I have here a brief report from an association which sent me as a
delegate to the National Woman Suffrage Convention, in which it is
stated that women in Pennsylvania can be elected as directors on
school boards or superintendents of schools, but can not help to
elect those officers. It must very readily occur to your minds
that when women take such interest in the schools as mothers must
needs take they must feel many a wish to control the election of
the officers, superintendents, and managers of the schools. The
ladies here from New York city could, if they had time, give you
much testimony in regard to the management of schools in New York
city, and the need there of woman's love and woman's power in the
schools and on the school boards. I am also authorized by
the association which sent me here to report that the
woman-suffragists and some other woman organizations of the city
of Philadelphia, have condemned in resolution the action of the
governor a year ago, I think, in vetoing a bill which passed
largely both houses of the Legislature to appoint women inspectors
of prisons. On such questions woman feels the need of the ballot.

The mothers of this land, having breathed the air of freedom and
received the benefits of education, have come to see the necessity
of better conditions to fulfill their divinely appointed and
universally recognized office. The mothers of this land claim that
they have a right to assist in making the laws which control the
social relations. We are under the laws inherited from barbarism.
They are not the conditions suited to the best exercise of the
office of woman, and the women desire the ballot to purge society
of the vices that are sure to disintegrate the home, the State,
the nation.