=The Connecting Link=

When I think of the Circulation Department of the Woman’s Journal, I feel as I think Angela Morgan must have felt when she wrote the following lines for the beginning of her great poem, “Today:” 

  “To be alive in such an age! 
  With every year a lightning page
  Turned in the world’s great wonder book
  Whereon the leaning nations look.... 
  When miracles are everywhere
  And every inch of common air
  Throbs a tremendous prophecy
  Of greater marvels yet to be. 
  O thrilling age!”

The Woman’s Journal is the connecting link between the individual suffragist and the movement itself, and a certain thrill and delight and marvel get hold of me when I realize how wonderful each year is and how full of prophecy and promise and marvel is the cause for which we all work.

Because the Circulation Department of the Woman’s Journal is the tangible bond which holds us all together and makes one big family of all who work for the movement and all who are in any way connected with the paper, I am going to try to take the readers of these pages into the Journal offices and let them see the processes of the department.

While Miss Blackwell, Mr. Stevens, Miss Smith, Mr. Morris and myself are spending part of our time in preparing reading matter and pictures for the paper, and while we are working at the printing office of the Grimes Brothers on Wednesdays, Miss Spink, Miss Ethel Costello and their assistants, Miss Mosher, Miss Isabel McCormick, Miss Falvey, Miss Hegarty, Miss McCarthy, Miss Collins, Miss Cox, Miss Johnson, Miss Gilbert, and Miss Hazel McCormick are diligently at work in the Circulation Department.

What do they all do? the subscriber may ask.  In the first place, the Journal goes to forty-eight states, besides Alaska and the District of Columbia, and to thirty-nine foreign countries.  On a page by itself, in the back of this little book, will be shown the list of foreign countries.

When a subscription is received at the office, the letter carrying it has to be opened and the money entered by Miss Elizabeth Costello in the ledger—­and it takes just as long to enter 25 cents or a dollar as to enter $1,000, and it must be done just as accurately.  If the subscription is sent in for one’s self, no acknowledgment is necessary, for the next issue of the paper is sufficient to tell the subscriber that her money and order have been received.  If, however, as so often happens, one person sends a subscription for another, two additional processes must be carried out:  We must acknowledge the order and money to the person who sends it, and we must tell the other person (if the subscription is a gift) that the paper is being sent to her with the compliments of her friend, or by an anonymous person, as the case may be:  but at any rate, that the subscription is for a certain time and that she will not be billed for it.  This