Surrendering the Gavel

Twenty years ago Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt organized the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. On May 12 that organization opens its biennial convention in Rome, and Mrs. Catt has announced that she will finally retire from the Presidency which she has held since 1904. As a lecturer and woman suffrage leader she is known throughout the country and also as a most prominent advocate of the Nineteenth Amendment. During recent months she has been touring South America, arousing the proponents of suffrage in those countries. Her last official act as President of the International Alliance will be to make a report on the woman movement in these Latin countries.

Mrs. Catt's work in South America may have some bearing on the selection of her successor. Inasmuch as an Anglo-Saxon has been President of the organization since its inception, it is thought advisable to elect a "Latin " woman as the next President. International politics, however, will play its part. If a French or Italian woman were elected there is fear that the German women might be alienated. Mrs. Maud Wood Park, President of the National League of Women Voters and delegate to the Convention from the United States, predicted that the next President of the Alliance would be a South American woman.

Part of the program of the convention will be consideration of independent citizenship for married women. Hitherto, in most countries, women have assumed the nationality of their husbands upon marriage. Under the Cable Law, passed last year, marriage does not affect citizenship status in the United States. So if a foreign woman marries an American citizen, although in many cases her native country disowns her, she does not automatically acquire American citizenship. The Alliance wants to do away with these "women without countries " by having measures similar to the Cable Law passed by other nations. Bills to this effect are pending in Great Britain and France.