In Belgium 268,337 women are engaged in the industries. The Socialist party has recognized the organizations of these women; it was instrumental in organizing 250,000 women into trade-unions. Elsewhere this would be impossible.[87] Madame Vandervelde, the wife of the Socialist member of Parliament, and Madame Gatti de Gammond, the publisher of the _Cahiers feministes_, were the leaders of the Socialist woman's rights movement, which is organized throughout the country in committees, councils, and societies. Madame Gatti de Gammond died in 1905, and her publication, the _Cahiers feministes_, was discontinued. The secretary of the Federation of Socialist Women (_Fédération de femmes socialistes_) is Madame Tilmans. Vooruit, of Ghent, publishes a woman's magazine: _De Stem der Vrouw_. The women are demanding the right to vote. The Belgian women possessed municipal suffrage till 1830. They were deprived of this right by the Constitution of 1831. A measure favoring universal suffrage (for men and women) was introduced into Parliament in 1894. This bill, however, provided also for plural voting, by which the property-owning and the educated classes were given one or two additional votes. The Socialists opposed this, and demanded that each person have one vote (_un homme, un vote_). The Clerical majority then replied that it would not bring the bill to a vote. In this way the Clericals remained assured of a majority. For tactical purposes the Socialists adopted the expression--_un homme, un vote_. It harmonized with their principles and ideals. At a meeting of the party in which the matter was discussed, it was shown that universal suffrage would be detrimental to the party's interests; for the Socialists were convinced that woman's suffrage would certainly insure a majority for the Clericals. Hence, in meeting, the women were persuaded to withdraw their demand for woman's suffrage on the grounds of opportuneness, and _in the meantime to work for the inauguration of universal male suffrage without the plural vote_.[88] In the _Fronde_, Audrée Téry summarized the situation in the following dialogue:-- _The man._ Emancipate yourself and I will enfranchise you. _The woman._ Give me the franchise and I shall emancipate myself. _The man._ Be free, and you shall have freedom. In this manner, concludes Audrée Téry, this dialogue can be continued indefinitely. Recently the middle-class women have begun to show an interest in woman's suffrage. A woman's suffrage organization was formed in Brussels in 1908; one in Ghent, in 1909. Together they have organized the Woman's Suffrage League, which has affiliated with the International Woman's Suffrage Alliance. Woman's lack of rights and her powerlessness in public life are shown by the fact that in Antwerp, in 1908, public aid to the unemployed was granted only to men,--to unmarried as well as to married men. As for the unmarried women, they were left to shift for themselves. ITALY