NAWSA Subject File National League of Women Voters Anniversary (10th) Addresses, [Speeches] Press Department National League of Women Voters Release, Wednesday 2:00 P. M. March 26, 1930 Speech of Miss Belle Sherwin, president of the National League of Women Voters, to be given Wednesday, March 26, as a part of the celebration of the Tenth Anniversary of Woman Suffrage, at the St. Regis Hotel, New York City, and carried over a nationwide hook-up on the National Broadcasting Company's system. Her topic is "The Discoveries of the Members." Listening members of the League! The number of your anniversary groups throughout the country have passed beyond my counting, but no television is needed to see you each in your own place yet together this minute! I wish I could spare words to tell all of you what I know most of you are doing - Pacific Time, Mountain Time, Central Time, Eastern Time - in groups large and small. I fancy I saw your expression in response to Mrs. Leach, Miss Ludington and Mrs. Catt as they spoke in New York; that I do so now as I look out toward you all from Washington. You must have been thinking of quite definite proofs in your own experience of the wisdom of Mrs. Catt and her allies in founding the League. Though its performance in ten years has not matched line for line, color for color, the expectations 1920, that wisdom has truly been justified of its children. You will be rising up all over the land to say so before this common anniversary hour is ended. Many of you will have turned back in memory to the first time you ever heard of a League of Women Voters as a new thing under the sun. It is refreshing to do that. Contrasted with whatever you have just been doing in the League, it is highly informing and, yes, exhilarating. For the doggerel -"that was then and this is now" was seldom more apt. And the difference, between then and now, is all in favor of the present if you count it a gain to see clearly what once was dim, to learn and to make use of learning. Do you remember the animation, the brisk interest of women in voting in 1920? It seemed as if all the women one knew and knew about were talking that lively autumn -2- of registration and state offices and hetherto unrealized mysteries of the Presidential ballot. The impression prevailed that women generally were going to the polls on Election Day, 1920, because they were eligible. Before we learned in figures that they did not all do so, did you discover with a shock that many of the previously enfranchised men you knew and respected in your community did not know the names of the candidates below the top of the ticket that year, that they did not vote as a matter of course because they could? Yet it was not until after the Elections of 1922 and 1924 that realized beyond doubt that an organization like the League was needed for an indefinitely long period, in order to bring to the light of day and then to nourish the interest of women in government and thus in voting. I think this was the first universal discover we made and it was startling compared with what we said in 1920. For we all talked then of five years, at most of ten years of political education which should enable women to justify their new suffrage by its use. We seem to have thought that all that was required for useful participation in political life was information gained once for all and universally - information as to how we are governed in town or city, county, state and nation, and information as to the means of electing by ballet desired men and women to office in those governments. We appear to have expected that a long program of what we called "improved legislation" would overtake speedily the interest we felt had been neglected by government. We know now that we did not think far beyond the immediate necessities of an overwhelming new situation. Few of us had knowledge of the realities involved. But we met them promptly. Before we sensed generally that an organization like the League had a continuous part in a great floundering democracy, we were learning individually and in adventuring groups that an organization of voters had a new touchstone, a hard flinty thing, by which all plans and acts must be tested. There was a comeback for everything we proposed and undertook. So regard for reality -3- ality has gradually become a prime factor in shaping our plans, our policies, our procedures. For before we actually understook it, we found (as one of you has recently written) that the League was different from any organization we had ever known, and that in consequence its ways of doing things had to be different, have of necessity been shaped step by step. Pay as you go is sound public finance. Make your method as you need to use it is sound administration in the League - which is[underscored] different because it is and unpartisan yet political organization. The discoveries all along that still progressing way may be summed up in two words. We have learned that we must be responsible and responsive; to which should always be added - in the public interest. You will have been illustrating to yourselves what responsibility and responsiveness have meant. Recalling how early in our ten years we learned we could not generalize on emotions or impressions or hearsays because we had entered a field in which we must defend what we said, how soon we learned that we had need to be definite in our proposals. Beyond disapproving of an existing condition or provision of government, for instance, we learned we must know why it exists, what merit or fitness it had originally or still retains, how it could be practically improved - on the basis of what has worked well elsewhere. You will recall also how soon we discovered that a few members of an organization of voters could not act in the name of all unless specifically instructed to do so; that what was desired by some of us must be referred to all of us with ample opportunity to understand and act upon it, one way or another. These disciplines of democracy we knew by sight before 1920. Since then we have learned to put our trust in them, and we have learned that, as the China boy says, we "can do." Putting our basic and intimate discoveries to work here, there and everywhere in the League, we find action that is significant and obviously of interest. The experiences of the League in the country are a great Jack Horner's pie. It is not -4- kept in a corner, but as yet no one has had time to do more than nibble at it. put in my thumb and pull out such plums as these in answer to my own question. The voters of a small New England city have good reason to know that the intelligent patient plea of an observant voter availeth much. A law requiring the separation of voters from the audience in Town Meetings had long been flouted. The League protested to the Town Council, the League chairman followed up the protest, and orderly voting procedure was restored. In the very biggest city the League's municipal affairs committee delved into a 600-page budget and faithfully attended meetings of the Board of Estimate. Recommendations for a more complete specification of items in the city's budget followed study groups of League members in assembly districts. Finally there was a hearing. The city budget now contains new features which bear a strong likeness to the League's recommendation. A League in the far West made a successful campaign last year for a compulsory jury service statute. The appointment of a woman jury commissioner came next - then a school for jurors conducted by the League, attended by women drawn on the first panel. While the League was successful in two states last year in supporting bills for permanent registration, in another state it met last-minute disheartening defeat. But "never say die." Members of this League had spent two years in study. Promptly they re-addressed their efforts to a revision of the state constitution as a fundamental need. In a one-party state a League member served as the secretary of a meeting of her party in her own ward. She was amazed to find that minutes of preceding meetings had not been properly kept. From that discovery has grown a practical plan for better attended and better conducted meetings and a registration campaign which has as an objective a full vote, an improved water supply and school system. -5- Discoveries like these, multiplied, we may make among ourselves! I actually do not know how many plums or little currants of nobler promise may already be bake in the League's pie. I cannot be tempted to prophesy. I do not yet foresee the scale of development in the League in the next decade, so I would rather not take up Mrs. Catt's challenge to set a goal for 1940. But of this I am sure that if a League pie is opened then, it will, like another famous baking, "--be a dainty dish to set before the king" wherever the king-power in a democracy be found in that day. Radio Address delivered by Carrie Chapman Catt at Luncheon of the National League of Women Voters Hotel St. Regis Wednesday, March 26, 1930 You ask me what HOPE led to the founding of the League of Women Voters. None at all. When suffragists were marching upward, on the last lap of their century old campaign, they spied Old Age coming down the path to meet them. They knew they would be caught soon, for they had been long on the way. They did not feel sorrow or regret. Glancing over their shoulders, they saw an army plodding upward behind them, younger, healthier, stronger, much handsomer, and beaming with patriotism. The Old Ones spoke softly to the Young Ones, saying " "Hear ye, we are dropping an incompleted task that we can no longer carry. Come, take hold, and finish it." The answer "Aye, Aye", unanimous and confident, came in quick response. The army picked up the dropped tools and went to work. No, it was not a hope, but a job, a hard, disagreeable job, that brought the League of Women Voters. That is the way God's work is done. The situation was this: with the vote won, there remained innumerable odds and ends of claims to equal rights, some disputed year by year for a century, that had now to be set straight and made consistent with the status of the en- franchised women. There were legal wrongs, some little, some big, that must be made right, and every code of laws was dotted with curious discriminations agains Mrs. Catt's Speech March 26, 1930 -2- women and these had not only to be thought out, but often brought to the consideration of somewhat obstreperous legislatures. These were the troubles left over from the suffrage campaign, but there were others. When the suffrage movement began, no married woman could collect or use her wages, should she earn any. As late as 1846 there were only eight occupations open to women. No industry wanted them. In 1920 industry had so expanded that the number of occupations had increased by several hundreds, and every industry wanted women. In that year they were employed in all of them except eight; that is, all occupations except eight were closed to women in 1846, - all except eight were open to women in 1920. Every day new industries are arriving and new occupations call for new women workers. Even farmers are deep in the experiments of translating corn into paper, sugar, syrup, and fertilizer, instead of feeding it to swine. Women do not feed swine, but they will work in all new substitutes. Upon this fast expanding field of industry lies the mighty prosperity of this nation, and, curiously, the industry rests largely upon its millions of women workers. Strangely, every worker is wrapped around by a group of problems and this forms the contact with the League of Women Voters. Wages: Shall the woman's equal the man's or be inferior? Hours: Shall the woman work 16 or 8, or what? Mrs. Catt's Speech March 26, 1930 -3- Seats: May she sit or must she always stand? Sanitation: Shall her health be protected or death invited? Trade Unions: Is she free to join a trade union and if she does, will she have equal rights within the Union? Indeed, there are problems enough boiling and seething around every woman of us to keep an army of keen thinkers and doers busy for a generation before they shall be cleared away. The problems confronting the new voters of 1920 were by no means confined to the rights and status of women. Men in the United States were enfranchised in six installments and in no case were these new voters asked what qualifications for voting they possessed. Suffragists discovered long ago that many of them possess none. With ignorant, untutored voters forming its constituencies the great bold progressive nation [?dr?] dreamt of by the Revolutionary fathers never came. Progressive legislation has be slow to arrive. Institutions, unbecoming such a nation as ours, still linger. Inexplicable timidity frequently possess Congresses and Legislatures, Presidents and Governors. Mrs. Catt's Speech March 26, 1930 -4- a stock of provisions which had to last six months and during that time they saw no human being except themselves. One spring the ship's crew, bringing provisions, found only one man. Upon inquiry, the man replied that he had not seen the other man for six months. He explained that they had had a dispute and had decided that they hated each other so much that neither wanted ever to see or to hear the other again, so one had gone to live in the tower while the other occupied the ground floor, and for six months they had not met. Franklin said that the spirit of these two men pervaded every Parliament he had known and gave this as the reason why so little got done. The story seems to provide an explanation why Naval Reduction Conferences do not reduce; why a high tariff Congress consumes a year and some months to raise the tariff higher. It certainly illustrates the predicament of our nation when wets have taken to the cellar and drys to the tower. The spirit of the two men, flying about in our legislatures, explains admirably why progress has often moved backward instead of forward. Observing these things, suffragists said to each other, "Wives and daughters of American men will be as ignorant, indifferent and Eddystonish as they. What shall we do about it?" "Why", others replied, "we must educate them. Remember, no party, no government, no organization, ever tried to educate the new man voter. He lived, voted and died where he was found, and that was in a rut. Mrs. Catt's Speech March 26, 1930 -5- We must not repeat that blunder. Let us have a League of Women Voters. Each League must first educate itself; then go forth and teach all it knows to other groups. It must hold schools and round tables on all the great issues of the day. It must persuade other organizations to take up the business of making good and wise women citizens. Ah, and every knowing woman must ask questions of husbands and sons at home that they cannot answer and thus agitate a single standard of political wisdom and that a higher one. It is the business of the League to drive from its midst any spirit of Eddystone that appears and ever after to wage war against such spirits in the home circle, all legislatures, and Congress. Whenever a naval conference is called again, the Leagues of Women Voters of all the nations must provide many Round Tables with a dictionary and encyclopedia in the middle of each one and all surrounded by very easy chairs. With political fly brushes they must then swish away every buzzing Eddystonean spirit. For ten years the League of Women Voters has striven. It has done excellent work and found satisfaction in the doing, but before us gleans a coming glory: a nation is coming, coming; a nation, with ideals as noble, with intelligence as outstanding, with leadership as bold, as the greatest Revolutionary father pictured in his dreams - a nation never yet achieved. The job lies unfinished on the "world's work table" but imitating Mrs. Catt's Speech March 26, 1930 -6- Kipling's words The League continueth Its work continueth Broad and deep continueth Greater than its knowing God bless the League, God bless the Nation. God bless its women voters, its men voters and more than all else God bless the rising generation. God bless one of the ablest, most devoted and keenest minded presidents any organization ever had. She is Miss Belle Sherwin. I am introducing her now and she will speak to you from Washington. 3-26-30 Address of Mrs. Norman de R. Whitehouse Instead of speaking (for five minutes) about any one event in our very eventful suffrage campaign, I should like to tell you of the most vivid impression made upon me during the campaign. It was an impression of the enormous cumulative force of growth which an idea has that is right in itself and more or less in tune with the spirit of the times when it is once launched by the faith of a pioneer and sustained by the courage and devotion of the early converts. This was brought vividly to me when toward the end of our 1917 campaign. I have never seen Susan B. Anthony. One day some suffragists were discussing her and said that she illumined every small thing she said with the most touching quality. They remembered especially Miss Anthony telling of her effort to hold her first suffrage meetings, and the story, as I remember it over these years, was something like this: that she would go into a town to hold a meeting, and the local papers would perhaps refuse to print an announcement. Then she would write out by hand some hand-bills, and take them about herself and tack them to the sides of barns or other buildings, knowing that they would soon be pulled down or defaced by boys or wanton people - but hoping that before they disappeared, some one would see them, be stirred perhaps by curiosity and come to the meeting. You could see Miss Anthony at her humble task. When I heard this little story, we were then having great bill-posters displayed throughout the State, and full-page advertisements in the papers. Such a contrast in size itself between Miss Anthony's handwritten little hand-bills and the great flaming posters visible in passing from train or motor car . . . A symbol of how the idea itself had grown. We know what storms of ridicule and hatred out pioneers had to face, and we know it took courage to be a suffragist in the early days. Most of us feel that we have that kind of courage. But the faith! We have seen here in our own cause, in the short space of less than a century, faith moving mountains, and the courage to have that faith is the courage that very few have, and the quality that should always make us humble and reverent before our pioneers. Press Department Release Wednesday 2:00 P.M National League of Women Voters March 26, 1930 Speech of Miss Katharine Ludington, of Lyme, Connecticut first vice-president of the National League of Women Voters, to be given in New York City Wednesday, March 26, at the celebration of the Tenth Anniversary of Woman Suffrage, and carried over a nation-wide hook-up on the National Broadcasting Company's system. Her topic was "Unforeseen in 1920." The League of Women Voters has never seen a day like this! From California to Maine, we are together as if we were in one room, thinking the same thoughts, honoring those who made this day possible, appraising the use which we have made of the tool they put in our hands. Have women as voters, done the things -- either catastrophical or milennial -- that were prophesied by the foes or the friends of Suffrage? Or have they perhaps, in ways unforeseen in those strenuous days, justified the faith of the pioneers? Let us say at once that we have, rather conspicuously, not fulfilled some of the prophesies. Our votes have not disrupted the home, destroyed the Church or undermined the pillars of the State. On the other hand, our votes have not markedly purified politics -- yet; nor made human welfare the main concern of government, nor brought universal peace. To state such forecasts baldly is to expose their absurdity -- yet they were a familiar part of the Suffrage Campaign. It is not strange that those who were in the pressure of the struggle did not look deeper for the possible effects of woman suffrage, but one might have expected more of the political scientists whose business it was to study social forces at work. Much in the way of comment was written, some of it not too wide of the mark, but on the whole the feminist movement fought its way along, unaccompanied by the wealth of searching analysis which followed for instance the industrial revolution, or the march of modern science. There is no time to speculate on the reason for this -- it is more useful to - 2 - ask what light the past decade has thrown on the contribution women may make to the political life of the country. What should we have expected to see in view of the qualities women had exhibited under earlier conditions? I can only suggest an obvious point or two. Woman have had age-long experience with the details of daily living, with the ordering of the background conditions for men's activities. Have they brought this painstaking habit to their new task as citizens? Have they shown interest in the methods of government and its orderly functioning as a background for the complex activities of our common life? It is a truism to say that women's habitual concern has been with the human side of things. Would a study of their organized programs and objectives show this responsible concern operating on a broader scale? Women through centuries of dependence -- economic, legal, physical -- might be expected to develop the trait of intellectual humility and teachableness. Has this marked their dealings with the perplexing problems of citizenship? Since the earliest colonial days, when the little girls sat on the steps of school houses, listening through windows while the boys were being taught, women in increasing numbers have claimed educational opportunity and whatever else they may have done or left undone, we in the League know that they have approached the issues of government with this same eagerness to learn and to understand.... To that dispassionate and olympian jury which one likes to visualize as appraising our political performance, I respectfully submit the League of Women Voters as Exhibit A. While the League is only one of the doors by which women have found their way into government life, it has presented the novel spectacle of a great body of - 3 - citizens banded together to continuously train themselves for their job as voters. This may hold more of permanent significance than any spectacular achievement could. That women not only want to do but to study to do may some day be called the outstanding fact of these ten critical years. The League was conceived by a great leader and launched by a small group, but it has been creatively shaped by a veritable army of workers. It is fair therefore to cite it as evidence, to exhibit it as a demonstration that women are bringing to the electorate certain qualities, developed through the centuries of their unenfranchised life, which are as vitally important to the state as they have been to the home or the community. In this perhaps, lies a clue for our future How shall we test our success in the next decade? By laws passed or crusades won? Yes, by all means, but, far more, by how we have done these things; whether in doing them we have spent our strength, dissipated our forces, used up our ammunition - or whether in action we have forged the tools for further action -- and in acting, have grown wise. If we hold to our self-imposed role of attending to the heretofore neglected aspects of government, if we supply a quiet and continuous infiltration of certain qualities into the electorate, we may rightfully claim to have justified the faith of the founders and to be a fitting trustee for the honor roll of their names. We are now to listen -- with eager expectation -- to the leader who not only led the Suffrage movement to a a successful outcome but had the prophetic foresight to initiate the League of Women Voters -- Mrs. Catt. Transcribed and reviewed by contributors participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.