Another reason why women should vote is for the sake of the moral welfare of their children. It is the voter who has it in his hands to eliminate the saloon and to control the public dance-hall, the debasing theater or moving-picture show, and other sources of moral corruption. It is the voter who has the power to establish libraries and art galleries, playgrounds and parks.
Women ought to vote for the sake of protecting and helping those who cannot help themselves; for the sake of abolishing child-labor, and of securing humane hours and reasonable wages for working-women as well as better protection for young girls against those who would ensnare them. They should vote, also, in order that they may have a voice in measures affecting the public welfare, such as old-age pensions, mothers’ pensions, industrial insurance, prison reform, better care of the sick and the aged, and all forms of civic betterment.
Women should vote in order that they may help to abolish unjust discrimination against women. Even in this free Republic many steps will have to be taken before women will have the same rights before the law as men. The enfranchisement of women will hasten that time. It is only a few years since Senator Tillman, of South Carolina, called to his aid an ancient law of that State in order to enable his son, who had left his wife, to take their children from her. South Carolina is not the only State in which the law, in case of a legal separation, is most unjust to the woman. According to a recent authority, women have the same rights as men in the guardianship of their children in only sixteen States of the Union. In some States the father has even power to deed the children away from their mother. In a number of the States of the Union, the husband still has legal control of his wife’s property and he may claim her wages. Every woman should resolve to do all in her power to help to abolish such obviously unjust laws as these.
There is one more reason why women should vote, and that is, for their own growth and enlargement. Only a few hundred years ago woman had practically no liberty. She had little freedom before marriage, small choice in marriage, unequal rights as a wife, no legal right to her children. She could own no property; educational opportunities were denied her; and her life from birth to death was determined by others, not by herself. One has only to read such a story as Browning’s “The Ring and the Book” to understand something of the wrongs that millions of women suffered before the days when the world in the process of evolution was brought to a more enlightened idea of the rights of woman. What vast progress she has made! One who knows the story of it can be patient in regard to further progress, confident that it will come as surely as the planets will continue in their orbits. And we must not forget that at every step upward hands of strong and fearless men have been held out to her, else she could not have reached her present position. That person is doing small service to the world who attempts to set the interests of women over against those of men and to create antagonism between them. Let us never forget that their interests are not opposed to each other, but that in the long run nothing can be detrimental to one which is not also detrimental to the other.
“The woman’s cause is man’s; they rise or sink
Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free;
· · · · · · ·
If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,
How shall men grow?“