Edgena De Lespine

Young Dick and Milly are married but struggling, especially when Dick loses his position on a labor gang. Milly returns to her father who refuses to take Dick in as well. He wanders disconsolately in a park where he finds a kitten. Wanting to give it to Milly as a gift he follows it to the courtyard of a mansion. The young boy who lives there accidentally injures Dick, when he is carried into the house the boy's mother, touched by his Dick’s story, cares for him and sends for Milly. When he is all well again, she gives him a position in her household as a chauffeur and the young couple reunite.

Named by historian Kevin Brownlow as “the first important suffrage film”, this melodrama follows suffragist May Fillmore in her fight to sway Senator Herman, whose vote could pass a key reform bill. After exposing him and his fiancée Jane Wadsworth to the dire living conditions of a motherless tenement family—unsanitary housing, child labor, and workplace exploitation—Jane turns against her negligent fiancé and joins the suffrage cause. Ultimately, both Herman and Jane’s father are persuaded to support reform, and the film ends with the characters proudly taking part in a suffrage parade. (Note: This silent narrative film is distinct from Edison’s Votes for Women (1913), a Kinetophone short that recorded real suffragist leaders delivering speeches.)