How a Saloonkeeper's Wife Was Used to Strip Washington Women of the Vote

A call for a meeting of the Equal Suffrage League in this city today recalls an interesting scrap of history in the state of Washington. The women in the territory were legally enfranchised by the legislature in November, 1883. The measure was popular and it was the law of the territory until a plot was hatched in Spokane to defeat it. At the charter election in that city in 1888 judges of election were selected to pave the way for the execution of a scheme to knock out woman suffrage, which had grown distasteful to the vicious and ignorant and some "conservative" citizens of both political parties. It was necessary for the judges to find a woman to act as their accomplice. The wife of a Spokane saloonkeeper and the judges of election, together with four judges of the supreme court of the territory (known to be rancorous opponents of woman suffrage) crushed the woman suffrage movement in this state. It was done this way: When the saloonkeeper's wife went to vote the judges, by a previous arrangement, refused to allow her to cast a ballot. The votes of other women were regularly accepted. She then brought suit against these judges of election, claiming $5,000 damages. It was decided adversely in the district court at Spokane and an appeal was taken to the territorial supreme court where a like result awaited her. "The next step," says a well known writer, "was an appeal to the United States supreme court, where the case was to be held awaiting the usual tardiness of the law, until a state constitution could be framed and adopted without in any way recognizing the rights of the women voters."

"In the regular course of procedure," said the Hon. Edward Eldridge, some months ago in the Pacific Magazine, "the case could not have been heard by the territorial supreme court until the month of December, long after another legislature had been elected by women as well as men; and then, as a matter of course, if the supreme court took away the ballot from women again the legislature would again restore it."

"In order to complete the conspiracy before such an event would occur, the case was rushed through the territorial courts in indecent haste and irregular form, the whole plot being planned and executed inside of eleven months, in a territory where but one regular term of the supreme court could be held in a year." The case is now before the supreme court of the United States. In the meantime gamblers, dogfighters, prizefighters, pimps, ex-convicts and the demoralizing elements of society who do not own a cent's worth of property, are sovereign voters of the state, while good women of Washington, many of whom are large property holders, are debarred from the elective franchise.