Dating from that evening a stranger visiting the convention might almost have thought that the sole object of the gathering was a discussion of the right of women to the ballot.  Women floated through the corridors of the hotel talking suffrage.  They talked suffrage in little groups in the dining-room, they discussed it in the street cars going to and from the convention.

The local suffrage clubs had planned a banquet to the visiting suffragists and had calculated a maximum of one hundred and fifty applications for tickets.

Three days before the banquet they had had nearly three hundred applications, and when the hour for the banquet arrived every available seat, the room’s limit of three hundred and seventy-five, was occupied.  Outside were women offering ten dollars a plate and clamoring for the privilege of merely listening to the after-dinner speakers.  Something must have happened in the course of those eight years to make such an astounding change in the attitude of the club women.

The fact is that until the club women had been at work at practical things for a long period of years, they did not realize the social value of their own activities.  They thought of their work as benevolent and philanthropic.  That they were performing community service, citizens’ service, they did not remotely dream.  There is nothing surprising in their naivete.  It is a fact that in this country, although every one knows that women own property, pay taxes, successfully manage their own business affairs, and do an astonishing amount of community work as well, no one ever thinks of them as citizens.

American men are accustomed to women in almost all trades and professions.  It doesn’t astonish a New Yorker to see a hospital ambulance tearing down the street with a white-clad woman surgeon on the back seat.  A woman lawyer, architect, editor, manufacturer, excites no particular notice.  In the Western States men are beginning to elect women county treasurers, county superintendents of schools, and in Chicago, second largest city in the country, a Board of Education, overwhelmingly masculine, recently appointed a woman City Superintendent of Schools.

Yet to the vast majority of American men women do not look like citizens.

As for the majority of American women they have always until recently thought of themselves as a class,—­a favored and protected class.  They cherished a sentimental kind of delusion that the American man was only too anxious to give them everything that their hearts desired.  When they got out into the world of action, when they began to ask for something more substantial than bonbons, the club women found that the American man was not so very generous after all.

A typical instance occurred down in Georgia.  A few years ago the women of Georgia found a way to introduce into the legislature a child-labor law.  It was really a very modest little bill and it protected only a fraction of the pitiful army of cotton-mill children, but still it was worth having.  The women worked hard and they got some very powerful backing and a barrel or two of petitions.  Nevertheless, the bill was defeated.  One legislative orator rose to explain his vote.