From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for Feb. 17, 1912:

“Kansas women here [in Kansas City, Kan.] today fired the first real gun in their campaign for complete suffrage. The affair was a brilliant luncheon given at the Grand hotel…. Dozens of suffragists from over Kansas and from Missouri heard the speeches given by leading suffrage advocates of the two states. Mrs. Lucy L. Johnston, wife of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Kansas and President of the Kansas State Equal Suffrage Association, said in part: ‘We have unbounded faith, as we know you have, but never, for one moment, forget that faith without work is dead and that we are working for big majorities and not just to get through. And remember, too, on that day when the returns telling of victory are coming in, you will want to know the joy of feeling that you had a part in it — that you are reaping where you have sown — and that you are not one who has stood selfishly by letting others bear the heat and burden of a battle…. When our Kansas constitution was framed only a few women in the United States were wage-earners and scarcely any in our own state. Now there are about 8,000,000 in the United States and nearly 100,000 in Kansas. Working men are beginning to realize that disfranchised women lower wages in every trade they enter and that they cannot afford to have 8,000,000 workers politically helpless. We may sigh for good old times, but the big, old-fashioned kitchen, with open fire place for cooking, and with a corner for loom and wheel, has its place only in story and history. We shall see it no more. Instead we must meet the conditions as they exist and the outlook is good.'”