Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions; Women -- Suffrage; Women's rights
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."
[Illustration: SUFFRAGETTES IN MADISON SQUARE.]
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, Küche, 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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