Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 205, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 August 1916 — Balance of Power Held by Women Who Have Vote in Twelve Suffrage States [ARTICLE]

Balance of Power Held by Women Who Have Vote in Twelve Suffrage States

By FLORENCE M. BREWER of Pittsburgh

There are, excluding aliens, minors and everyone to whom the antis could find an objection, 4,034,594 women qualified to vote in the coming elections. The 12 suffrage states control one-fifth of the electoral college and one-third of the votes necessary to elect a president. In the last 20 years it would have required a change of only one-ninth of the total vote cast to throw the election in any of the suffrage states to the other party. In the last five presidential elections no one of the suffrage states has gone steadily for any one party. As for congressional elections, much the same situation exists. Women vote for members of both houses in 11 states; in Illinois the women vote only at a municipal election. Since 1896 not one of the districts in these states has been carried steadily by the Democratic party, and only five have been held in the Republican column. In two-thirds of the elections of this period less than 10 per cent of the total vote cast would have served to change the elections. Women cannot always agree, cannot always stand as a united political force. The important thing is that they should keep their direct, clear vision of what politics is; should be able always to forget the local and the personal as they are now forgetting them, to see the nation as a whole, to keep what one of their leaders calls ‘‘the great throb of faith that has been renewed in their blood by this movement among free women to help the unfree.”