Digital Exhibits

Weekly Index of Pacific University: Mrs. Ehrgott of Portland Speaks On Suffrage

This is a 1912, Pacific University Index Article. It talks about the speech of the leader Mrs. Erhgott, whom speaks upon the subject of women's suffrage. She describes the rights of women as something that was gained over time. Mrs. Ergott used the arguments of Medieval scholars debates of women having souls, talks about the Quakers being the only religious group in the early United States giving women the right to vote, and then goes into the subject of the Boston school system shutting its doors to women in 1812, and how by this point women finally argued against their separation from education. In 1912, Mrs. Erhgott compelled a crowd to consider also giving women the right to vote. As she argues, many women were already starting to go into the public business world and 17 percent of high school graduates come from high school. She further argued, that it would only be fair to let women have the right to vote, because women who are educated do make society better, and excluding them would exclude an significant portion of the population from having a say in society. At the time, there existed a anti-womens suffrage movement to counter her. They believed that when women received the right to vote, that they would not use the right to vote. Her speech countered their objections by attracting a large crowd interested in her speech.

Pacific University

Pacific University Index

PUA_WH_104.pdf

In Copyright

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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