That she must demand her freedom from his daughters and his sons.
Neither beneath nor over, but equal in her place,
The freedom that she’ll die for, is the freedom of the race.
A Woman’s Question
By M. Carey Thomas
(A contemporary. President of Bryn Mawr College. From an address at the College Evening of the National American Suffrage Association.)
Woman suffrage is first of all a woman’s question. We cannot remain indifferent. The issues involved are so overwhelmingly important, first of all, to us as women caring as we must for all other women’s welfare, and second, to us as citizens of the modern industrial state. I am sure as the result of repeated experiment that it is only necessary for generous and unprejudiced women to realize the present economic independence of millions of women workers, and the swiftly coming economic independence of millions upon millions more women workers for woman suffrage to seem to them inevitable from that moment.
No one can maintain by serious arguments—that is, by arguments that are not pure and simple distortion of fact—that the ballot will not aid women workers, as it has aided men workers, to obtain fairer conditions and fairer wages. All working men and all men of every class regard the ballot as their greatest protection against the oppression and injustice of other men. It is only necessary to ask ourselves what would be the fate of any political party whose platform contained a plank depriving laboring men of the right to vote.
Because They Cannot Vote
By Meta L. Stern