Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
It has been well said that the modern city is a stronghold of
industrialism quite as the feudal city was a stronghold of
militarism, but the modern cities fear no enemies and rivals from
without and their problems of government are solely internal.
Affairs for the most part are going badly in these great new
centres, in which the quickly-congregated population has not yet
learned to arrange its affairs satisfactorily. Unsanitary
housing, poisonous sewage, contaminated water, infant mortality,
the spread of contagion, adulterated food, impure milk,
smoke-laden air, ill-ventilated factories, dangerous occupations,
juvenile crime, unwholesome crowding, prostitution and
drunkenness are the enemies which the modern cities must face and
overcome, would they survive. Logically their electorate should
be made up of those who can bear a valiant part in this arduous
contest, those who in the past have at least attempted to care
for children, to clean houses, to prepare foods, to isolate the
family from moral dangers; those who have traditionally taken
care of that side of life which inevitably becomes the subject of
municipal consideration and control as soon as the population is
congested. To test the elector's fitness to deal with this
situation by his ability to bear arms is absurd. These problems
must be solved, if they are solved at all, not from the military
point of view, not even from the industrial point of view, but
from a third, which is rapidly developing in all the great cities
of the world--the human-welfare point of view....
City housekeeping has failed partly because women, the
traditional housekeepers, have not been consulted as to its
multiform activities. The men have been carelessly indifferent to
much of this civic housekeeping, as they have always been
indifferent to the details of the household.... The very
multifariousness and complexity of a city government demand the
help of minds accustomed to detail and variety of work, to a
sense of obligation for the health and welfare of young children
and to a responsibility for the cleanliness and comfort of other
people. Because all these things have traditionally been in the
hands of women, if they take no part in them now they are not
only missing the education which the natural participation in
civic life would bring to them but they are losing what they have
always had.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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