On call of its president, Carrie Chapman Catt, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance was summoned to its eighth congress June 6–12, 1920, in Geneva, Switzerland, seven instead of the usual two years after the last one.
That morning at 9 Father Hall, sent by the Catholic ecclesiastical authorities from England for the purpose, delivered a sermon to the congress at a special mass in Notre Dame.
[1] Catt showed how the suffrage had come in some countries where no effort had been made for it, while in others where women had worked the hardest they were still disfranchised, and she gave a scathing review of the situation in the United States, where it had been so long withheld.
She paid eloquent tributes to Susan B. Anthony, a founder of the Alliance, and to Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, who had helped to found it and had attended every congress but had died the preceding year.
[1] A few of the delegates wished to disband the Alliance; a few others desired to change the character of its objects, but by an overwhelming majority it was voted to continue it along the original lines, although broadened, until the women of all countries were enfranchised.
The Congress was held in the Maison Communale de Plainpalais, the large town hall in a suburb of Geneva, and here one evening its municipality gave a reception to the members.
The shady gardens and sunny terrace were the scene of many social gatherings.1 The congress opened with a roll call of the suffrage victories and the responses showed the almost unbelievable record that twenty countries had enfranchised their women during the years of the war!
The Official Report was edited by Miss Chrystal Macmillan, recording secretary of the International Alliance, and the Introduction was a graphic review, which said in part:[1] "Despite the difficulties of travel and the fact that only three months' notice had been given the gathering at Geneva was more widely representative than any previous meeting.
Of the twenty-six affiliated with the Alliance at the time of the last meeting, in 1913, the auxiliaries of nineteen showed their continued vitality by sending fully accredited delegates to Geneva.
Four countries, Greece, Spain, Argentina and Uruguay, sent delegates from newly formed National Suffrage Societies, which were accepted in the Alliance.
The outstanding feature of the first business session was the announcement of particulars by representatives of the many nations which had given the political and suffrage eligibility to women between 1913 and 1920—Austria, British East Africa, Canada, Crimea, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Rhodesia, Russia, Sweden, Ukraine and six more of the United States.
On Monday, a special feature was the speeches of five women members of Parliament—Helen Ring Robinson (State Senate), Colorado; Elna Munch, Denmark; Annie Furuhjelm, Finland; Lady Astor, Great Britain; Tekla Kauffman, Wurtemberg.
[1] The Woman's Leader, organ of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship of Great Britain, in its account of the Congress said:[1] The effect of these reports was intensely dramatic, mingled, as it inevitably was, with the memories of the strange and bitter conditions under which the change had come.
Germany easily surpassed other countries in this respect, having had 39 women members in the last National Assembly, 155 in the Parliaments of the Federated States and 4,000 on local and municipal bodies.
[1] Catt, president of the Alliance, welcomed each new representative in the name of all the countries, and, although the victories had been won in times of stress and war, the rejoicing was without rivalry, for in the Congress from the first day until the last no sign or mark of ill-feeling or enmity was to be found.
Not that the delegates forgot or disregarded the recent existence of the war; no one who saw them would suppose for a moment that they were meeting in any blind or sentimental paradise of fools.
[1] An important report was that of the Headquarters Committee, consisting of Catt, Mrs. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, first vice-president of the Alliance, Adela Stanton Coit, treasurer, and Miss Macmillan.
After the Congress at Budapest in 1913 the official monthly paper Jus Suffragii was removed from Rotterdam to London and the international headquarters established there.
For the next seven years the three members of the committee resident in London held regular meetings, seventy altogether, consulting Mrs. Catt by letter or cable when necessary.
[1] The report told of the meeting of the international officers and a number of the national presidents which took place in London in July, 1914, to make arrangements for the Congress in Berlin the next year.
The officers in London at once issued a Manifesto in the name of the Alliance and presented it to the British Foreign Office and the Ambassadors and Ministers in London, which after pointing out the helplessness of women in this supreme hour said: "We women of twenty-six countries, having banded ourselves together in the International Woman Suffrage Alliance with the object of obtaining the political means of sharing with men the power which shapes the fate of nations, appeal to you to leave untried no method of conciliation or arbitration for arranging international differences which may help to avert deluging half the civilized world in blood."
They decided to cooperate with the British branch of the Alliance in a public meeting, which was held August 3 with Mrs. Fawcett in the chair, and a resolution similar to the above was adopted.
They were cordially received by the members of the Conference and a pronouncement in favor of the political equality of women and eligibility to the secretariat was placed in the constitution of the League of Nations, which attracted the attention of the world.
When speaking of the United States' help I wish to make special mention of the splendid work for the Alliance by Miss Clara M. Hyde, private secretary for Mrs. Catt.
The Board instructed Margery Corbett Ashby to arrange a deputation to the League of Nations to present resolutions and to ask for the calling of the conference as soon as possible.