Miss Gail Laughlin, of Portland, member of the Maine Legislature and National Vice President of the National Woman's Party, who will preside at the national Convention of the National Woman's Party in Colorado Spring July 7th to 10th, and will be the chief speaker on the Speakers' Train leaving Washington en route for the convention July 3rd. Miss Laughlin will speak at Chicago, Kansas City, Topeka and Denver. Miss Laughlin, former National President of the Business and Professional Women's Clubs, has lived in California, where she was Vice-Chairman of the Republican Party, and in Colorado, where she likewise was very active. Miss Laughlin has had wide experience speaking for feminism and wider opportunities for women in practically every state in the Union.

Suffragettes Women's suffrage is the right of women to vote in elections. Beginning in the late 1800s, women worked for broad-based economic and political equality and for social reforms, and sought to change voting laws in order to allow them to vote. National and international organizations formed to coordinate efforts to gain voting rights, especially the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (founded in 1904, Berlin, Germany), and also worked for equal civil rights for women. Women who owned property gained the right to vote in the Isle of Man in 1881, and in 1893, the British colony of New Zealand granted all women the right to vote. Most independent countries enacted women's suffrage in the interwar era, including Canada in 1917; Britain, Germany, Poland in 1918; Austria and the Netherlands in 1919; and the United States in 1920. Leslie Hume argues that the First World War changed the popular mood: "The women's contribution to the war effort challenged the notion of women's physical and mental inferiority and made it more difficult to maintain that women were, both by constitution and temperament, unfit to vote. If women could work in munitions factories, it seemed both ungrateful and illogical to deny them a place in the polling booth. But the vote was much more than simply a reward for war work; the point was that women's participation in the war helped to dispel the fears that surrounded women's entry into the public arena..."