Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World War

by Mabel Potter Daggett

A South African Party Congress, for the first time it has ever listened to women, has received a delegation who urge: “Half the population of the country is composed of women. Can you any longer afford to do without our point of view in your national deliberations?” The Grand Council of Switzerland is considering a bill which is before it, proposing to give women the franchise in communal affairs. Mexico is struggling toward national freedom with her women at the side of her men. It was not even considered necessary to incorporate in the new constitution the woman suffrage provision suggested by Hermila Galindo at the national convention. The new Mexican Federal constitution states explicitly that “Voters are those Mexicans who are 21 if unmarried and over 18 if married and possessed of an honest means of livelihood.” And under this constitution, in the March, 1917, elections, Mexican women quietly voted as a matter of course along with the other citizens.

DR. POLIKSENA SCHISKINA YAVEIN
Who led 45,000 women to the duma in Petrograd to make their calling to citizenship sure.

In all of Russia’s turbulent revolutionary unrest, none of the divers parties struggling for supremacy there, denies the claim of half the race to the freedom which it is hoped ultimately to establish. The Provisional government’s first announcement was for universal suffrage. But the Russian women weren’t going to take any chance. They remembered a French revolution that also proclaimed “universal” suffrage and has not yet done anything of the kind. The Russian League for the Defence of Women’s Rights said, “Let’s be certain about this. We want our calling to citizenship made sure.” So Dr. Schiskina Yavein, the president of the League, led 45,000 women to the Imperial Duma in Petrograd. As their spokesman she told the government: “At this time of national crisis we should have no confusion of terms. Without the participation of women, no franchise can be universal. We have come for an official declaration concerning the abolition of all limitations with regard to women. We demand a clear and definite answer to two questions: Are women to have votes in Russia? And are women to have a voice in the Constituent Assembly which only in that case can represent the will of the people? We are here to remain until we receive the answer.”

Well, the answer came. It was an unconditional affirmative, received in turn from the men who came out from the government house to reply to the waiting women: M. V. Rodzianko, president of the Imperial Duma; N. S. Tchkeidze, president of the Council of Workingmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies, and Prince Lvoff, president of the Council of Ministers. And when the preliminary parliament of the Russian Republic was opened at Petrograd in October, 1917, the chair was offered to Madame Breshkovsky, the celebrated “Little Grandmother” of the Russian Revolutionaries, as the senior member of the council.

In New York City on election night of November, 1917, the newsboys shrilled out a new cry, “The wimmin win!” “The wimmin win!” It was like a victory at Verdun or the Somme. The cables throbbed with the news that New York State, where the woman movement for all the world began ninety years before, had made its over three million women people. It is now only a question of time when all other American women will be. New York State carries with it almost as many electoral votes as all of the 17 previous States combined, which have conferred on women the Presidential franchise. The strongest fortress of the opposition is fallen. And President Wilson has already recommended women suffrage to the rest of the States as a war measure for immediate consideration.

It was from the hand of Susan B. Anthony that the torch of freedom was received by every leader of the woman movement now carrying it. On her grave at Rochester, N. Y., we have already laid the victory wreath. For Democracy, the right of women to have a voice in the government to whose authority they submit, is about to be established in the earth!

“One thing that emerges from this war, I feel absolutely convinced,” (it is Mr. Lloyd George, Premier of England, who is speaking in a public address), “is the conviction that women must be admitted to a complete partnership in the government of nations. And when they are so admitted, I am more firmly rooted than ever in the confident hope that they will help to insure the peace of nations and to prevent the repetition of this terrible condition of things which we are now deploring. If women by their enfranchisement save the world one war, they will have justified their vote before God and man.”

There is a story that the anti-suffragists started. But it’s our best suffrage propaganda now. A farmer’s wife in Maine, who had cooked the meals and swept the house, and washed the children and sent them to school, and hoed the garden and fed the chickens, and worked all the afternoon in the hayfield, and was now on her way to the barn to finish her day’s work with the milking, was accosted by an earnest agitator, who asked her if she didn’t want the vote. But the farmer’s wife shook her head: “No,” she answered, “if there’s any one little thing the men can be trusted to do alone, for heaven’s sake, let ’em!”

But is there? From the rose bowered cottage, the cottage red roofed and the blue trimmed cottage and the ikon blessed cottage, and the plain little white house somewhere off Main Street, there is a rising to the question.