Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
This brings me to the other platitude. How often we are told,
"Women themselves do not want it; when they do it will be given
to them." That is to say, when an overwhelming majority of women
want what they ought to have, then they can have it. Extension of
suffrage never has been granted on these terms. No great reform
has gone through on these terms. In an enlightened State wanting
is not considered a necessary condition to the granting of
education or the extension of any privilege. Such a State confers
it in order to create the desire; unenlightened States, like
Turkey and Russia, hold off until revolution compels a reluctant,
niggardly abdication of tyranny.... We have the conviction that
that which has come in Finland and Australia, which is coming in
Great Britain, will come in America, and there is a majesty in
the sight of a great world-tide which has been gathering force
through generations, which is rising steadily and irresistibly,
that should paralyze any American Xerxes who thinks to stop it
with humanly created restraints.
Dr. M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College, received an
ovation. "The formation of this National College League," she said,
"indicates that college women will be ready to bear their part in the
stupendous social change of which the demand for woman suffrage is
only the outward symbol," and she continued:
Sixty years ago all university studies and all the charmed world
of scholarship were a man's world, in which women had no share.
Now, although only one woman in one thousand goes to college even
in the United States, where there are more college women than in
any other country, the position of every individual woman in
every part of the civilized world has been changed because this
one thousandth per cent. have proved beyond the possibility of
question that in intellect there is no sex, that the accumulated
learning of our great past and of our still greater future is the
inheritance of women also. Men have admitted women into
intellectual comradeship and the opinions of educated women can
no longer be ignored by educated men.... Women are one-half of
the world, but until a century ago the world of music and
painting and sculpture and literature and scholarship and science
was a man's world. The world of trades and professions and work
of all kinds was a man's world. Women lived a twilight life, a
half-life apart, and looked out and saw men as shadows walking.
Now women have won the right to higher education and to economic
independence. The right to become citizens of the State is the
next and inevitable consequence of education and work outside the
home. We have gone so far; we must go farther. Why are we afraid?
It is the next step forward on the path toward the sunrise--and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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