rested for having voted without the legal right, and the Inspectors who had permitted it were also arrested. A true bill of indictment was found against them all.

It was not until the next June that the trial came off. Miss Anthony employed her time in making capital for her cause out of the fresh interest in the question which her arrest had aroused. "Is it a crime for a

United States citizen to vote?" was the title of the lecture which she delivered far and near, much to the disgust of those who opposed her and who called her a "corruptionist" for trying to influence public opinion before her trial. The charge did not worry Susan-any more than the fact that she was under arrest. Indeed, she took pains to show her defiance by appearing

in Rochester for the spring city election, and voting again!

The trial, which was held at Canandaigua, N. Y., was a summary affair. The opposing attorneys made their arguments, the judge read a written opinion, evidently prepared beforehand, in which he reiterated what had already been declared by the Supreme Court, that the regulation of suffrage was a state's right. He then instructed the jury to bring in a charge of guilty and ordered the clerk to record it. He even refused that the jury be polled. Miss Anthony's indignation was boundless. She declared that she had not had a fair trial. Her counsel asked for a new trial, but this was denied. The only consolation Miss Anthony had was telling the Court what she thought of him and his procedure, which she succeeded in doing in spite of his repeated declaration: "The Court cannot allow the prisoner to go on," "The prisoner must sit down," etc.

She was sentenced to pay a fine of $100.00 and costs, and she answered back:

under the Constitution, but she did not cease her agitation on that line until, in 1875, the Supreme Court of the United States laid down an elaborate dictum confirming the several previous decisions. This was in a suit brought by Mrs. Minor of St. Louis, the wife of the man who had in the first place worked out the argument. Mrs. Minor, in October, 1872, tried to register. She was refused and thereupon she brought suit against the Registrar.

The question argued in the Supreme Court of the state was whether, since the adoption of the XIVth Amendment, a woman who is a citizen of the United States and of the state of Missouri is a voter in that state, notwithstanding the provision of the Constitution and laws of the state, which confined the right of suffrage to men alone. The court decided that she was not. Mrs. Minor then carried her case to the Supreme Court of the United States where it was promptly taken up, and in March, 1875, the opinion was pronounced by Chief Justice Waite, himself a believer in Woman's Suffrage.

According to this opinion it had not needed. the XIVth Amendment to make women citizens. They had always been considered so by the legislative and judicial bodies of the United States. The direct question was not of their citizenship but whether voting was one of the "privileges" guaranteed by the Constitution to citizens. The court showed that the framers of the Constitution did not attempt to define who should vote in the various states which went into the Union. It left that to the states, and in no one of them were all the male citizens allowed to vote. In one of them (New Jersey) women were given the suffrage. Such was the state control over the suffrage that in 1807 this right was withdrawn by the legislature of New Jersey. The Federal Government could not prevent this, for New Jersey had complete con

"May it please your honor, I will never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty. All the stock in trade I possess is a debt of $10,000 incurred by publishing my paper-The Revolution-the sole object of which was to educate all women to do precisely as I have done, rebel against your man-made, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, which tax, fine, imprison and hang women, while denying to them the right to representation in the government; and I will work on with might and main to pay every dollar of that honest debt, but not a penny shall go to this unjust claim. And I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim, 'Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God."" But she was not to have the satisfaction of trol of matters of suffrage within her borders. going to prison, for the Judge said:

"If the courts can consider any question set"Madam, the Court will not order you to tled this is one," the opinion went on. "For stand committed until the fine is paid."

The fine never was paid, nor was that of the inspectors who were likewise found guilty and fined. Miss Anthony's counsel appealed to Congress to remit the fine on the grounds that she had been denied the right to a trial by jury, but the appeal was denied and there the case rested. As for the inspectors, refusing to pay their fine, they were imprisoned for a weeka week in which they were feasted and applauded by the suffragists of Rochester-and at the end pardoned by President Grant.

Miss Anthony was, of course, chagrined with the rather farcical outcome of her attempt to assert what she honestly believed to be her right

ninety years the people have acted upon the idea that the Constitution when it conferred citizenship did not necessarily confer the right of suffrage." Being unanimously of this opinion, the Supreme Court confirmed the judgment of the lower court.

But while the organized militant suffragists had been staking everything on this short cut to the ballot through the XIVth Amendment, suffrage had come naturally and because it was obviously of political value in two territories of the Union, Wyoming and Utah. In the former the women's votes were needed to help keep order, in the latter, the Mormons needed them to outnumber the Gentiles.

From a photograph taken by Notman of Boston, about 1870, and furnished through the courtesy of her husband, Edmund Hudson, of Hartford, Ct.

Mary Clemmer's "Woman's Letters from Washington," contributed to the New York Independent from March, 1866, to her death in 1882, are her chief claim to remembrance, though she published three novels and one volume of verse. She was the first woman, so far as the writer knows, to "earn $5,000 a year" in journalism-a fact which made a deep impression at the time

GRACE GREENWOOD (SARAH JANE LIPPINCOTT)

Enlarged from a carte-de-visite photograph by Brady, Washington, D. C., in the collection of Frederick H. Meserve, New York

The most distinguished newspaper correspondence done in this country by women belongs to the war and after-war period and came from Washington. In this group of correspondents Grace Greenwood was a leader-less because of the value of what she wrote than because of the novelty of a woman succeeding in journalism as early as she did

By 1875, then, the advocates of woman suffrage had before them a clear path. The question of their constitutional right to suffrage had been cleared up. Two direct paths were open to them, one a XVIth Amendment, similar to the XVth, forbidding the denial of suffrage on account of sex, the second was to persuade state legislatures to strike the word "male" from their constitutions. To help them in this latter undertaking they had suffrage at work in two territories. They were splendidly organized. They had the platform for the taking. They had an increasing number of educated women to assist them. It remained to persuade a majority of both men and women that their votes were needed.

difficult situation she faced, she said summarily themselves as jurors, and as for Mrs. Moore, she that the thing needed to keep order in Wyoming was appointed a justice of the peace and adminwas woman's suffrage. Among her townsmen istered the law for a term so vigorously as to was a vigorous citizen, Col. W. H. Bright. make a deep impression on the community, Col. Bright had a great respect for the superior which was anything but peaceable in its ineducation and judgment of both Mrs. Moore stincts. and of his own wife, and when they proposed to him that he introduce into the territorial legislature a bill giving women the ballot he consented. The bill was prepared then in all seriousness, probably by Mrs. Moore, at least with her help. It met much ridicule in debate, and Mr. Bright seems to have carried on a lively campaign in its interests, using whatever argument he thought would appeal to the man whose vote was solicited, without much attention to its soundness. One argument he is credited with using with the hesitating members of his own party, the Democratic, was to vote for it that the party might get the credit, that it could not pass since the Governor, a Republican, of course, would veto it. At all events the bill was passed and it is certain that portion of the votes cast for it were by men convinced that Wyoming needed the women's votes. The Governor, John A. Campbell, hesitated over the signing. There is a romantic story that he finally put his name to the bill because of the strong suffrage sentiments of a lady in Missouri to whom he had been attached and whom he had promised when he left her that if he ever could do anything to aid her favorite cause he would. The lady tells the writer that there was no such promise made her so far as she now remembers. Those who were in consultation with Governor Campbell at the time say that he signed the bill finally with much misgiving and because he saw that it might become of political force and importance to the Republicans, as it unquestionably proved. The women used the vote in the interests of law and order. Moreover, they made a good record for

To sum up, we may say that this country started out on the last quarter of the nineteenth century with an Emancipated Women in the field, that is, if we concede that emancipation means freedom to work untrammeled for those things which you believe are for your best good. Higher education, professional education, industrial freedom, the right to the press and the platform, freedom to agitate for the ballot or for anything else she wanted, was hers. What would she make of this emancipation? Would she use it to develop her rights to the full? Did she care enough for them to make the long, steady effort which must always be made to perfect new undertakings? What would her emancipation if completed make of her? Was the woman to be produced under the new order of things to be an improvement on the woman she succeeded? What would she gain? What would she lose?

The second part of this series of articles will begin in the winter of 1910-1911, and will deal with "The Emancipated American Woman."