Good morning,
Whitewater’s forecast for today calls for a sunny day with a high of seventy-six.
Tomorrow’s Friday Comment Forum topic — “10 Favorite Reads of All Time (including books, graphic novels, comic books, magazines, etc.).”
This Saturday, from 8 AM to 4 PM, there will be a Garage Sale Fundraiser for the Whitewater League of Women Voters, with free LWV 90th Birthday cupcakes, at 230 S. Cottage St., Whitewater. The sale items include “Great assortment of household and miscellaneous items: a FREE piano (needs work), partial penguin collection, and don’t miss the many vintage movie and other ads from the 40’s and 50’s and boxes of vintage magazines.”
The New York TImes recalls that on this date in 1920 the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was declared in effect:
The half-century struggle for woman suffrage in the United States reached its climax at 8 o’clock this morning, when Bainbridge Colby, as Secretary of State, issued his proclamation announcing that the Nineteenth Amendment had become a part of the Constitution of the United States.
The signing of the proclamation took place at that hour at Secretary Colby’s residence, 1507 K Street Northwest, without ceremony of any kind, and the issuance of the proclamation was unaccompanied by the taking of movies or other pictures, despite the fact that the National Woman’s Party, or militant branch of the general suffrage movement, had been anxious to be represented by a delegation of women and to have the historic event filmed for public display and permanent record.
Secretary Colby did not act with undue haste in signing the proclamation, but only after he had given careful study to the packet which arrived by mail during the early morning hours containing the certificate of the Governor of Tennessee that that State’s Legislature had ratified the Congressional resolution submitting the amendment to the States for action.
No Suffrage Leaders See Signing
None of the leaders of the woman suffrage movement was present when the proclamation was signed.
“It was quite tragic,” declared Mrs. Abby Scott Baker of the National Woman’s Party. “This was the final culmination of the women’s fight, and, women, irrespective of factions, should have been allowed to be present when the proclamation was signed. However the women of America have fought a big fight and nothing can take from them their triumph.”
