As women enter further into the industrial field, more and more laws are made for their protection. The men have done wonderfully for our women. Whenever the public conscience is aroused to the need of a law, that law is passed. Women do much, in fact, nearly everything, towards arousing that public conscience, but we find when we study the laws as they exist in our state that our men have made better laws for the protection of our women than the men and women have made together in any suffrage state. Let me add some of the other good laws we have in Massachusetts. We have the Mothers' Pension Bill. This law was originated by a man in a male suffrage state. We have the Equal Guardianship Law. There are suffrage states where neither of these laws exist.
Not long ago Mrs. Maud Wood Park, asserted that I was misstating the laws in suffrage states. She said I did not know the happenings in the legislature this year. I have made a careful study of the laws proposed and the action taken upon them in the eleven suffrage states and the four big "campaign states" in the legislative year of 1915. I find that while in Massachusetts we enacted five new laws relating to our women and children assuring them of still greater protection and better public health regulations, Arizona turned down five laws for women which already exist here in our own state. I was unable to find any suffrage state which could compare in any favorable way with the progress Massachusetts has made. Wyoming turned down a bill regulating the employment of children and a bill limiting the hours a woman may work. As long as I have mentioned Arizona, let me continue the comparison one step further and point out that on the 16th of February, 1915, Mrs. Berry, an Arizona suffragist, introduced a bill regulating and granting teachers' pensions. The bill was indefinitely postponed. In the same year Massachusetts women teachers introduced a bill asking to have their former pensions granted again to them. At the same time the men teachers introduced a similar bill; and it is an interesting fact that the men were turned down, while the women's bill was signed by the Governor. For our suffrage friends who say that women must have the ballot to be listened to, this is rather a stumbling block. I happened to be up at the State House the day the bill went through, and heard one of the women who was interested say: "It's a mighty lucky thing we women did not have the vote." This is the latest example of what Massachusetts men are interested in doing for Massachusetts women. Let us voice our just pride that Massachusetts touches the high water mark of protective legislation and stands as an example to all other states.
VII
WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND WAR
MRS. CHARLES P. STRONG
Mary B. Strong, widow of Dr. Charles P. Strong of the Harvard Medical School; studied for three years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; former President of the Saturday Morning Club; Vice-President of the Cambridge Indian Association; Corresponding Secretary of the Massachusetts Women's Anti-Suffrage Association.
J. A. H.