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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 Representatives took action on their Hawaii bills before adjournment. ••••••••• 124 • SBA to Clara Bewick Colby Rochester, N.Y., March 17— 1899. Yes—Blackwell has done what the old adage declared a foul thing he illegible his for a hen—even—dirtied his own wife’s nest— 1 But dont—I beg of you say one word about him in your paper—let him have all the fun by himself— neither Mrs Stanton nor Mrs Harper is going to say a word back— Let him alone— Lovingly U S. B A ^ 281 17 march 1899 Y ALS, on NAWSA letterhead for 1899, Clara B. Colby Collection, CSmH. 1. After three paragraphs of praise, most of it for SBA’s person rather than Ida Harper’s book, Henry Blackwell, writing in Woman’s Journal, 11 March 1899, turned to one of his favorite subjects: “Valuable and delightful as Miss Anthony’s biography is, it has one conspicuous lack. It does not explain the causes that led to the division between the ‘National’ and ‘American’ wings of the woman suffrage movement.” He proceeded to fill nine columns of the paper with his familiar list of misbehavior and misjudgment on the parts of ECS and SBA, by which “[t]he cause had been hopelessly blackened in the eyes of the public.” Lucy Stone, who died in 1893, had refused to state the facts of division, Blackwell explained. “If she were living, it is not unlikely that she would still take this view.” But he would not follow her example: “Let it be repeated and emphasized that only a small fraction of the suffragists ever advocated making easy divorce a part of the program of the Suffrage Association, or favored the alliances with Mr. Train or with Mrs. Woodhull .” On Blackwell as his own historian, see also Papers, 5:213n, 297–98, 308, 371. ••••••••• 125 • Speech by SBA to the NationalAmerican Woman Suffrage Association Editorial note: SBA called the National-American’s thirty-first annual convention to order and made her opening speech at the St.Cecilia Club House in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the afternoon of 27 April 1899. According to another report, she prefaced this speech by explaining that suffrage associations only counted their annual meetings back to the postwar period, not to 1848, “as the suffrage work was dropped during the civil war,[and] the...

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