TRIBESWOMEN'S PETITION, THE, presented to the Assembly of the Tribes on the 14th of March 1897, praying that the franchise the Second Widening Act (q.v.) of 1885 had extended to very nearly the whole adult male population of the Commonwealth be extended, on the same property and residency terms already applied to men, to women also. It was signed, in the returns this contributor has examined at the Assembly's own clerk's office, by upward of two hundred and sixty thousand subjects of the Commonwealth, a number the clerk's own certificate records as the largest single petition the Assembly had received on any subject since the Reapportionment Quarrels of the last century, and it was received, by the Assembly's own standing order on public petitions, with the ordinary courtesies: read at the table, referred to a select committee, and reported upon, in due course, without adverse comment on either its substance or the manner of its presentation.
The committee's report, delivered the following session, found the petitioners' case "stated with a clarity and a moderation the Committee has found it easy to commend," and recommended no action beyond the report's own printing at the Assembly's expense, a recommendation the Assembly adopted without division. The question has since been raised in nine further sessions of the Assembly by motions of individual members, none of which has yet been carried to a vote the returns record as a serious test of the House's opinion; the Tribeswomen's own continuing organisation, whose annual reports this contributor receives as a matter of course in her own professional correspondence, records a membership grown from the petition's original signatories to above four hundred thousand by the return for 1910, distributed across every province of the Commonwealth in a proportion that tracks, this contributor's own tabulation finds, remarkably closely with the distribution of the female literacy the Public Profession's own Sabbath schools have done a good deal, over two centuries, to establish.
Whether the question will be carried in the present decade, the next, or the one after that, this contributor's own professional training gives her no particular authority to predict, franchise reform of any description having proceeded, on the Commonwealth's own historical record, by an arithmetic of accumulated petition and committee report that resists, so far as this contributor's tables show, any very confident forecasting of the date at which the accumulated total becomes sufficient. The returns are set down here, as this contributor's office requires, for the reader's own use. (M. S. W.)