Legislative Responsibility
By Emily J. Hutchins
The most obvious effect of the vote is that it puts women upon a plane of political equality with other normal adults.... Universal suffrage stands for a certain recognition of the stake that all human beings, irrespective of sex, have in the general welfare, and destroys a false sense of sex limitations. By virtue of their new standing in the community women assume an equal responsibility with men, for both good and bad legislation.
He Shall See the New Woman
By Mabel Potter Daggett
(From “What the War Means to Woman,” in “Pictorial Review.”)
You see, when her country called her, it was destiny that spoke. Though no nation knew. Governments have only thought they were making women munition workers and women conductors and women bank-tellers and women doctors and women lawyers and women citizens and all the rest. I doubt if there is a statesman anywhere who has learned to unlock a door of opportunity to let the woman movement by, who has realized that he was but the instrument in the hands of a higher power that is re-shaping the world for mighty ends, rough-hewn though they be today from the awful chaos of war.
But there is one who will know. When the man at the front gets back and stands again before the cottage rose-bowered on the English downs, red-roofed in France and Italy, blue-trimmed in Germany, or ikon-blessed in Russia, or white-porched off Main Street in America, he will clasp her to his heart once more. Then he will hold her off, so, at arm’s length and look long into her eyes and deep into her soul. And lo, he shall see there the New Woman. This is not the woman whom he left behind when he marched away to the Great World War. Something profound has happened to her since. It is woman’s coming of age.