Volume 17 , Issue 37

100 Years Ago Today - 19 Oct. 1915

One hundred years ago today, 19 October 1915, Tuesday, the Tulsa Daily World, Tulsa, Oklahoma, was reporting the following front page headline: "All Night Long They Talked Suffragism." In every city in New Jersey women spoke until daylight that morning. President Wilson was to vote, and democrats and republicans were split; none would forecast the results.

Newark, N.J., October 18 (1915) -- The vigor of the hot campaign waged by women workers for suffrage rose to its highest pitch the night of 18 October 1915, election eve, in every section of New Jersey. all day the yellow banners of the suffrage association and the green, white and purple of the woman's political union fluttered from hundreds of automobiles from Cap May to the New York line and that night there were few communities in the state where the voices of feminine orators were not lifted for the cause.

It was reported in this city a score of more of women workers spoke all day, passing only long enough to spell one another. Dawn and daybreak, they said, would find them still at their post for this twenty-four hour meeting was not not to end till the polls open at 6 o'clock.

Everywhere in the big cities of the state groups of women workers were speaking in the streets, hundreds of them utilizing the waning hours of the long campaign for what they believe to be a smashing drive against their political foes. The so-called whirlwind finishes of bygone campaigns within the memory of living voters had failed to equal that night's intense activity.

President Wilson's vote for suffrage would be cast in Princeton. Any man's guess - or any woman's - was as good that night as any other's as to how the battle would go the next day. The standards of the two big political parties which had opposed each other for fifty years before had been sent to the background. Democrats and Republicans were working side by side for suffrage against democrats and republicans were working no less assiduously against it. Without a precedent to guide them both sides claim victory.
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