Jasper County Democrat, Volume 6, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 February 1904 — WOMEN DO NOT WANT TO VOTE. [ARTICLE]

WOMEN DO NOT WANT TO VOTE.

I have before me six editorials bearing upon women suffrage that just arrived through the mail and every one of them assumes, as an excuse for denying women their citizens right to the ballot, that women do not want to vote. Even editors who claim to believe in the justice of it make this excuse, Pray, what would you have we women do to prove tnat we wanted the ballot? You will not let us vote in order to prove it, except in four States and in those states the women have certainly shown that they want to vote by actually doing so year after year in as great a proportion, and sometimes greater than the men. If you do not believe these women care for the ballot just try to take it from them and see what will be the result.

We have presented more petitions to our legislative bodies asking for the ballot than has ever been presented upon any other subject in the history of our Nation. At the time of the last Constitutional Convention in NewYork State the women secured petitions from 600,000 citizens, 21 years of age and above, asking that a woman suffrage amendment be submitted to the voters, but the Convention refused to submit it’ This was the only amendment ask for by any large number of citizens. Before the women obtained this mammoth petition the editor of the New York Sun said: If the women secure 100,000 names the convention will be obliged to submit the amendment, still they refused to submit it after the women had secured six times that number of names.

Last year almost every organization of women in the state of Illinois united on a suffrage hill and sent their delegates to the legislature to prove that the women did want to vote, but it was lost just the same. The same is true of nearly every state where women have made the attempt to secure some form of suffrage. In view of all these facts, I think it about time that “women do not want to vote” is relegated to the past to keep company with all the other false prophecies about women that have done duty in the past. We know it is about all there is left for the opposition and they will cling to it as a*drowning man does to his last and only hope. We all know this is not the true reason why men do uot give women the ballot, and we also know that those who control the votes are ashamed to give the true reason. Elnora Monroe Babcock.