Leaders developed, women of intellect and experience, who could foresee the immense power an organized womanhood might some time wield, and who had courage to direct the forces under them towards vital objects.
When, in 1904, Mrs.Sarah Platt Decker, of Denver, was elected President of the General Federation, she found a number of old-fashioned clubs still devoting themselves to Shakespeare and the classic writers.

Mrs.
Decker, a voter, a full citizen, and a public worker of prominence in her State, simply laughed the musty study clubs out of existence.
"Ladies," she said to the delegates at the biennial meeting of 1904, "Dante is dead.

He died several centuries ago, and a great many things have happened since his time.

Let us drop the study of his 'Inferno' and proceed in earnest to contemplate our own social order." [Illustration: MRS.

SARAH PLATT DECKER] Mostly they took her advice.