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^ 279 15 march 1899 ••••••••• 123 • SBA to Mary Hutcheson Page1 Rochester, N.Y., March 15, 1899. My Dear Mrs Page Our National treasurer—Mrs Upton—has just written me that you & your Committee have contributed $500— and more to help our Organizer Mrs C. C. Catt work with the Legislatures of Oklahoma & Arizona to secure the suffrage for their women this winter— 2 It was splendid of you to thus specify the place & way for your money to be used—and it is most cruel that both of those bodies should come so near to giving the desired right, and yet fail to do so! Still—though Antis will reckon two more defeats —we shall count them as almost victories! We have only to go again two years hence—and do over again with their next Legislature—and then we surely must win the necessary vote in both Houses of both Legislatures! At any rate—we must & surely will “keep pegging away on this line”—if it takes a whole decade of years to gain the law!! But for the coming eight months—I propose to propose to all of our women of all of our States & territories to give their attention—their time & labor to saving our nation from thrusting a male oligarchy upon the people of nthep Hawaiian Islands—as the bills in both Houses of the 55th Congress, just closed, proposed to do. 3 Their failure to become law is a god-send to our cause—because it gives us time to roll up a mammoth petition to the 56th Congress—praying that in whatever form of government we give to Hawaii—or to any of our newly acquired possessions it shall be based upon the principle of equal rights to women—civil and political— That whatever the nvotingp qualification shall be—whether of property or education or both—it shall not be one of sex—or any other insurmountable qualification— Do you & your Committee believe that the women of this nation can be roused to this work? It seems to me we could in no way do so much good educational work—as by all of us setting about rolling up two or three or more millions of signatures to such a petition— Again thanking you for your good help to our good cause—I am very sincerely & gratefully U Susan B. Anthony 280 & 15 march 1899 Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead for 1899, Women’s Rights Collection, MCR-S. 1. Mary Hutcheson Page (1860–1940), educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lived in Brookline, Massachusetts, with her husband and children. Through her Committee of Work, she created an alternative to the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association in order to raise money for national suffrage work and organize new local constituencies. The Committee of Work sent money to the Colorado amendment campaign of 1893, and its donations continued. In 1901, the committee gave birth to the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government , one of the state’s most important twentieth-century suffrage groups. (Guide to Mary Hutcheson Page Papers, Women’s Rights Collection, MCR-S; New York Times, 11 February 1940; Sharon Hartman Strom, “Leadership and Tactics in the American Woman Suffrage Movement: A New Perspective from Massachusetts,” JAH 62 [September 1975]: 300–303; Joan C. Tonn, Mary P. Follett: Creating Democracy , Transforming Management [New Haven, Conn., 2003], 129–30; Report of the Thirty-first Annual Convention, 1899,p.140,and Report of the Thirty-second Annual Convention, 1900, p. 44, Film, 39:722ff, 40:829ff.) 2. The Organization Committee undertook lobbying in Oklahoma and Arizona territories at the start of 1899. Carrie Catt addressed joint sessions of the territorial legislatures. In Oklahoma, where Mary Hay spent several months, the house passed House Bill 41 for woman suffrage on 3 March 1899, but the council buried it in committee on 10 March. Five days later, a local newspaper ran the headline, “Did Bribes Kill It? Defeat of the Woman’s Suffrage Bill Said to Have Been Caused by Money.” In Arizona, legislators followed a similar course. The house passed House Bill 35 on 10 February 1899, but in the council, the bill never emerged from committee. (Report of the Thirty-first Annual Convention, 1899, pp. 29–34; Guthrie Daily Leader, 14, 17, 24, 25 January, 1 February, 3, 7, 10, 15 March 1899; Phoenix Weekly Herald, 9, 16 February, 16, 23 March 1899.) 3. The Fifty-fifth Congress ended on 3 March 1899. Neither the Senate nor the House of...

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