“Conditions in Colorado Today After Nineteen Years of Women Voting,” Salem Daily Capital Journal, October 23, 1912, 3.
-Transcription
Conditions in Colorado Today After Nineteen Years of Women Voting
It was in the year 1893 that woman suffrage was granted in Colorado. For 19 years the suffragists have used this state as a sample of good government, brought about by the womans’ vote. The anti-suffragists ask the men of Oregon to read the words of a Colorado woman—one who has been and is now politically prominent. She tells the conditions of politics in her state today.
Mrs. Elizabeth Cass Goddard, of Colorado, a former ardent suffragist, has held the following offices, namely: Delegate to city and state conventions, deputy sheriff, watcher at the polls and member of the Republican state committee from El Paso county. She has been represented on various boards of the city and state organizations. For example, vice-president for Colorado of the mother’s congress, second vice-president of the Y.W.C.A. of Colorado Springs, first vice-president of the boys’ club, trustee of the city federation of women’s clubs, president of the Humane society only woman member of the Anti-Tuberculosis Committee of Colorado Springs and president of the Colonial Dames of Colorado. We wish to quote from a letter written by Mrs. Goddard to a member of the board of anti-suffrage association of Portland. She says in part:
“I am in a peculiar position, for while I disapprove most emphatically of equal suffrage, and while I have yet to see one good result from it, while the women of Colorado have the responsibility, I must do my part toward trying to make matters better. But I frankly say I do not see how this can be accomplished. It certainly has not yielded any such results up to this date. We have no cleaner politics, no purer politicians, no less graft, no better laws for women and children than Massachusetts has, in spite of the often-repeated assertions of the suffragist, not one of the laws we have is the result if the votes of women. As far as this goes the influence of women outside the suffrage is better than with the exercise of it. I have found the professional suffragist or politician hard, aggressive, loud in voice and manner, and ready to antagonize any one to carry her point. It is not with her an “appeal to reason” but an appeal to sentiment, to passion and to fancied wrong done to women. There is very little now to say on the subject excepting that my observation has only intensified my feelings on the subject. The better class of women do not want to vote. It is hard for me to induce them to come to the polls, when any stirring question comes up, and on ordinary matters they neither feel nor even pretend…feel any interest.”
Judging from the conditions as they now stand in Colorado, do we honestly feel that the women’s vote will better our state of Oregon?
Oregon State Association opposed to the extension of suffrage to women.
MRS. FRANCIS JAMES BAILEY, President.