home for only one day. The suggestion was never intended to be carried out and did not go further than a letter sent by Mrs. Whitehouse to the presidents of women's clubs and some other organizations, asking them to come to a meeting to consider the plan, copies of which were sent to the newspapers. The effect was extraordinary. Department stores, telephone company managers, employers of all kinds of women's labor, hospitals and schools, protested loudly against the crippling of public service, the loss of profits and the disruption of business which would result from even one day's absence of women from their public places. Editorial writers devoted columns to denouncing the proposal. Suffrage leaders were bitterly criticized for even suggesting such a public calamity. The favorite argument of the "antis" was answered for all time.
At the very end of the campaign the anti-suffragists began to advertise extensively in the subway and on the elevated roads in New York City but the firm that controlled this space refused to accept any advertising from the suffragists. Woman's wit, however, was equal to the emergency. For the three days preceding the election one hundred women gave their time to riding on elevated and subway trains holding up large placards on which were printed answers to the "anti" advertisements. The public understood and treated the women with much courtesy.
It is difficult to give even the barest outline of the work of the Press Bureau, at first under the management of Mrs. Haryot Holt Dey and later of Miss Rose Young, with a volunteer force of 214 press chairmen over the State. There were 2,136 publications in the State, 211 dailies, 1,117 weeklies, 628 monthlies, and 180 foreign publications printed in twenty-five languages. To the weeklies a bulletin from the central bureau went regularly; 3,036 shipments were made of pages of plate matter. The American Press Association and the Western Newspaper Union for many weeks sent out columns of suffrage news with their regular service for the patent inside page used by country papers. The bureau furnished material for debates and answered attacks against suffrage. The support given by the newspapers was of great value. Of the fifteen dailies of New York City ten were pro-suffrage, while the rural press was overwhelmingly in favor.
