enactment.  If the question had been submitted to the rank and file of the people of Boston, with 66,000 men paying nothing but the poll-tax, they would have undoubtedly voted against letting women have the right to vote for members of the school board; but their intelligent representatives on the floor of the Legislature voted in favor of the extension of the school suffrage to the women.  The first result in Boston has been the election of quite a number of women to the school board.  In Minnesota, in the little town of Rochester, the school board declared its purpose to cut the women teachers’ wages down.  It did not propose to touch the principal, who was a man, but they proposed to cut all the women down from $50 to $35.  One woman put her bonnet on and went over the entire town and said, “We have got a right to vote for this school board, and let us do so.”  They all turned out and voted, and not a single $35 man was re-elected, but all those who were in favor of paying $50.

It seems to be a sort of charity to let a woman teach school.  You say here that if a woman has a father, mother, or brother, or anybody to support her, she can not have a place in the Departments.  In the city of Rochester they cannot let a married woman teach school because she has got a husband, and it is supposed he ought to support her.  The women are working in the Departments, as everywhere else, for half price, and the only pretext, you tell us, for keeping women there is because the Government can economize by employing women for less money.  The other day when I saw a newspaper item stating that the Government proposed to compensate Miss Josephine Meeker for all her bravery, heroism, and terrible sufferings by giving her a place in the Interior Department, it made my blood boil to the ends of my fingers and toes.  To give that girl a chance to work in the Department; to do just as much work as a man, and pay her half as much, was a charity.  That was a beneficence on the part of this grand Government to her.  We want the ballot for bread.  When we do equal work we want equal wages.

    MRS. SAXON.  California, in her recent convention, prohibits the
    Legislature hereafter from enacting any law for woman’s suffrage,
    does it not?

    MISS ANTHONY.  I do not know.  I have not seen the new constitution.

    MRS. SAXON.  It does.  The convention inserted a provision in the
    constitution that the Legislature could not act upon the subject
    at all.

MISS ANTHONY.  Everywhere that we have gone, Senators, to ask our right at the hands of any legislative or political body, we have been the subjects of ridicule.  For instance, I went before the great national Democratic convention in New York, in 1868, as a delegate from the New York Woman Suffrage Association, to ask that great party, now that it wanted to come to the front again, to put a genuine Jeffersonian plank in its platform,