Somehow, in what mysterious manner no one can precisely tell, the reserve of the club women towards the suffrage question began some years ago to break down. At the St. Louis Biennial of 1904 part of a morning session was given up to the suffrage organizations. Several remarkable speeches in favor of the suffrage were made, and there is no doubt that a very deep impression was made, even upon those women openly opposed to the movement. Six years later, at the biennial meeting held in Cincinnati, Ohio, in June, 1910, an entire evening was given up to an exhaustive discussion of both sides of the question.

Dating from that evening a stranger visiting the convention might almost have thought that the sole object of the gathering was a discussion of the right of women to the ballot. Women floated through the corridors of the hotel talking suffrage. They talked suffrage in little groups in the dining-room, they discussed it in the street cars going to and from the convention.

The local suffrage clubs had planned a banquet to the visiting suffragists and had calculated a maximum of one hundred and fifty applications for tickets.

Three days before the banquet they had had nearly three hundred applications, and when the hour for the banquet arrived every available seat, the room's limit of three hundred and seventy-five, was occupied. Outside were women offering ten dollars a plate and clamoring for the privilege of merely listening to the after-dinner speakers. Something must have happened in the course of those eight years to make such an astounding change in the attitude of the club women.

The fact is that until the club women had been at work at practical things for a long period of years, they did not realize the social value of their own activities. They thought of their work as benevolent and philanthropic. That they were performing community service, citizens' service, they did not remotely dream. There is nothing surprising in their naivete. It is a fact that in this country, although every one knows that women own property, pay taxes, successfully manage their own business affairs, and do an astonishing amount of community work as well, no one ever thinks of them as citizens.

American men are accustomed to women in almost all trades and professions. It doesn't astonish a New Yorker to see a hospital ambulance tearing down the street with a white-clad woman surgeon on the back seat. A woman lawyer, architect, editor, manufacturer, excites no particular notice. In the Western States men are beginning to elect women county treasurers, county superintendents of schools, and in Chicago, second largest city in the country, a Board of Education, overwhelmingly masculine, recently appointed a woman City Superintendent of Schools.

Yet to the vast majority of American men women do not look like citizens.

As for the majority of American women they have always until recently thought of themselves as a class,—a favored and protected class. They cherished a sentimental kind of delusion that the American man was only too anxious to give them everything that their hearts desired. When they got out into the world of action, when they began to ask for something more substantial than bonbons, the club women found that the American man was not so very generous after all.

A typical instance occurred down in Georgia. A few years ago the women of Georgia found a way to introduce into the legislature a child-labor law. It was really a very modest little bill and it protected only a fraction of the pitiful army of cotton-mill children, but still it was worth having. The women worked hard and they got some very powerful backing and a barrel or two of petitions. Nevertheless, the bill was defeated. One legislative orator rose to explain his vote.

"Mr. Speaker," he said eloquently, "I am devoted to the good women of my State. If I thought that the women of my State wanted this bill passed I would vote for it; but, sir, I have every reason to believe that the good women of my State are opposed to this bill, and therefore;"

At this juncture another member handed to the orator a petition bearing the name of five thousand of the best known women in Georgia. The orator stammered, turned red, felt for his handkerchief, mopped his brow, and continued: "Mr. Speaker, I deeply regret that I did not see this petition yesterday. As it is, my vote is pledged."

Incidents of this kind have occurred too frequently for the women of the United States to escape their meaning. They have learned that they cannot have everything they want merely by asking for it. Also they have learned, or a large number of them have learned that the old theory of women being represented at the polls by their husbands is very largely a delusion.

The entrance of women in large numbers into labor unions, and into membership in the Women's Trade Union League is another factor in the increasing interest of American women in suffrage. After a decision of the New York Court of Appeals that the law prohibiting night work of women was unconstitutional, nearly one thousand women book-binders in New York City made a public announcement that they would thenceforth work for the ballot. They had been indifferent before, but this close application of politics to their industrial situation—bookbinding is one of the night trades—made them alive to their own helplessness.

The shirt-waist strike and the garment workers' strike in New York and Philadelphia, waged so bitterly in 1910, brought great numbers of women into the suffrage ranks. Not only were the women strikers convinced that the magistrates and the police treated them with more contempt than they did the voting men, but they perceived the need of securing better labor laws for themselves. The conviction that women of the wealthier classes would stand by them in securing favorable laws, as they stood by the strikers in the industrial struggle, was a strong lever to turn them towards the suffrage ranks.



The Women's Trade Union League building, used as strike headquarters in all strikes involving women workers, is a veritable center of suffrage sentiment in New York! One floor houses the offices of the Equality League of Self Supporting Women, of which Harriot Stanton Blatch is founder and president. This society, which is entirely made up of trade and professional workers, claims an approximate membership of twenty-two thousand. A number of unions belong to the League, and there is also a very large individual membership.

In Chicago the suffrage movement and the labor movement is more closely associated than in any other American city. In Chicago, it will be remembered, the Teachers' Federation is a trade union and is allied to the Central Labor Union. Teachers, almost everywhere denied equal pay with men for equal work, are eager seekers for political power. When, as in Chicago, they are associated with labor, they become convinced suffragists.

Organized labor has always been friendly to woman suffrage, but in Chicago not only the union women but the union men are actively friendly towards the cause. The original moving spirit in the Chicago organization was a remarkable young working girl, Josephine Casey. Miss Casey sold tickets at one of the stations of the Chicago Elevated, and she formed her first woman suffrage club among the women members of the Union of Street and Elevated Railway Employees. Later she organized on a larger scale the Women's Political Equality Union, with membership open to men and women alike. The interest shown in the union by workingmen, many of whom had never before given the matter a moment's thought, was, from the first, extraordinary. During the first winter of the society's existence, union after union called for Woman Suffrage speakers. Addresses were made before fifty or more. Some of the more popular speakers often made four addresses in an evening. Mrs. Raymond Robins, president of the National Women's Trade Union League, and Miss Alice Henry, secretary of the Chicago branch of the League, won many converts by their expositions of the exceedingly favorable labor laws of Australia and New Zealand, where women vote.



Unquestionably the mighty battle which is waging in England made a deep impression on American women of all classes. The visits made in this country by Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, Mrs. Borrman Wells, Mrs. Philip Snowden, and, most of all, Mrs. Pankhurst, leader of the militant English Suffragists, aroused tremendous enthusiasm from one end of the country to the other. Never, until these women appeared, telling, with rare eloquence, their stories of struggle, of arrest and imprisonment, had the vote appeared such an incomparable treasure. Never before, except among a few enthusiasts, had there existed any feeling that the suffrage was a thing to fight for, suffer for, even to die for.

Up to this time the suffrage was a theory, an academic question of right and justice. After the visits of the English women, American suffragists everywhere began to view their cause in the light of a political movement. They began to adopt political methods. Instead of private meetings where suffrage was discussed before a select audience of the already convinced, the women began to mount soap boxes on street corners and to talk suffrage to the man in the street.

The first suffrage demonstration was held in New York in February, 1908. The members of a small but enthusiastic Equal Suffrage Club announced their intention of having a parade. Most of the women being wage earners they planned to have their parade on a Sunday. When they applied at Police Headquarters for the necessary permit they found to their disgust that Sunday parades were forbidden by law.

"Not unless you are a funeral procession," said the stern captain of the police.

The woman replied that they were anything but a funeral procession, and threatened darkly to hold their parade in spite of police regulations. They got plenty of newspaper publicity in the succeeding days, and on the following Sunday a huge crowd of men, a sprinkling of women, a generous number of plain clothes men, and New York's famous "camera squad" assembled in Union Square, where all incendiary things happen. The dauntless seven who made up the suffrage club were there, and at the psychological moment one of the women ran up the steps of a park pavilion and spoke in a ringing voice, yet so quietly that the police made no move to stop her.

"Friends," she said, "we are not allowed to have our parade, so we are going to hold a meeting of protest at No. 209 East 23d Street. We invite you to go over there with us." She and the others walked calmly out of the square, and the crowd followed. They turned into Fifth Avenue, and the crowd grew larger. Before three blocks were passed there were literally thousands of people marching in the wake of ingenious suffragists.

The sight aroused the indignation of many respectable citizens.

"Officer," exclaimed one of these, addressing an attendant policeman, "I thought you had orders that those females were not to parade."

"That ain't no parade," said the policeman, serenely; "them folks is just takin' a quiet walk."

The suffragists have taken more than one quiet walk since then. Street speaking has become an almost daily occurrence. At first there was some rioting, or, rather, some display of rowdyism on the part of the spectators and some show of interference from the police. The crowds listen respectfully now, and the police are friendly.

The most practical move the New York Suffragists have made was the organization, early in 1910, of the Woman Suffrage Party, a fusion of nearly all the suffrage clubs in the greater city into an association exactly along the lines of a regular political party. At the head of the party as president is Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the International Woman Suffrage Association. Each of the five boroughs of the city has a chairman, and each senatorial and assembly district is either organized or is in process of organization.



Absolutely democratic in its spirit and its organization, the party leaders are drawn from every rank of society. The chairman of the borough of Manhattan is Mrs. James Lees Laidlaw, wife of a prominent Wall Street banker. Mrs. Frederick Nathan, president of the New York State Consumers' League, is chairman of the assembly district in which she lives. Mrs. Melvil Dewey, whose husband is head of a department at Columbia University, is chairman of her own district. Other chairmen are Helen Hoy Greeley, lawyer; Lavinia Dock, trained nurse; Anna Mercy, an East Side physician; Maud Flowerton, buyer in a department store; Gertrude Barnum, sociologist and writer. Practically every trade and profession are represented in the party's ranks.

The object of the Woman Suffrage Party is organization for political work. Last winter the party made the first aggressive move towards forcing the Judiciary Committee of the Assembly to report on the bill to give women votes by constitutional amendment. They succeeded in getting a motion made for the discharge of the committee, sixteen legislators voting for the women.

New York is the present center of the progressive suffrage movement, with Chicago not very far behind.

In rather amazing fashion are women in many American communities beginning to realize that politics are as much their business as men's. In Salt Lake City when a city council undertakes to give away a valuable water franchise, or extend gamblers' privileges, or otherwise follow the example of many another city council in bending before the god of greed, the women of Salt Lake send the word around. When the council meets the women are in the room. They don't say anything. They don't have to say anything. They can vote, these women. More than once the deep-laid plans of the most powerful politicians in Salt Lake City have been completely frustrated by a silent warning from the women. The city council has not dared to pass grafting measures with a roomful of women looking on.



Even the non-voting woman has discovered the power which attaches to her presence, in certain circumstances. In San Francisco during the second Ruef trial, when the decent element of the city was fighting to down one of the worst bosses that ever cursed a community, the women, under the leadership of Mrs. Elizabeth Gerberding, performed this new kind of picket duty. The courtroom where the trial was held was, by order of the boss's attorney, packed with hired toughs whose duty it was to make a mockery of the prosecution. Every point against the Ruef side was received by these toughs with jeers and hootings. The district attorney was insulted, badgered, and openly threatened with violence.

Mrs. Gerberding, whose husband is editor of a newspaper opposed to boss rule, attended several sessions, and induced a large number of women of social importance to attend with her. These women went daily to the courtroom, occupying seats to the exclusion of many of the tough characters, and by their presence doing much to preserve order and to assist the efforts of the district attorney. When the assassin's bullet was fired at the district attorney a number of the women were present.

Out of the horror and detestation of this crime was organized the Women's League of Justice, which soon had a membership of five hundred. The league fought stoutly for the reelection of Heney as district attorney. Heney was defeated, and the league became the Women's Civic Club of San Francisco, pledged to work for political betterment and a clean city government.

In four States of the Union, Washington, Oregon, South Dakota, and Oklahoma, the voters will this autumn vote for or against constitutional amendments giving women the right to vote. It is not very probable that the Suffragists will win in any of these States, not because the voters are opposed to suffrage, but because they are, for the most part, uninformed. The suffrage advocates have not yet learned enough political wisdom to further their cause through education of the voters.

Although enormous sums of money have been spent in suffrage campaigns, in no one has enough money been available to do the work thoroughly. In the four States where the question is at present before the voters, complaint is made that there is not enough money in the treasuries properly to circulate literature.

Many of the wisest leaders in the National Woman Suffrage Association, including Dr. Anna Shaw, Ida Husted Harper, and others, are advising an altogether new method of conducting the struggle for the ballot. They advocate selecting a State, possibly Nebraska, where conditions seem uncommonly favorable, and concentrating the entire strength of the national organization, every dollar of money in the national treasury, all the speakers and organizers, all the literature, in a mighty effort to give the women of that one State the ballot. The vote won in Nebraska, the national association should pass on to the next most favorable State and win a victory there. The moral effect of such campaigns would no doubt be very great.

One of the principal reasons why men hesitate in this country to give the voting power to women is that they do not know, and they rather fear to guess, how far women would unite in forcing their own policies on the country. If an Irish vote, or a German vote, or a Catholic vote, or a Hebrew vote is to be dreaded, say the men, how much more of a menace would a woman vote be. I heard a man, a delegate from an anti-suffrage association, solemnly warn the New York State Legislature, at a suffrage hearing, against this danger of a woman vote. "When the majority of women and the minority of men vote together," he declared, "there will be no such thing as personal liberty left in the United States."



Under certain conditions a woman vote is not an unthinkable contingency. It has even occurred.

For the edification of the possible reader who is entirely uninformed, it may be explained that women are not entirely disenfranchised in the United States. Women vote on equal terms with men, in four States. They have voted in Wyoming since 1869; in Colorado since 1894; in Utah and Idaho since 1896. They vote at school elections and on certain questions of taxation in twenty-eight States.

While it is true that in the States which have a small measure of suffrage the women show little interest in voting, in the four so-called suffrage States, they vote conscientiously and in about the same proportion as men.

But here is a notable thing. The women of the suffrage States differ so little from the women of other States, and women in general, that the chief concerns of their lives are the home, the school, and the baby,—the Kaiser's "Kirche, Kueche, und Kinder" over again. They vote with enthusiasm on all questions which relate to domestic interests, that is, which directly relate to them and their children. Aside from this, the woman vote has made a deep impression on the moral character of candidates and that is about all it has meant. In general politics women have counted scarcely more than have the women of other States.

But the new interest in suffrage, the new realization of themselves as citizens that has been aroused all over the United States within the past two years have seriously affected the women voters of at least one suffrage State, Colorado.

The women of Colorado, especially the women of Denver, have for several years taken an active part in legislation directly affecting themselves and their children. The legislative committee of the Colorado State Federation of Clubs has held regular meetings during the sessions of the State Legislature, and it has been a regular custom to submit to that committee for approval all bills relating to women and children. This never seemed to the politicians to be anything very dangerous to their interests. It was, in a manner of speaking, a chivalric acknowledgment of women's virtue as wives and mothers.

But lately the women of Colorado have begun to wake up to the fact that not only special legislation, but all legislation, is of direct interest to them. It has lately dawned upon them that the matter of street railway franchise affects the home as directly as a proposition to erect a high school. Also it has dawned on them that without organization, and more organization, the woman vote was more or less powerless. So, about a year ago they formed in Denver an association of women which they called the Public Service League. Nothing quite like it ever existed before. It is a political but non-partisan association of women, pledged to work for the civic betterment of Denver, pledged to fight the corrupt politicians, determined that the city government shall be well administered even if the women have to take over the offices themselves. The League is, in effect, a secret society of women. It has an inflexible rule that its proceedings are to be kept inviolable. There is a perfect understanding that any woman who divulges one syllable of what occurs at a meeting of the League will be instantly dropped from membership. No woman has yet been dropped.

It may well be understood that this secret society of women, this non-partisan league of voters, is a thing to strike terror into the heart of a ward boss. As a matter of fact, the corrupt politicians and the equally corrupt heads of corporations who had long held Denver in bondage regard the Public Service League in mingled dread and detestation. Equally as a matter of fact politicians of a better class are anxious to enlist the good will of the League. Last summer a Denver election involved a question of granting a twenty years' franchise to a street railway company. Opposed to the granting of the franchise was a newly formed citizens' party. Opposed also was the Women's Public Service League. In gratitude for the co-operation of the League the Citizens' Party offered a place on the electoral ticket to any woman chosen by the League.

It was the first time in the history of Colorado that a municipal office had been offered to a woman, and the League promptly took advantage of it. They named as a candidate for Election Commissioner Miss Ellis Meredith, one of the best known, best loved women in the State. As journalist and author and club woman Miss Meredith is known far beyond her own State, and her nomination created intense interest not only among the women of her own city and State, but among club women everywhere.

On the evening of May 3, 1910, there was a meeting held in the Broadway Theater, Denver, the like of which no American city ever before witnessed. It was a women's political mass meeting to endorse the candidacy of a woman municipal official. The meeting was entirely in the hands of women. Presiding over the immense throng was Mrs. Sarah Platt Decker, formerly president, and still leader of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. Beside her sat Mrs. Helen Grenfell, for thirteen years county and State superintendent of schools, Mrs. Helen Ring Robinson, Mrs. Martha A.B. Conine, and Miss Gail Laughlin, all women of note in their community. The enthusiasm aroused by that meeting did not subside, and on the day of the election Miss Meredith ran so far ahead of her ticket that it seemed as if every woman in Denver, as well as most of the men, had voted for her. She took her place in the Board of Election Commissioners, and was promptly elected Chairman of the Board.

There is nothing especially attractive about the office of Election Commissioner. In accepting the nomination Miss Meredith said frankly that she was influenced mainly by two things: first a desire to test the loyalty of the women voters, and second, because, while women had been held accountable for elections which have disgraced the city of Denver, they have never before been given a chance to manage the elections.

Nothing is more certain that women, when they become enfranchised, will never, in any large numbers, appear as office seekers. It is probable that office will be thrust upon the ablest of them. Mrs. Sarah Platt Decker has been spoken of as a possible future Mayor of Denver, and it is certain that she could be elected to Congress if she would allow herself to be placed in nomination.

A few women have been elected to the legislatures in the suffrage States, and they have held high office in educational departments. In suffrage and nonsuffrage States they have been elected to many county offices. Miss Gertrude Jordan is Treasurer of Cherry County, Nebraska. In Idaho, Texas, Louisiana, and several other States women have filled the same position. The State of Kansas is a true believer in women office-holders, even though it refuses its women complete suffrage. Women can vote in Kansas only at municipal elections, but in forty counties men have elected women school superintendents. They are clerks of four counties, treasurers of three, and commissioners of one. In one county of Kansas a woman is probate judge. The good and faithful work done by these women ought to go a long way towards educating men of their community to the idea of political association with women.

The attitude of men towards suffrage has undergone an enormous change within the past two years. A large number of the thinking men of the country have openly enlisted in the Suffrage ranks. It is said that almost every member of the faculty of Columbia University signed the Suffrage petition presented to the Congress of 1909. Well-known professors of many Western universities and colleges have spoken and written in favor of equal suffrage. In New York City a flourishing Voters' League for Equal Suffrage has been formed, with a membership running into the hundreds.



To the average unprejudiced man the old arguments against political equality have almost entirely lost weight. The theory that women should not vote because they cannot fight is now rarely argued. Municipal governments certainly no longer rest on physical force. The same is true of state governments, and it is probably true of national governments. At all events we are sincerely trying to make it true. For the rest it would be extremely difficult to prove that women would make undesirable citizens. To the anxious inquiry, What will women do with their votes? the answer is simple. They will do with their votes precisely what they do, or try to do, without votes. This has been proven in every country in the world where they have received the franchise. In Australia, New Zealand, Finland, and in the English municipalities the ideal of the common good has been reflected in the woman vote. Social legislation alone interests women, and so far they have confined their efforts to matters of education, child labor, pure food, sanitation, control of liquor traffic, and public morals. The organized non-voting women of this country have devoted themselves for years to precisely these objects. Without votes, without precedents, and without very much money they instituted the playground movement, and the juvenile court movement, two of the greatest reforms this country has contributed to civilization. They have instituted a dozen reforms in our educational system. They practically invented the town and village improvement idea. They have co-operated with every social reform advocated by men, and it is to be noted that wherever their judgment has been in error they have conscientiously erred in favor of a wider democracy, a more exalted social ideal.



However long-deferred Woman Suffrage may prove to be, it is pretty generally conceded that women will inevitably vote some day. The evolution of society will bring them into political equality with men just as it has brought them into intellectual and industrial equality. The first woman who followed her spinning-wheel out of her home into the factory was the natural ancestress of the first woman who demanded the ballot.

The application of steam to machinery took women's trades out of the home and placed them in the factory. The effect of this was that men were confronted with a singular dilemma. They had to choose between two courses; they had to support their women in idleness, or else they had to allow them to leave the home and go where their trades had gone. The first course involving the intolerable burden of doing their own and their women's work, they were obliged to choose the second. The jealously-guarded doors of the home were opened, and little by little, grudgingly, the men admitted women to full industrial freedom.

Women's housekeeping, or most of it, has gradually been withdrawn from the home and transferred to the municipality. There was a time when women could ensure their families pure food, good milk, clean ice, proper sanitation. They cannot do that now. The City Hall governs all such matters. Again the men find themselves facing the old dilemma. They must either support their women in idleness—do all their own as well as the women's housekeeping—or they must allow their women to leave the home and follow their housekeeping to the place where it is now being done,—the polls.

Women are beginning to understand the situation. They are even beginning to understand how badly the men are providing for the municipal family. They are demanding their old housekeeping tasks back again. To this point has the Suffrage movement, begun in 1848 by a band of women called fanatics, arrived.



CHAPTER XI

IN CONCLUSION

I have tried to set down in these pages the collective opinion of women, as far as it has expressed itself through deeds. I have not succeeded if any reader lays down the book with the impression that he has merely been reading the story of the American club woman. I have not succeeded at all if my readers imagine that I have been writing only about a selected group of women. What I have meant to do is to show the instinctive bent of the universal woman mind in all ages, reflected in the actions of the freest group of women the world has ever seen.

I might have reanimated ages of stone and of bronze; might have shown you women, through slow centuries, inventing the arts of spinning and weaving, and pottery molding; learning to build, to till the earth, to grind and to cook grains, to tan skins for clothing against the cold. No one taught them these things. Out of their brains, as undeveloped and as primitive as the brains of men, they would never have conceived so much wisdom. The vague mind of the savage woman never sent her to the spider, the nesting bird, and the burrowing squirrel to learn to weave and to build and to store. When we find exactly what it was that taught primitive woman how to lay the first stones of civilization, we have a perfect philosophical understanding of all women.

I chose to interpret the woman mind through the modern American woman, partly because she has learned the great lesson of organization, and has thus been able to work more effectively, and to impress her will on the community more strikingly than other women in other ages. What she has done is apparent and easy to prove.

Also, I chose the American club woman because she represents, not an unusually gifted type, but the average intelligent, well-educated, energetic, wife-and-mother type of woman. The club woman is not radical, or at least not consciously radical. She has not, like the progressive German and Russian woman, theories of political regeneration or of family reconstruction. What she desires, what ideals she has formed, I think must fairly represent the desires and ideals of the great mass of women of the twentieth century.

When we survey the activities the club women have engaged in, when we discover why they chose exactly these activities, we have a perfect philosophical understanding, not only of the modern woman mind, but of the cave woman mind and all the woman mind in between.

The woman mind is the most unchangeable thing in the world. It has turned on identically the same pivot since the present race began. Perhaps before.

Turn back and count over the club women's achievements, the things they have chosen to do, the things they want. Observe first of all that they want very little for themselves. Even their political liberty they want only because it will enable them to get other things—things needed, directly or indirectly, by children. Most of the things are directly needed,—playgrounds, school gardens, child-labor laws, juvenile courts, kindergartens, pure food laws, and other visible tokens of child concern. Many of the other things are indirectly needed by children,—ten-hour working days, seats for shop girls, protection from dangerous machinery, living wages, opportunities for safe and wholesome pleasures, peace and arbitration, social purity, legal equality with men, all objects which tend to conserve the future mothers of children. These are the things women want.

In my introductory chapter I cited three extremely grave and significant facts which confront modern civilization. The first was the fact of women's growing economic freedom, their emancipation from domestic slavery. I believe that women would not wish to be economically free if their instinct gave them any warning that freedom for them meant danger to their children. But no observer of social conditions can have failed to observe the oceans of misery endured by women and children because of their economic dependence on the fortunes of husbands and fathers.

Whatever may be the solution of poverty, whatever be the future status of the family, it seems certain to me that some way will be devised whereby motherhood will cease to be a privately supported profession. In some way society will pay its own account. If producing citizens to the State be the greatest service a woman citizen can perform, the State will ultimately recognize the right of the woman citizen to protection during her time of service. The first step towards solving the problem is for women to learn to support themselves before the time comes for them to serve the State. Through the educating process of productive labor the woman mind may devise a means of protecting the future mothers of the race.

The second fact, the growing prevalence of divorce, on the face of it seems to menace the security of the home and of children. So deeply overlain with prejudice, conventionalities, and theological traditions is the average woman as well as the average man that it is difficult to argue in favor of a temporary tolerance of divorce that a permanent high standard of marriage may be established. But to my mind any state of affairs, even a Reno state of affairs, looks more encouraging than the old conditions under which innocent girls married to rakes and drunkards were forbidden to escape their chains. It is not for the good of children to be born of disease and misery and hatred. It is not for their good to be brought up in an atmosphere of hopeless inharmony. What is happening in this country is not a weakening of the marriage bond, but a strengthening of it. For soon there will grow up in the American man's mind a desire for a marriage which will be at least as equitable as a business partnership; as fair to one party as to the other. He will cease to regard marriage as a state of bondage for the wife and a state of license for the husband. He will not venture to suggest to a bright woman that cooking in his kitchen is a more honorable career than teaching, or painting, or writing, or manufacturing. Marriage will not mean extinction to any woman. It will mean to the well-to-do wife freedom to do community service. It will mean to the industrial woman an economic burden shared. When that time comes there will be no divorce problem. There will be no longer a class of women who avoid the risk of divorce by refusing to marry.

The third fact, the increasing popularity of woman suffrage, I disposed of in the preceding chapter. Nothing that the women who vote have ever done indicates, in the remotest degree, that they are not just as mindful of children's interests at the polls as other women are in their nurseries and kitchens.

On the contrary, wherever women have left their kitchens and nurseries, whenever they have gone out into the world of action and of affairs, they have increased their effectiveness as mothers. I do not mean by this that the girl who enters a factory at fourteen and works there ten hours a day until she marries increases her effectiveness as a mother. Industrial slavery unfits a woman for motherhood as certainly as intellectual and moral slavery unfits her.

Women who are free, who look on life through their own eyes, who think their own thoughts, who live in the real world of striving, struggling, suffering humanity, are the most effective mothers that ever lived. They know how to care for their own children, and more than that, they know how to care for the community's children.

The child at his mother's knee, spelling out the words of a psalm, stands for the moral education of the race—or it used to. A group of Chicago club women walking boldly into the city Bridewell and the Cook County Jail and demanding that children of ten and twelve should no longer be locked up with criminals; these same women, after the children were segregated, establishing a school for them, and finally these same women achieving a juvenile court, is the modern edition of the old ideal.

Woman's place is in the home. This is a platitude which no woman will ever dissent from, provided two words are dropped out of it. Woman's place is Home. Her task is homemaking. Her talents, as a rule, are mainly for homemaking. But Home is not contained within the four walls of an individual home. Home is the community. The city full of people is the Family. The public school is the real Nursery. And badly do the Home and the Family and the Nursery need their mother.

I dream of a community where men and women divide the work of governing and administering, each according to his special capacities and natural abilities. The division of labor between them will be on natural and not conventional lines. No one will be rewarded according to sex, but according to work performed. The city will be like a great, well-ordered, comfortable, sanitary household. Everything will be as clean as in a good home. Every one, as in a family, will have enough to eat, clothes to wear, and a good bed to sleep on. There will be no slums, no sweat shops, no sad women and children toiling in tenement rooms. There will be no babies dying because of an impure milk supply. There will be no "lung blocks" poisoning human beings that landlords may pile up sordid profits. No painted girls, with hunger gnawing at their empty stomachs, will walk in the shadows. All the family will be taken care of, taught to take care of themselves, protected in their daily tasks, sheltered in their homes.

The evil things in society are simply the result of half the human race, with only half the wisdom, and not even half the moral power contained in the race, trying to rule the world alone. Men's government rests on force, on violence. Everything evil, everything bad, everything selfish, is a form of violence. Poverty itself is a form of violence.

Women will not tolerate violence. They loathe waste. They cannot bear to see illness and suffering and starvation. Alone, they are no more capable of coping with these evils than men are. But they have the very resources that men lack. Working with men they could accomplish miracles.

Note the inventiveness of women, most of which goes to waste because they lack the wonderful constructive ability of men. Women invented spinning. They could never have harnessed the lightning to their wheels. Women established the first public playgrounds. Men extended the public playgrounds across the country.

Women established the juvenile court. Men took it over and worked out a new system of criminal jurisprudence for children. Women have cleaned up a hundred cities. Men are rebuilding them. Slowly men and women are learning to live and work together. Reluctantly men are coming to accept women as their co-workers.

Woman's place is Home, and she must not be forbidden to dwell there. Who would be so selfish, so blind, so reactionary, as to forbid her her fullest freedom to do her work, must surrender opposition in the end. For woman's work is race preservation, race improvement, and who opposes her, or interferes with her, simply fights nature, and nature never loses her battles.

INDEX

Aberdeen, Countess of, Addams, Jane, Alabama, Aladyn, Alexis, Albert Hall, London, Albion House of Refuge, N.Y., Aldrich, Mrs. Richard, Allegheny, Pa., Allgemeinen Deutschen Frauenbund, American, Sadie, American Federation of Labor American women and common law Arbitration, Argentine, Arizona, Arkansas Arthur, Mrs. Clara B., Association of Collegiate Alumnae, Association of Working Girls' Clubs, Augsberg, Anita, Australia, Austria

Balliett, Thomas M., Barnum, Gertrude Barrett, Mrs. Kate Waller, Bedford Reformatory, N.Y., Belmont, Mrs. O.H.P., Berlin, Birmingham, Ala., Blackstone Blackwell's Island, Blatch, Harriot Stanton, Bluhm, Agnes, Boston, Mass Boston Central Labor Union, Boswell, Helen V., Brandeis, Louis D. Brewer, Justice, Brooklyn, N.Y., Bullowa, Emilie,

California Carlisle, Pa., Carnegie, Andrew, Casey, Josephine, Catt, Mrs. Carrie Chapman, Cauer, Minna, Chicago Child, Lydia Maria, Church, the Christian, its relation to social problems, Civic Club of Allegheny County Civic Club of Philadelphia, Cleveland, O. Cliff Dwellers' remains, Cobden Sanderson, Mrs., Code Napoleon Cole, Elsie College Settlements Association, Colony Club, Colorado, Colorado State Federation of Clubs, Columbia University, Columbus, Ohio, Common law, Coney Island Conine, Mrs. Martha A.B., Consumers' League of N.Y., Consumers' Leagues Conventions of women's clubs, Corpus Juris, Cotton mills, women and girls in Council of Women Cranford, N.J., Cutting, Fulton,

Dallas, Tex., Dance halls, Daughters of the American Revolution, Daughters of the Confederacy, Davis, Mrs. Jefferson, Decker, Mrs. Sarah Platt, Delaware, Denver, Colo., Department stores, Detroit, Devine, Edward T., Dewey, Mrs. Melvil, Dineen, Governor, District of Columbia, Divorce Dock, Lavinia, Domestic service, Domestic Service, Professor Salmon's, Donnelly, Annie, Dreier, Mary, Dutcher, Elizabeth,

Eight-hour day, Ely Bates Settlement, Employment agencies, England Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, Europe, European women, Evans, Mrs. Glendower,

Factories, Fall River, Mass. Festivals, play, Feudalism Filene system, Finland Florida Flowerton, Maud, Folks, Homer, France, Franks, Salian French Code,

Gad, Elizabeth, General Federation of Women's Clubs, Georgia Gerberding, Mrs. Elizabeth, German Woman Suffrage Association, Germany, Gillespie, Mabel, Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, her Women and Economics, "Girls' Bill," Girls' Friendly Association, Golden, John, Goldmark, Josephine, Goldmark, Pauline, Gompers, Samuel Grannis, Mrs. Elizabeth, Greece, Greece, Queen of, Greeley, Helen Hoy, Greenbaum, Sadie, Grenfell, Mrs. Helen, Gulick, Luther H.,

Harper, Ida Husted, Harrisburg, Pa., Hearn, Henry, Alice, Holland,

Housekeepers' Alliance, Hughes, Governor, Hundred Years' War,

Iceland, Idaho, Illinois, Inheritance, Intermunicipal Committee on Household Research, International Council of Women, International Woman Suffrage Alliance Iowa, Israels, Mrs. Charles M. Italy, Janes, Elizabeth, Jefferson Market Court, Jordan, Gertrude,

Kansas Kellor, Frances, Kennard, Beulah, Kirby, John, Jr., Kusserow, Anna

Lafferty, Mrs. Alma, Laidlaw, Mrs. James Lees, Lake City, Minn., Laughlin, Gail, Laundries, Law, American Legal Aid Society of N.Y. City, Legal disabilities of women Leipzig, Lemlich, Clara, Libraries, Los Angeles, Cal., Louisiana Lowell, Mrs. Josephine Shaw, Luxemburg,

MacLean, Annie Marian, Maloney, Elizabeth, Marot, Helen Massachusetts Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics McEwans, the, Men, their attitude toward women Mercantile Employers' Bill Merchants' Association of N.Y., Mercy, Anna, Meredith, Ellis Milholland, Inez, Mills, Mills, Enos, Miner, Maude E., Miner, Stella, Missouri, Mitchell, John, Montana, Moore, Mrs. Philip N., Morgan, Anne Mott, Lucretia, Muller, Curt

Napoleon, Napoleon Code Nathan, Mrs. Frederick National Civic Federation, National Congress of Mothers, National Manufacturers' Association National Society of Collegiate Alumnae, National Woman Suffrage Association Nebraska Nestor, Agnes, Nevada, New England, New Haven, Conn. New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, New York, N.Y., New York Telephone Co., New Zealand, Night Court. See Jefferson Market Court Night work of women, North Carolina North Dakota,

Ohio, Oklahoma, Orange, House of, Oregon, Oregon case, Oregon Standard,Out of Work, Miss Kellor's

Palisades of the Hudson, Panama Canal, Pankhurst, Mrs., Paris, Peace Pennsylvania, Persia, Philadelphia, Pike, Violet, Pittsburg, Playgrounds, Playgrounds Association of America Portland, Ore., Portugal Potter, Virginia, Probation Association of N.Y., Property Law, Married Women's, Public Service League of Denver, Colo. Puritans

Resurrection, Tolstoy's, Revere Beach, Rheinhard Commission, Rhode Island "Rights of Man," Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory, Robins, Mrs. Raymond, Robinson, Mrs. Helen Ring, Rochester, N.Y., Industrial School, Roxbury, Mass., carpet mill strike, Russia,

Sage, Mrs. Russell, St. Louis, Mo. Salic Law, Salmon, Prof. Lucy Maynard Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Schoenfeld, Julia, Scranton, Pa., Seneca Falls convention, Servant problem. See Domestic Service Shaw, Dr. Anna, Shirt-waist makers' strike, Smith, "Gypsy," Snowden, Mrs. Philip, Social evil, Social purity Socialist party South Africa, South Carolina, South Chicago, South Dakota, Spain Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Stover, Charles B., Succession to throne by women, Sweat shop, the Switzerland

Teacher's Federation of Chicago Ten-hour day, Tennessee Texas, Tillman case, Turkey, Tuthill, Judge R.S., Twentieth Century Club of Detroit,

United States Government United States Industrial Commission, United Textile Workers Utah

Vassar College, Victoria, Queen, Virginia, Voters' League for Equal Suffrage,

Wage earning, women in, Washington (state), Waverley House, White, Mrs. Lovell, "White Slave" traffic Whitman, Charles S., Wilhelmina, Queen, Windeguth, Dora Winthrop, Mrs. Egerton, Woman and Economics, Gilman's, Woman suffrage, Woman Suffrage Party Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Woman's Municipal League of N.Y., Women, their ideals, in Europe, in America, in industry, their fight against the social evil, in domestic service, collective opinion of, Women's Civic Club of San Francisco, Women's Club, of Lake City, Minn., of Dallas, Tex., of San Francisco, of Pittsburg of Detroit, of Philadelphia, of Harrisburg, Pa., of Birmingham, Ala., of Carlisle, Pa., of Cranford, N.J., Women's Clubs Women's Educational and Industrial Union of BostonWomen's League of Justice, Women's Political Equality Union, Women's Property Act, Women's Trade Union League Working Women's Society Wyoming,

Yonkers, N.Y., Young Women's Christian Association

THE END