University of Virginia Library

Will Women Vote?

In Wyoming women have had full suffrage since 1869. The
Wyoming Secretary of State, in a letter to Miss Alice Stone Blackwell,
of Boston, says that 90 per cent of them vote. (Woman's
Journal, May 6, 1905.)

The Colorado Secretary of State, in a letter to Mrs. Charles Park,
of Boston, says that 80 per cent of Colorado women register, and
about 72 per cent vote. (Woman's Journal, Aug. 20, 1908.)

The Chief Justice of Idaho and all the Justices of the State Supreme
Court have signed a published statement that "the large vote
cast by the women establishes the fact that they take a lively interest."
(Woman's Journal, Aug. 20, 1908.)

In Australia, in the first elections after the women were enfranchised,
which took place in 1903, 359,315 women voted; in 1906,
431,033; and in 1910, 601,946.

When woman suffrage was granted in New Zealand in 1893, the
estimated number of women in the country was 139,915. Of these,
109,461 registered to vote; and the number of women voting has increased
at each triennial Parliamentary election since. In 1893, 90,290
women voted; in 1896, 108,783; in 1899, 119,550; in 1902, 138,565; in
1905, 175,046; in 1908, 190,114. (New Zealand Year Book.) Mrs. K.
A. Shepard, president of the New Zealand Council of Women, writes
that in the elections of 1911, 221,858 women voted.

The majority of the women had never asked for suffrage in any
of these places.