Here are the twelve greatest living American women in the opinion of a special committee of the National League of Women Voters which was appointed to select such a list:
Jane Addams, philanthropist.
Cecilia Beaux, painter.
Carrie Chapman Cart, politics.
Anna Botsford Comstock, natural history.
Minnie Maddern Fiske, stage.
Louise Homer, music.
Julia Lathrop, child welfare.
Florence Rona Sabin, anatomy.
M. Carey Thomas, education.
Martha van Rensseler, home economics, Edith Wharton, literature.
Anna Jump Cannon, astronomy.
Shanghai well remembers the recent visit of Jane Addams who heads the list. but it will not recall so vividly Dr. Florence Rona Sabin's sojourn in China almost two years ago at the time of the formal opening of the Peking Union Medical School. Dr. Sabin, who it one of the most unobtrusive of celebrities, was in Shanghai a short time and it was impossible to arrange for her to speak on the line of specialized research which has made her famous in the medical profession. A graduate of Smith College and of Johns Hopkins University she was assistant professor of anatomy in the latter institution from 1902-17 and since that time professor of histology.
Louise Homer, the great contral to, is internationally known, as is also Mrs. Fiske, who creat-el the role of "Tess of the D'Urbevilles" and "Becky Sharp," while Edith Wharton, author of "The House of Mirth" and many other novels and descriptive volumes is probably better known in England than any other of America's women authors. The International Woman Suffrage Alliance has made Carrie Chapman Cart when equipped with a sword. well known on both sides of the sea.
In making public these names the committee said it was "'humanly impossible" to know who the really greatest women in the country were, and that the selections had been made on the basis of those who had contributed most in their fields to the betterment of the world.
The selections were made at the request of Senorita Mandujano, a Chilean delegate of the Pan American conference of women at Baltimore a year ago, who desired to write about the American women for the women of South America.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.