Jasper County Democrat, Volume 22, Number 92, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 February 1920 — BIG SUFFRAGE MEET [ARTICLE]

BIG SUFFRAGE MEET

TWO THOUSAND DELEGATES OPEN CHICAGO CONVENTION. Battle Is on for 20,000,000 Women Votes—Democrats and Republicans Busy. Chical, Feb. 13. —Chicago became the battle‘ground for the potential votes of 20,000,000 women as the National American Woman Suffrage association opened the preliminary conferences of its fifty-first and probably its last, annual convention. With the national political conventions only three months away, and the ratification of woman suffrage imminent, the question, “How will you vote?” threatened to supplant the query with which suffrage conventions have opened for 50 years, “When will we get the ballot?” The chief women politicians and suffrage leaders of the country were present among the 2,000 delegates and their alternates as the preliminary meetings bf‘gan In the Congress hotel. The gathering is admitted even by the opponents of equal rights to be the most important convention of women ever held in the United States. The officers of the organization are confident that the amendment providing far national woman suffrage will be ratified in time for the women to vote in the coming presidential election. How the women will go back home and vote or tell others to vote is conceded by the leaders to be the paramount issue in the congress, ostensibly nonpartisan. Headquarters have been opened in the hotel by both the Democratic and the Republican woman parties. The appearance In the printed program of the congress of pictures of prominent candidates for the presidency is sufficient evidence that the meetings will not be lacking in political color. While the convention proper will not be called to order Until Friday, the preliminaries are now in full swing, consisting of six all-day conferences on subjects of vital impotence to women.