A Short History of Women's Rights: From the Days of Augustus to the Present Time. with Special Reference to England and the United States. Second Edition Revised, With Additions.Hecker, Eugene A. (Eugene Arthur)
History
A Short History of Women's Rights: From the Days of Augustus to the Present Time. with Special Reference to England and the United States. Second Edition Revised, With Additions.
Hecker, Eugene A. (Eugene Arthur)
Women's rights -- History
One venerable bogey I wish to dispose of before I close. It is that the
Roman Empire was ruined and collapsed because the increasing liberty
given to women and the equality granted the sexes under the Empire
produced immorality that destroyed the State. The trouble with Rome was
that it failed to grasp the fundamentals of economic law. Slavery, the
concentration of land in a few hands, and the theory that all taxation
has for its end the enriching of a select few, were the fallacies which,
in the last analysis, caused the collapse of the Roman Empire. The
luxury, immorality, and race-suicide which are popularly conceived to
have been the immediate causes of Rome's decline and fall, were in
reality the logical results, the inevitable attendant phenomena of a
political system based on a false hypothesis. For when wealth was
concentrated in a few hands, when there was no all-embracing popular
education, all incentives to thrift, to private initiative, and hence to
the development of the sturdy moral qualities which thrift and
initiative cause and are the product of, were stifled. A nation can
reach its maximum power only when, through the harmonious cooperation
of all its parts, the initiative and talents of every individual have
free scope, untrammeled by special privilege, to reach that sphere for
which nature has designed him or her.
NOTE: The official organ of the National American Woman Suffrage
Association is _The Woman's Journal_, published weekly. The headquarters
are at 505 Fifth Avenue, New York City.
England has two organisations which differ in methods. The National
Union of Women's Suffrage Societies has adopted the constitutional or
peaceful policy; it publishes _The Common Cause_, a weekly, at 2 Robert
Street, Adelphi, W.C., London. The "militant" branch of suffragettes
forms the National Women's Social and Political Union, and its weekly
paper is _Votes for Women_, Lincoln's Inn House, Kingsway, W.C.
The International Woman Suffrage Alliance issues the _Jus Suffragii_
monthly at 62 Kruiskade, Rotterdam.
A good source from which to obtain the present status of women in Europe
is the _Englishwoman's Year Book and Directory for 1914_, published by
Adam and Charles Black.
NOTES:
[428] Twenty-six senators did not vote. The question of negro suffrage
complicated the matter with Southern senators. Mr. Williams of
Mississippi wished to limit the franchise to "white citizens"; but his
amendment was voted down. The list of senators voting for and against
the woman suffrage amendment appears on page 5472 of the Congressional
Record, March 19, 1914. The debate is contained in pages 5454-5472.
Senator Tillman of South Carolina inserted a vicious attack on northern
women by the late Albert Bledsoe, who advised them to "cut their hair
short, and their petticoats, too, and enter a la bloomer the ring of
political prizefighters." Bledsoe's article will be found in the Record,
July 28, 1913, 3115-3119.
[429] Record, May 6, 1913, 1221-1222.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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