A newspaper report and excerpts from Addams' February 17 speech at the National Suffrage Convention, after the defeat of municipal suffrage for women in Chicago.
Addams discusses the benefits of suffrage and how the vote will benefit immigrant women living in tenement houses. This lecture was made before the Ethical Culture Society at New Century Hall in Philadelphia on March 14, 1908 and published later.
Addams discusses poor women in Chicago and their need for suffrage at a meeting of the College Equal Suffrage Society at Boston University on March 21. The excerpt was published later.
Addams argues for women to have the vote in order that they may continue to perform their duties to family and to home in the modern world, where responsibilities, like feeding their children and keeping them safe, are no long directly within their control.
In an interview with James Evan Crown, Addams discusses the impact that woman suffrage is having on society. Addams later denied having taken part in this interview, specifically her comments on the poor.
Addams pays tribute to Theodore Parker at a Memorial Banquet in Chicago, where she praised his anti-slavery work and support of black suffrage, blamed his generation for not extending suffrage to women, and surmised that Parker would have ultimately supported the franchise for women had he lived longer.
Addams gave this lecture at least two times; once at the February 2 meeting of the New York City Women's Political Union, and again on February 14 at the Boston School Voters' League. In the lecture, she discusses the philosophical relationship between women and the State and argues for the value of women in government, leading to the importance of woman suffrage. She may have also delivered a version of this lecture in Chicago on Dec. 8, 1910, to the Fortnightly Club.
In this first installment of "Why Women Should Vote," Addams argues that antiquated notions of being a "lady" work against the woman suffrage movement.
In the final installment of "Why Women Should Vote," Addams highlights why women need the ballot and argues that woman suffrage is centuries overdue and necessary for women to protect themselves.
An excerpt from Addams' address to the National American Woman Suffrage Association, on October 21, 1911, in Louisville, Kentucky, arguing that the desire for woman suffrage comes from women's desires for better social conditions.
Roosevelt compliments Addams's article in McClure's, which argues that woman's suffrage will lift up women from vice. But he also offers a caution that women's suffrage could fail to impart real change as suffrage failed to impart real change for African Americans in the South.
Addams sends McCulloch some letters and suggests a meeting to discuss plans for the convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Milwaukee.
