By Catherine Waugh McCulloch
(American contemporary. Former President Illinois Woman Suffrage Association, and practicing attorney. The following is from a pamphlet, “Illinois Laws Concerning Women,” issued by the I. W. S. A.)
We read that no person shall be denied any political rights, privileges, or powers on account of religion. The word sex should have been added. People may change their religion, but never their sex. Rights, privileges and capacities ought never to depend on color of eyes or hair, cast of features, sex or any other accident for which a person is not to be blamed and which a person can never overcome. Any other qualification demanded of a voter may be acquired by one’s own exertion, or the lapse of time. Property may be earned, minority out-grown, education secured, sanity regained, alienage removed, imprisonment outlived. But no industry, no age, no brilliancy, no morality, can change sex. Sex should be made less a disgrace instead of more of a disgrace than poverty, minority, alienage, insanity and criminality.
The Working Woman’s Awakening
By Theresa Malkiel
(In “The Progressive Woman.” American contemporary. Socialist. Speaker and writer on woman, child and labor problems.)
Unconsciously, with closed eyes, driven, perhaps, by the herd instinct that makes her follow the others, the working woman is rising at last from her long slumber....
The solution of the problem of existence is pressing upon her more and more. Even the mantle of marriage does no longer save her from it. The patient sufferer cannot and will not see her children destitute and hungry. She wants some of the celestial promises to be realized here on earth. Hence this general unrest of womanhood the world over.
Woman’s Weak Dependency
By Gertrude Atherton