An American Suffragette

by Isaac Newton Stevens

There was a little buzz and stir while slips of paper and pencils were distributed to the audience, and the questions collected for the next speaker.

The presiding officer made the usual preliminary remarks, and introduced Miss Renner, who gathered up the goodly sheaf of white slips in her hands and ran over them as if looking for some query that would make a specially apt beginning. Her face lit up as she came across one with which she was evidently familiar.

"This is a favorite question of mine," she said cheerfully. "I should miss it dreadfully if it failed to turn up, but it is such a troublesome and comprehensive question to answer that I have set the reply to music, and will have it sung for you, in order that you may all remember it. The question is, 'What have Colorado women done with the ballot?' I don't, myself, consider that a fair question, since none of us come down to Philadelphia or New York or Pittsburg or any of the other cities of sweetness and light and ask what you men have done with your all-powerful vote, but this seems to be the main one, especially to the masculine mind."

Dr. Earl laughed, for he had written the question, and seating herself at the piano, Miss Renner looked up at a merry-faced girl, who began singing to her rippling accompaniment a song of miraculous changes which should have ensued upon woman's enfranchisement, and concluded with a long chant, recounting some of the more notable achievements of the voting woman, ranging all the way from joint ownership of children and property, minimum salary laws, juvenile courts, medical inspection of school children, State institutions built and endowed, equality in inheritance and a host of other things, up to the adoption by her State of the initiative and referendum.

After that, Miss Renner had her audience with her until she dropped the last twist of paper on the table beside her. "You ask me why it took us so many years to pass a good law regulating child labor, and why we have failed in limiting the hours of woman's labor. As to the first, it is true that our law was by no means equal to yours, but we had the means to enforce it, and as a consequence we have little or no child labor. You have a good statute, one of the best in the Union"—there was a ripple of applause—"but in addition to this excellent law prohibiting child labor," she went on evenly, "you have in this city alone over twenty thousand child wage-earners.

"When we have gone to our legislatures asking for laws for the protection of the weak, we have generally obtained them easily, when they did not interfere with 'big business.' It took Illinois women nine years to get a State Home for children. We passed such a law without any effort whatever. In two-thirds of the States of the Union women are trying to make mothers co-equal guardians of their children, and trying in vain. That was the first law our enfranchised women wrote upon our statute books. One only learns to understand these things by experience. You may find it hard to see why railroads should go into a deal to defeat an eight-hour law for women, but that statute was flagged by a Pullman palace car towel and fell asleep at the switch, because that company complained that it couldn't get a change of sheets unless laundry girls could be compelled to work overtime. You don't dream when you talk of 'big business' to what little business it will descend."

There was a sudden hush, and she flung out her hands with an impulsive gesture, and there was a passionate earnestness in her voice that gripped her hearers. "Let me tell you something you do not know when you hold the women in the suffrage States responsible for conditions they are the first to deplore. A handful of men in this city have more to do with Western industries and their regulation than have both the men and women. We have steel works; their policy is dictated from lower Broadway. We have smelters; they are closed at the order of a syndicate in this city. We have railroads, all of them controlled by your fellow citizens, and it was the deals entered into between the representatives of these interests and our local corporations that defeated the eight-hour law for women, and every bit of reform legislation pledged to the people. It was this condition, this failure of alleged democracy, that made us go on record for real democracy, for the initiative that makes it possible for us to enact the laws our representatives are cajoled into pigeon-holing, for the referendum that enables us to scotch the snake so that the people may have a chance to kill it. This was the first great fundamental reform which the women demanded, and it was owing to the work of education they began twenty years ago, and kept up untiringly, that Colorado has won this great victory. Woman suffrage is not alone for women, or to enable us to secure certain readjustments of law. It is for our country, which cannot exist half enfranchised and half irresponsible, half democracy and half a feudalism; half of it privileged to shirk or exercise its civic rights, and half denied aught but the burden of those rights. Women need the franchise if only to make their influence, of which we hear so much, effective, but more than they need the ballot, this nation needs the active devotion of its women to transmute to golden fulfillment its leaden life; it needs, it must have all that we can give it, your life and mine; if it is to go forward, its sons and daughters must go forward—together!"

There was generous applause, and the two young men followed Miss Holland, and she presented Dr. Earl and was about to introduce his brother, when Miss Renner held out both hands to him.

"Hast thou found me, O mine enemy," she cried. "I'm awfully glad to see you, Frank. I was much minded to tell how you helped me get my dove bill through, but I feared they might hold you responsible for the defeat of the eight-hour law and turn and rend you."

"You promised never to reveal any of my good deeds," he answered. "Keep it out of the papers, Miss Holland. I can't afford to lose prestige as the exponent of the Mammon of Unrighteousness."