POLITICAL NOTES: Rallying Women

If Mrs. Caroline O’Day goes to Washington to take a seat in the House of Representatives on Jan. 3, it will be by the will of a majority of the voters of all New York State. As Democratic nominee for Representative-at-Large she must make a campaign as extensive as those of Governor Lehman or Senator Copeland. Thus raised above the ordinary run of Congressional candidates, Mrs. O’Day was lifted still higher last week when she became the rallying point for women without, as well as within, her own State.

In Washington, Mrs. Roosevelt announced that she would head Mrs. O’Day’s finance committee, take the stump for five speeches in her behalf. Never before in White House history had a First Lady stepped into a Congressional election fight. Said Mrs. Roosevelt: “I know it is rather unusual. … I am doing it because I have worked for many years under Mrs. O’Day.”

Caroline Goodwin O’Day, 59, is tall, florid, greying, a dozen years a widow. Daughter of a Georgia planter, she went abroad to study art in the 1890s, met & married the son of a Standard Oil vice president. Installed in a fine mansion at Rye, N. Y., she soon found that managing a household and rearing three children by no means exhausted her energies. Down to Manhattan went she to work in famed Henry Street Settlement, interest herself in women factory workers. For 13 payless years she has never missed a meeting of New York’s State Welfare Board.

Together she and Mrs. Roosevelt organized the women’s division of New York’s Democratic State Committee. Mrs. O’Day became the Committee’s vice chairman, Mrs. Roosevelt the women’s finance chairman. Meanwhile Mrs. O’Day found time for the vice presidency of her friend’s Val Kill Furniture Shop. Last year she succeeded the late Elisabeth Marbury as Democratic National Committeewoman from New York.

To her campaign last week rallied an Independent Committee including Mrs. Charles Dana Gibson, Mrs. Frank A. Vanderlip, Alice Duer Miller, Virginia Gildersleeve.In Denver famed Coal Operator Josephine Roche, lately defeated for Colorado’s Democratic Gubernatorial nomination, hinted that she might go to New York for some O’Day speeches.