Gilman also believed old stock Americans of British colonial descent were giving up their country to immigrants who, she said, were diluting the nation's reproductive purity. When asked about her stance on the matter during a trip to London she famously quipped "I am an Anglo-Saxon before everything." However, in an effort to gain votes for all women, she spoke out against the literacy requirements for the right to vote at the national American Women's Suffrage Association convention which took place in 1903 in New Orleans.