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^ 531 ••••••••• 262 • SBA to Aletta H. Jacobs1 Rochester, N.Y. December 17, 1904. My dear Friend— I had a letter from Mrs. Harper the other day, asking me to send you Volume 4, in leather, of the History of Woman Suffrage. I have put that up to go to you, and also have put in my Life and Work, and some other documents , and hope you will be glad to get them all. I have written Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, 205 W. 57th St., N.Y., telling her that I have sent the books to the hotel to you, so I think you will get them without a doubt. I am greatly disappointed that I couldn’t meet you while you are in this country, but my brother’s sickness and death occurred about the time you passed through, I understand. I should like to know what you think of the people of this country. I wish you could stay here a whole year and watch us and see us work. Isn’t it pretty good that the Territorial Committee at Washington declared that it was the woman suffrage letters from all parts of the country that moved them to strike out the whole clause from the bill which classed sex with idiots, criminals, etc. 2 It really gives me hope when any body can be moved by the letters from women, and I should think that our women all over the country would take courage. You are not going to see Miss Shaw, either, for she is in Oklahoma and doing grand service there,but I am glad that you can see Mrs.Catt,and that we have one woman that can be reached. The International Suffrage Alliance grows apace, and Mrs. Catt is just the woman to be president of it. Hoping to meet you at the International in London two years from now, I am Very sincerely yours, Y TL, on NAWSA letterhead, Aletta Jacobs Papers, Aletta, Instituut voor Vrouwengeschiedenis Amsterdam. Directed to New York City. 1. Aletta Henriëtte Jacobs (1854–1929) of the Netherlands was a physician and woman suffragist who met SBA first in London in 1899. Besides maintaining her medical practice alongside her political interests, in 1900 she published her translation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics, into Dutch. After Jacobs and her husband, Carel Victor Gerritsen, attended the International Woman Suffrage Alliance meeting in Berlin, they toured the United States for 17 december 1904 532 & nearly four months at the end of 1904. (Aletta H. Jacobs, Memories: My Life as an International Leader in Health, Suffrage, and Peace, ed. Harriet Feinberg [New York, 1996].) 2. On 15 December 1904, the Committee on Territories reported back to the Senate an amended H.R.14749,with “sex”eliminated from the controversial paragraph .A holiday recess delayed scheduling a vote until January.(Washington Post, 16, 17 December 1904; Congressional Record, 58th Cong., 3d sess., 16 December 1904, pp. 340–41.) ••••••••• 263 • SBA to Elizabeth Smith Miller Rochester N.Y. December 22nd, 1904. My dear Friend— I have received the plum pudding and a beautiful letter from your daughter Lou. 1 Many thanks to you for thinking of us and saying on the card the good word you did. I suppose you have received a letter from Senator Beveridge and others , and that you have seen, if he has not written you, that the obnoxious placing of “sex” with idiots and criminals, etc., has been done away with. I have this morning been reading the bill which the Senator sent me, and it has “male citizen” over and over, but I suppose it will be no use to try and get them to drop it. 2 They are the last two territories that are to come in. We have got to learn to fight on some other line, and I think Senator Platt’s bill to cut off the southern representation is the place for it. You see he has a long bill and has to hedge around all sorts of ways in order to hit the south and not take in Massachusetts and other states that have the educational qualifications. It seems to me that now is the time,—after forty years of wandering in the wilderness which the Republicans have had since 1865, 3 —when they put “male”in the 2nd Section of the 14th Amendment ,—to demand of the Republicans to base their representation upon the voters, and say that each state...

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