0.23 5.5 civic duty  (Page 4/5)

Many are moved forward by this spirit without knowing its source. I am not making a plea for female suffrage. I am telling why it is coming. To oppose it will prove futile.

BS , December 19, 1912, p. 1.

Samuel P. Brooks, president of Baylor University, was even a less defensive and more positive advocate of woman suffrage. In a speech to the Waco Equal Suffrage Association in 1914, he gave a thoughtful explanation of the transformation of social power from a base of physical strength to one of merit and intelligence, for which women were as well suited as men. He claimed that men had kept women repressed because they were just as surely victims of cultural conditioning as women were. He believed that women were weary of acting indirectly, exercising

"silent powers,"

and demonstrating

"canned innocence." "Real mothers, like real fathers, are of the earth--earthy,"

he revealed. Hope lay in both sexes realistically seeking common ground and growth. ^{Samuel P. Brooks, "Some Phases of Woman Suffrage," TS of speech delivered April 30, 1914, to the Waco Equal Suffrage Association, Waco, Texas. Samuel P. Brooks Papers, Texas Collection, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.}

Unaccustomed or unwilling to deal with political issues in or out of the church, women generally let these men defend the suffrage cause and waited for the vote to come their way. The exception was Edna Best Crawford, a short-story contributor to the Standard , who wrote:

When Dr. Gambrell's most magnificent editorial on "Why Female Suffrage is Coming" appeared, my hand sought his across the miles of distance intervening between us in a fervent "God bless you, Dr. Gambrell!" "and in a thousand amens!" I believe the time is fitting when we as women should break our silence, however reluctantly, and boldly declare our positions.

In response to the time-worn excuse that voting would detract from woman's role as wife and mother, she responded:

"Doctors, lawyers, merchants, farmers nor any of the great host of other professions do not give up their professions nor neglect them because of casting a ballot."

BS , February 13, 1913, p. 7.

The women did not join in Edna Crawford's chorus of "amens," but were either timid and awkward about facing the subject in open forum, disinterested and preoccupied with other concerns, or willing to wait for the inevitable. ^{Baptist women exhibited the same patient posture toward the Southern Baptist Convention, which was debating the issue of women's serving as voting delegates, or "messengers," during this same period. They finally received a positive vote in 1918.}

"There is no use to jump into the sea to pull a ship in, when it is already coming,"

explained Dr. Gambrell, justifying his own moderation toward an issue that he supported in principle.

BS , July 13, 1916, p. 10.

As predicted, Texas women were granted suffrage to vote in primaries, almost tantamount to enfranchisement in the one-party state, in 1918; Texas was the ninth state in the Union and first in the South to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment in June 1919.

A. Elizabeth Taylor, "The Woman Suffrage Movement in Texas," Journal of Southern History , 17, No. 2 (1951), pp. 210, 215.