Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/614

CHAPTER XLIII.

ILLINOIS.

Chicago a Great Commercial Center—First Woman Suffrage Agitation, 1855—A. J. Grover—Society at Earlville—Prudence Crandall—Sanitary Movement—Woman in Journalism—Myra Bradwell—Excitement in Elmwood Church, 1868—Mrs. Huldah Joy—Pulpit Utterances—Convention, 1869, Library Hall, Chicago—Anna Dickinson—Robert Laird Collier Debate—Manhood Suffrage Denounced by Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony—Judge Charles B. Waite on the Constitutional Convention—Hearing Before the Legislature—Western Suffrage Convention, Mrs. Livermore, President—Annual Meeting at Bloomington—Women Eligible to School Offices—Evanston College—Miss Alta Hulett—Medical Association—Dr. Sarah Hackett Stephenson—"Woman's Kingdom," in the Inter-Ocean—Mrs. Harbert—Centennial Celebration at Evanston—Temperance Petition, 180,000—Frances E. Willard—Social Science Association—Art Union—International Congress at Paris—Jane Graham Jones—Moline Association.

Illinois, one of the Centra] States in our vast country, stretching over five and a half degrees of latitude, was admitted to the Union in 1818. Its chief city, Chicago, extending for miles round the southern shores of Lake Michigan, is the great commercial center of the boundless West. We may get some idea of the magnitude of her commerce from the fact that the receipts and shipment of flour, grain and cattle from that port alone in 1872 were valued at $370,000,000.

When the battles with the Indians were finally ended, the population of the State rapidly increased, and in 1880 the census gave 1,586,523 males and 1,491,348 females. In the school statistics we find about the same proportionate number of women and girls as teachers and scholars, in the public schools and in all the honest walks of life; while men and boys in the criminal ranks are out of all proportion. For example, in the state-prison at Joliet there were, in 1873, 1,321 criminals; fifteen only were women. And yet the more virtuous, educated, self-governed part of the population, that shared equally the hardships of the early days, and by industry and self-sacrifice helped to build up that great State, is still denied the civil and political rights