local. But the club women of Lake City, Dallas, San Francisco, do not
keep their interests local. Once a year they travel, hundreds of them,
to a chosen city in the State, and there they hold a convention which
lasts a week. And every second year the club women of Minnesota and
Texas and California, and every other State in the Union, to say
nothing of Alaska, Porto Rico, and the Canal Zone, thousands of them,
journey to a chosen center, and there they hold a convention which lasts
a week. And at these state and national conventions the club women
compare their work and criticise it, and confer on public questions, and
decide which movements they shall promote. They summon experts in all
lines of work to lecture and advise. Increasingly their work is national
in its scope.

In round numbers, eight hundred thousand women are now enrolled in the
clubs belonging to the General Federation of Women's Clubs, holding in
common certain definite opinions, and working harmoniously towards
certain definite social ends. Remember that these eight hundred
thousand women are the educated, intelligent, socially powerful.

Long ago these eight hundred thousand women ceased to confine their
studies to printed pages. They began to study life. Leaders developed,
women of intellect and experience, who could foresee the immense power
an organized womanhood might some time wield, and who had courage to
direct the forces under them towards vital objects.

When, in 1904, Mrs. Sarah Platt Decker, of Denver, was elected President
of the General Federation, she found a number of old-fashioned clubs
still devoting themselves to Shakespeare and the classic writers. Mrs.
Decker, a voter, a full citizen, and a public worker of prominence in
her State, simply laughed the musty study clubs out of existence.