The Ladies Literary Club of Grand Rapids, Michigan, sent this petition to Senator Julius Caesar Burrows. They ask the Senate Committee on Territories to remove the word sex from the Territorial Statehood Bill before Congress.
The bill would admit Oklahoma and Indian Territory (as one state) and Arizona and New Mexico (as one state) into the union, and included a line that “said states shall never enact any law restricting the right of suffrage on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude, except on account of illiteracy, minority, conviction of felony, mental condition, or sex.” The Club wrote that it resented “an insult so open and flagrant that…women of the west shall be so unjustly classed with illiterates, mental incompetents, felons and minors.”
This document was digitized by teachers in our Primarily Teaching 2017 summer workshop in Washington, D.C.
