The hundreds of thousands and millions of women employed in hundreds of trades and professions are personally and vitally concerned in the nature of our social legislation. Laws relating to the length of the work-day, night-work, child labor, wages, safety appliances in factories and workshops, in one word, all labor laws, as also insurance laws, etc., are of the greatest interest to working women. Workingmen are only very insufficiently informed about the conditions existing in many branches of industry in which women are chiefly or exclusively employed. It is to the interest of the employers to conceal existing evils that they have caused; and in many instances factory inspection does not include trades in which women are exclusively employed; yet in these very branches of industry protection is most needful. We need but point to the workshops in our large cities, where seamstresses, dressmakers, milliners, etc., are crowded together. We hardly ever hear a complaint from their midst, and there is no investigation of their condition. Women as bread-winners are also interested in the commerce and custom-laws and in all civil laws. There can no longer be any doubt, that it is as important to women as it is to men, to influence the nature of our conditions by means of legislation. The participation of women in public life would give it a new impetus and open new vistas. Demands of this sort are briefly set aside, with the reply: “Women don’t understand politics; most of them do not wish to have a vote and would not know how to use it.” That is both true and false. It is true that until now, in Germany, at least, not very many women have demanded political equality. The first German woman to proclaim the rights of women, as early as the sixties of the last century, was Hedwig Dohm. Recently the Socialist working women have been the chief supporters of woman’s suffrage and have undertaken an active agitation for the winning of the ballot.