Woman’s Voice

Woman’s Voice
AN ANTHOLOGY

By
JOSEPHINE CONGER-KANEKO

BOSTON
The Stratford Company
1918

Copyright 1918
The STRATFORD CO., Publishers
Boston, Mass.

The Alpine Press, Boston, Mass., U. S. A.

Dedicated to

THE SPLENDID WOMEN OF ALL NATIONS AND ALL AGES WHO HAVE VALIANTLY STRIVEN TOWARD THE BROADER FIELDS OF THOUGHT AND ACTIVITY FOR THEIR SISTERS AND FOR MANKIND AS A WHOLE

EDITOR’S PREFACE

Just now, when the world is going through the most significant period of human history, it is well that woman’s voice be heard above the tumult. For upon woman’s activity may rest the salvation of the race.

This Anthology is not an attempt at literary effects so much as it is an attempt to present seriously woman’s viewpoint of life to a nation standing on the verge of—it knows not what!

So new is the voice of woman in the affairs of life, that in time of stress or panic it must become insistent to be heard or heeded. One book, by one woman, regardless of its strength or purpose, could not have the effect that one book by “crowds” of women could have. That is why this volume has come into existence. It literally is the voice of “crowds of women.”

Those whose words are quoted here are representative women, leaders in their various organizations, representing hundreds of thousands of individuals. Many of them are among our foremost writers, artists, teachers, actors, orators and organizers—some of them combining several of these qualities.

“Woman’s Voice” might easily have been two or three times its present size, but that would have meant a publication too expensive to reach the thousands of readers of moderate means to whom this work is an immediate, special appeal. Future editions of this Anthology will be revised and enlarged until we finally shall have a perfect volume which will take its place in every home as a standard household classic, along with those other books of strong human appeal which every home possesses.

Much of the material in “Woman’s Voice” is covered by copyright, and special permission has been granted the editor to reproduce it here. Many very good things were taken from exchanges (more or less obscure publications), and in such cases the original source of their appearance was difficult to trace. However, in each instance attempt has been made to give credit where it is due, and the editor hopes she has made no serious failures in this respect.

The many publishers and publications, as well as authors and artists represented here, have been very kind in their co-operation to make “Woman’s Voice” a success, by granting permission to use these selections from their output. Special mention is given them elsewhere.

It is the editor’s hope that this volume will circulate very largely in the small towns and country districts of our nation. I want the millions of women who are feeling, and thinking, but who are as yet inarticulate upon the larger affairs of life, to find their need and their voice in this volume. I want that great isolated sisterhood, many of whom have never read a book by a woman on social questions, to have this volume in their homes—and always near at hand; on the sewing table, or in the kitchen cabinet, where it may be referred to between cake-baking and bread-making times. I hope the children in these homes will memorize the verses in this book, and recite them at the Friday afternoon “Literaries,” in their schools.

I hope the club women will make constant use of this volume in their club work—in the preparation of programs, and in roll calls. For the things quoted here deal with the most vital issues of the times, as well as with the most intimate personal emotions and needs of the individual, and are presented by responsible and capable women. Also, they show the growth of race progress through woman’s efforts—how she has struggled and won educational rights; how she has struggled and won political rights; how she has struggled and won matrimonial rights, and rights for her children, and for the world’s workers. How she is struggling still to bring about an ever higher and fuller life for today and for the future.

And in all this she needs your help, you in your isolated corners; for not until every nook and cranny is active and comes to the front, can our nation attain to those heights for which our womankind is so valiantly working.

When woman’s voice is heard the world around, mankind will hearken to her cries and heed them.

INDEX OF AUTHORS

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

The American people today may be likened to the onlookers of a great drama. A drama so tremendous, so spectacular, so tragic, that it surpasses anything the mind of man has hitherto conceived. The onlookers of this drama naturally are absorbed with its immediate movements. With its broad meanings they are intensely concerned, but beyond these they have no interest. Their vision for detail is clouded by the flare and vastness of the apparent. What lies beneath, above, about, are only incidentals and of no immediate consequence to them.

But the “incidentals” of the present war are, for the careful observer, to say nothing of the professional drama critic, the chips which show what is taking place as the result of the flare and the noise, and the tragedy. One of these incidents is the coming of woman into realms of activity which not for a million years—that is to say, never before—have been opened to her.

Under the stress involved in winning a world peace, this fact is scarcely noted, and is not understood in its full meaning. But the moment peace is declared it will become a question of vital importance, involving as it does all lines of human endeavor—labor, commerce, philosophy, literature, agriculture, law, education, and the crafts as well as the arts.

The conservative mind, freed from the absorption of war, will turn with startled gasp to discover that one half of the race has been shaken out of the rut of ages, and is spilling itself helter-skelter, into every department of social achievement. And the conservative mind will ask with child-like frankness if the women are equal to the responsibility and the opportunity which has been thrust upon them.

“Woman’s Voice” has been compiled in anticipation of this awakening on the part of the multitude, as an answer to its wondering inquiry.

That women have themselves long yearned toward the broader paths of effort and usefulness is manifest in the utterances of those who have learned the art of self-expression. That they fully comprehend the meaning, hardships and blessings of the broader life, is plainly shown in their wide-spread printed word. “Woman’s Voice” is an effort to collect, in what may be called at once a brief and an exposition of woman’s entrance into the world of general endeavor, the wisdom of the women who have studied conditions with an earnestness and efficiency which renders them peculiarly fitted to speak for themselves upon the questions most closely touching themselves and their children.

For ages untold only the voice of man has dictated the conditions under which the rest of the world should live, including women and children. All the poetry, all the philosophy, all the wisdom of the ages was presented in man’s words, and from man’s standpoint. Woman, dumb, untutored, and handicapped by an adverse public opinion, another creation of the solely masculine mind, held to her chimney corner as helpless in the face of petty and colossal injustices as the children she bore.

“Woman’s Voice” portrays the effort of women to get away from this now apparent social mistake. Women have spoken and will continue to speak, for, if we are to proceed speedily and with the least possible resistance into the new order of things, education is still essential. There are millions to whom the apparent is not apparent, and whose eyes must be opened before the democracy for which the world is paying in blood and agony can become a reality.

I believe “Woman’s Voice” should be in every home in the nation, and in all nations where society is affected by the conditions which have brought women away from the hearth-stone into the market-place. As a digest of the best thought of representative women the world over, it will be read when the multiplicity of volumes from which it is quoted are passed by. It will be read not only for its seriousness, but for its poetic sentiment, and its sprightly comment on the every-day things of life. Its usefulness to club members and to workers in the equal suffrage campaigns will be invaluable, but it is to the average housewife and mother that I trust it will make its strongest appeal. To the women who have more or less dimly felt, but who have not as yet found a voice or an avenue through which to develop or express this feeling about things which so much concern them and their children. I am hoping, also, that it will fall into the hands of thousands of theorists who are opposing, for no reason except their own ignorance about it, the advance of women in the coming world-democracy.

Briefly, but earnestly, I wish to thank the publishers, editors and writers who have made this Anthology possible through their permission to reprint from books, magazines and articles the matter contained herein. I have endeavored in all instances to give full credit to all of these, and if errors happen to occur in this regard they are unintentional, and only the result of the initial publishing of a work as new and comprehensive as this one. Also, if any name has been omitted whose observations should have appeared in this book, it is only because it was impossible for a very busy editor to fail to miss some very worthy writers. In future editions these can be gathered up, until we have a volume or many volumes which may be perfectly representative of the woman’s voice of the world.

Josephine Conger
Compiler “Woman’s Voice”

BOOK I
The Woman Movement

THE WOMAN MOVEMENT

The Most Brilliant Period

By Anna Howard Shaw

(American contemporary. Former president of the National American Suffrage Association. From a series of articles in “The Metropolitan.”)

The winning of the suffrage states, the work in the states not yet won, the conventions, gatherings and international councils in which women of every nation have come together, have all combined to make this quarter of a century the most brilliant period for women in the history of the world.

Woman’s Awakening

By Mary Ritter Beard

The awakening of women to the low social status of their sex is the most encouraging fact of the century.

Unanimity of Needs

By Katherine Anthony

(Author of “Mothers Who Must Earn,” and “Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia,” from which the following is taken.)

The woman movement of the civilized world wants much the same thing in whatever language its demands are expressed. In more or less unconscious cooperation, the women of the civilized nations have from the first worked for similar ends and common interests. Beyond all superficial differences and incidental forms, the vision of the emancipated woman wears the same features whether she be hailed as frau, fru, or woman. The disfranchisement of a whole sex, a condition which has existed throughout the civilized world until a comparatively recent date, has bred in half the population an unconscious internationalism. The man without a country was a tragic exception; the woman without a country was the accepted rule. The enfranchisement of the women now under way has come too late to inculcate in them the narrow views of citizenship which were once supposed to accompany the gift of the vote. Its effect will rather be to make the unconscious internationalism of the past the conscious internationalism of the future.

Coming Into Her Own

By Fanny Humphrey Gaffny

(American contemporary. President National Council of Women. From a speech delivered at the celebration of Miss Anthony’s 80th birthday.)

The Christian world reckoned by centuries is just coming of age. Therefore women are beginning to put away childish things and to realize the greatness of womanhood.

The Sisterhood of Women

By Coralie Franklin Cook

(From a speech delivered at the 80th birthday celebration of Susan B. Anthony.)

Not until the suffrage movement had awakened woman to her responsibility and power, did she come to appreciate the true significance of Christ’s pity for Magdalene as well as of his love for Mary; not till then was the work of Pundita Ramabai in far away India as sacred as that of Frances Willard at home in America; not till she had suffered under the burden of her own wrongs and abuses did she realize the all-important truth that no woman and no class of women can be degraded and all womankind not suffer thereby.

The Revolt of Women

“Ouida” in Lippincott’s

([See page 113])

The whole human race is involved in the results of the present revolt and reaction amongst women; if turned back upon itself by mockery it will burn and bite on unseen, and find its issue in mad sins, wild frivolity, and all the anarchy of voluptuous abandonment; if rightly met, if rightly guided, it may become the noblest and highest revolution that has ever broken the chains of effete prejudices, and let out human souls from the darkness of ignorance into the light and glory of a day of liberty.

Women’s Qualifications for Suffrage

By Mrs. Russell Sage

([See page 170])

Twenty years ago I did not think that women were qualified for suffrage, but the strides they have made since then in the acquirement of business methods, in the management of their affairs, in the effective interest they have evinced in civic matters, and the way in which they have mastered parliamentary methods, have convinced me that they are eminently fitted to do men’s work in all purely intellectual fields.

A Generation Ago

By Neva R. Deardorf, Ph. D.

(Department Public Health and Charities, Philadelphia. From “Annals of the American Academy.”)

Woman’s place in the crowd of a generation ago was immediately back of her masculine kinsfolk. Here she enjoyed protection from the rough elbowing of the crowd, though in return for this shelter she forfeited her liberty and was expected to devote all of her physical strength and mental energy to pushing some particular masculine protector to the front. Some times her efforts were appreciated, frequently they were taken for granted, since etiquette favored a covert manner of pushing. But the rules of the game have changed. Partners and co-laborers are taking the place of lords and masters. Farmers, professors, clergymen, politicians, in fact, husbands of every calling are coming to see the advantage of having a wife beside, instead of behind, them. They now take pride in a wife who enjoys an outlook on the world which enables her to help far more intelligently and effectively than did the wife of a generation ago.

To Raise the Standards of Life

By Gertrude Barnum

(American newspaper woman. Speaker and writer in the cause of organized labor.)

The attitude of men toward women, economic, social, political, reacts upon man and society. In recognizing this, the man with the scythe is a length ahead of the man with the cap and gown, the cassock or the check book. The awakening to a sense of the economic interdependence and fellowship of men and women, has made the trade unionist the first to recognize the justice and wisdom of “universal suffrage,” and annually in convention the American Federation of Labor declares:

“That the best interests of labor require the admission of women to full citizenship—not only as a matter of justice to them, but also as a necessary step toward insuring and raising the American standards of life for all.”

Legislative Responsibility

By Emily J. Hutchins

([See page 204])

The most obvious effect of the vote is that it puts women upon a plane of political equality with other normal adults.... Universal suffrage stands for a certain recognition of the stake that all human beings, irrespective of sex, have in the general welfare, and destroys a false sense of sex limitations. By virtue of their new standing in the community women assume an equal responsibility with men, for both good and bad legislation.

He Shall See the New Woman

By Mabel Potter Daggett

(From “What the War Means to Woman,” in “Pictorial Review.”)

You see, when her country called her, it was destiny that spoke. Though no nation knew. Governments have only thought they were making women munition workers and women conductors and women bank-tellers and women doctors and women lawyers and women citizens and all the rest. I doubt if there is a statesman anywhere who has learned to unlock a door of opportunity to let the woman movement by, who has realized that he was but the instrument in the hands of a higher power that is re-shaping the world for mighty ends, rough-hewn though they be today from the awful chaos of war.

But there is one who will know. When the man at the front gets back and stands again before the cottage rose-bowered on the English downs, red-roofed in France and Italy, blue-trimmed in Germany, or ikon-blessed in Russia, or white-porched off Main Street in America, he will clasp her to his heart once more. Then he will hold her off, so, at arm’s length and look long into her eyes and deep into her soul. And lo, he shall see there the New Woman. This is not the woman whom he left behind when he marched away to the Great World War. Something profound has happened to her since. It is woman’s coming of age.

The Freedom of the Women

By Louise Collier Wilcox

(In “The Woman’s Journal.”)

When woman knew that on her strength devolved the care of race,

She crept into her cave to sleep and told her man to face

The prowling outer dangers, and the dark and fearful odds,

The thunder, beasts, and lightning, and the wrath of all the gods;

For at her heart she carried the future and its cares,

And the freedom that she needed was more precious far then theirs.

So she watched her babe’s eyes open, and the little limbs grow straight,

And she taught him all the lore she’d learned, and what to love and hate;

And she trained the little body, and she led the little soul,

Till another woman took him to lead further toward the goal;

Then the mother smiled in anguish, though she laughed at age and cares,

For the freedom that she wanted was a longer one than theirs.

When the work of life grew harder and men bowed beneath the yoke,

Of needs too great to master, and lusts too deep to choke,

She worked and slaved and tended, she wrestled with the dearth;

She harnessed up herself to beasts, to till the barren earth;

And she planted in her garden and she weeded out the tares,

For the freedom that she wanted was more beautiful than theirs.

But when she saw man bestial and content with earthly things,

She scourged herself in cloisters, and she wept and prayed for wings.

Then she nurtured heavenly visions and she held aloft the cross,

To show eternal values amid life’s gain and loss.

And she pointed to the radiance round the crown the god-man wears,

For the freedom that she wanted was a holier one than theirs.

Then she smiled from out her shelter while her men coped with the world;

Her strength she made of weakness, and about her heart she curled

The tendrils of dependence and his little children’s love;

And she showed him what a home was in her gathered treasure trove.

All the time her eyes were smiling with the smile the seer wears,

For the freedom that she wanted was the freedom of his heirs.

Still her heart grew great and greater, and her eyes she would not blind

To the suffering of the victims, to the needs of all mankind.

And she knew her safety futile and her children’s stronghold weak,

Till the least, last one is sheltered, and there’s none astray to seek.

So she looked far down the ages to the good that all man shares,

For the freedom that she wanted was a broader one than theirs.

And she knew her man short-sighted, since he had not borne the pain,

The slavery, drudgery, darkness, the glory and the stain

Of womanhood and motherhood. How could he love the race?

As she who bore and nurtured, God’s instrument of grace?

So she ceased to coax and wheedle, and commanded as one dares

Whose only love of freedom is a higher one than theirs.

...

She stands, now, hand upon the helm, to help him govern life,

And she steers her world, his equal, in love, in peace, in strife;

She owns her strength and wisdom; and he may read who runs,

That she must demand her freedom from his daughters and his sons.

Neither beneath nor over, but equal in her place,

The freedom that she’ll die for, is the freedom of the race.

A Woman’s Question

By M. Carey Thomas

(A contemporary. President of Bryn Mawr College. From an address at the College Evening of the National American Suffrage Association.)

Woman suffrage is first of all a woman’s question. We cannot remain indifferent. The issues involved are so overwhelmingly important, first of all, to us as women caring as we must for all other women’s welfare, and second, to us as citizens of the modern industrial state. I am sure as the result of repeated experiment that it is only necessary for generous and unprejudiced women to realize the present economic independence of millions of women workers, and the swiftly coming economic independence of millions upon millions more women workers for woman suffrage to seem to them inevitable from that moment.

No one can maintain by serious arguments—that is, by arguments that are not pure and simple distortion of fact—that the ballot will not aid women workers, as it has aided men workers, to obtain fairer conditions and fairer wages. All working men and all men of every class regard the ballot as their greatest protection against the oppression and injustice of other men. It is only necessary to ask ourselves what would be the fate of any political party whose platform contained a plank depriving laboring men of the right to vote.

Because They Cannot Vote

By Meta L. Stern

([See page 250])

Industrial organization and political activity constitute the two powerful arms of the labor movement. Men are free to use both their arms. Women are struggling with one arm tied.

The Plea of the Women

By Katherine Parrott Sorringe

(In “The Woman’s Journal.”)

Standing before you with suppliant hands,

Mothers and wives and daughters, we

Sue for the justice long denied;—

Give us the vote that makes us free!

She who went down to the gates of death,

Joyful, to fling the life-doors wide,

Mother of statesman, soldier, saint—

Set this crown on her patient pride!

She, your comrade, who steadfast stood

Shoulder to shoulder, through storm and night,

Held up your hands till victory pealed—

Grant her this prize of well-fought fight.

Who trips laughing across your life,

Light of your love, your soul made fair?

Give her this pledge of a father’s faith,

Flower o’ freedom to deck her hair!

Mothers and wives and daughters, we,

Shall we ask in vain, with suppliant hand?

We, who are children of the free!

We, who are builders in the land!

A Prisoner in Bow

By Sylvia Pankhurst

(A leader of the Suffragette movement of England. The following, quoted from “The Woman’s Journal,” is an account of one of her imprisonments in the London jails.)

My eight days’ license had expired. The police were massed outside the Bromley Public Hall where I was speaking, waiting to arrest me. Numbers of detectives in plain clothes within were amongst the audience; the people hissed and howled at them and they threatened them with sticks. At the close of the meeting, the people, declaring that I should not be arrested, crowded down the stairs and out in a thick mass with men in the center of them all. The police rushed at us, striving to break our ranks and to force a way through to me.... Policemen were on every side of me. Two of them gripped and bruised my arms, dragging me along. The crowd followed, calling to me.... The policemen dug their fingers into my flesh. One of them took out his truncheon and grasped it tight against my hand and arm. The back of my left hand was bruised from it all next day. Several women rushed up to me and were arrested, and one girl who did not know any of us, or what the trouble was about, called out: “Oh, you should not hurt her,” and was taken into custody. They dragged me into a Cannon Row police station....

So, hatless, and without so much as a brush or comb, I was taken back to gaol to begin my hunger, thirst and sleep strike. When I reached my cell, the same cell in the hospital in which during February and March I had been forcibly fed for five weeks, I began to pace up and down.

A woman officer came to me and said I must not make a noise.... I took a blanket from the bed and spread it on the floor to deaden the sound of my footsteps, lest any of the other women prisoners should hear them and be kept awake.

Then I walked on and on, five short steps across the cell and five short steps back, on and on, and on.... As the hours dragged their slow way I stumbled often over the blanket that wrinkled up and caught in my feet. Often I stooped with dizzy brain to straighten it. The walking, the ceaseless walking, when I was so tired, made me grow sick and faint. I was stumbling, falling to my knees, clutching, as one drowning, at the bed or chair. Sometimes I think I slept an instant or two as I lay, for sleep seemed to be dogging as I walked.

It was cold, cold and colder, as the morning came, as the sombre yellow faded and the gray sky turned to violet—such a strange brilliant violet, almost startling it seemed through those heavy bars. Then the violet died into the bleak white chill of early day.

In the day time I still walked, but sometimes I had to rest in the hard, wooden chair, and then I would be startled to feel my head nod heavily to one side. My legs ached, the soles of my feet were swollen. They burned, and I thought of the women of the past who were made to walk on red hot plough shares for their faith. After the first few days I remembered that tramps rubbed soap on their feet to prevent their getting sore. I rubbed soap on mine and found that it eased them a good deal. Each time I took my stocking off to do this I noticed that my feet had grown more purple. My hands, too, were purple as they hung at my sides. My throat was parched and dry. My lips were cracked. On Wednesday I fainted twice, and afterwards there came and stayed till I was released, a strange pressure in the head, especially in the ears. There was a sharp pain across my chest. That evening I asked to see a doctor from the home office. On Thursday afternoon he came. On Friday there was no more likelihood of my sleeping. I lay on the bed most of the day burning hot, with cold shivers that seemed to pass over me as though a cold wind was blowing on my face. In the afternoon I was released and came back to the little red-roofed house under St. Stephen’s church and the kind hearts of Bow.

Out of the Dark

By Matilda Jocelyn Gage

(From “Woman, Church and State.”)

Although England was Christianized in the fourth century, it was not until the tenth that the Christian wife of a Christian husband acquired the right of eating at table with him.

All Methods Employed

By Mrs. Oliver H. P. Belmont

(In “Harper’s Bazar.” President of the Political Equality Association of New York, a leading spirit in the Congressional Union, an organization whose tactics have caused it to be called the militant wing of the suffrage movement.)

Woman suffrage is a war on ignorance, prejudice and vice. To attack certain gigantic forces, a people must take any and every line open to them. If the Germans had attacked Warsaw from but one side, that great city would still be under Russian rule. I believe, therefore, that women in fighting for their suffrage should use all lines approaching the enemy. I personally am working along all roads of attack, for I feel that where one method may fail, another may succeed.

Glory in Power

By Mrs. Burke Cockran

(In “Harper’s Bazar.”)

Suffragists are born, not made. There are many women whose brains will never respond to suffrage argument.... And yet I am convinced that these women, when they do receive the vote, will not only use their power judiciously and conscientiously, but will eventually glory in it.

Feminism a Tree

By Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

(Well-known English actress. Author of “What Women Want,”[1] from which the following is taken.)

... Feminism is a tree, and woman suffrage merely one of its many branches. Some of these branches are essential to the life of the tree, others are not. Some grow strong and put forth shoots in their turn, others blossom prematurely, wither young, and drop from the trunk. Meanwhile the tree towers up into the sun with its crown of sturdy growths, and its abortive shoots lie forgotten in the shadow below, leaving hardly a scar upon the great stem to mark their death. Only few people see this tree as a unit. All who do know that woman suffrage is one of its essential growths. But the majority still concentrate their gaze upon one branch or another, whichever seems to them most fair, and the parent tree is lost to sight amid the multiplicity of its offspring’s leaves. Suffrage has rallied to its march thousands of conservative women who are indifferent, or even opposed, to some newer branches of the tree, while those who are absorbed in certain later and eccentric growths are sometimes amusingly contemptuous of the older limbs. They forget that the topmost crown could not flourish if the wide boughs below did not help the tree to breathe. They are sometimes, too, in danger of forgetting that if the great roots of the trees were not anchored deep in the soil of woman’s nature itself, in her motherhood, her strong tenderness, and her service, the whole growth would perish.

[1] Frederick A. Stokes Co.

Woman Has Justified Herself

By Lady Morgan

(English. From “Woman and Her Master,” published in Paris, in a “Collection of Ancient and Modern British Authors,” 1840.)

Notwithstanding her false position, woman has struggled through all disabilities and degradations, has justified the intentions of Nature in her behalf, and demonstrated her claim to share in the moral agency of the world. In all outbursts of mind, in every forward rush of the great march of improvement she has borne a part; permitting herself to be used as an instrument, without hope of reward, and faithfully fulfilling her mission, without expectation of acknowledgment. She has, in various ages, given her secret service to the task-master, without partaking in his triumph, or sharing in his success. Her subtlety has insinuated views which man has shrunk from exposing, and her adroitness found favor for doctrines which he had the genius to conceive, but not the art to divulge. Priestess, prophetess, the oracle of the tripod, the sibyl of the cave, the veiled idol of the temple, the shrouded teacher of the academy, the martyr or missionary of a spiritual truth, the armed champion of a political cause, she has been covertly used for every purpose, by which man, when he has failed to reason his species into truth, has endeavored to fanaticize it into good; whenever mind has triumphed by indirect means over the hearts of the masses.

In all moral impulsions, woman has aided and been adopted; but, her efficient utility accomplished, the temporary part assigned her for temporary purposes performed, she has ever been hurled back into her natural obscurity, and conventional insignificance.... Alluded to, rather as an incident, rather than a principle in the chronicles of nations, her influence, which cannot be denied, has been turned into a reproach; her genius, which could not be concealed, has been treated as a phenomenon, when not considered as a monstrosity!

But where exist the evidences of these merits unacknowledged, of these penalties unrepealed? They are to be found carelessly scattered through all that is known in the written history of mankind, from the first to the last of its indited pages. They may be detected in the habits of the untamed savage, in the traditions of the semi-civilized barbarian! And in those fragments of the antiquity of our antiquity, scattered through undated epochs,—monuments of some great moral debris, which, like the fossil remains of long-imbedded, and unknown species, serve to found a theory or to establish a fact.

Wherever woman has been, there has she left the track of her humanity, to mark her passage—incidentally impressing the seal of her sensibility and wrongs upon every phase of society, and in every region, “from Indus to the Pole.”

The Story of Katie Malloy

By Caroline A. Lowe

(Well-known as a speaker on the Socialist and labor platforms. From a speech before the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Sixty-Second Congress.)

The need of the ballot for the wage-earning woman is a vital one. No plea can be made that we have the protection of the home or are represented by our fathers or brothers....

What of the working girls, who through unemployment are no longer permitted to sell the labor of their hands and are forced to sell their virtue?

I met Katie Malloy under peculiar circumstances. It was because of this that she told me of her terrible struggles during the great garment workers strike in Chicago. She had worked at H——’s for five years and had saved $30. It was soon gone. She hunted for work, applied at the Young Women’s Christian Association and was told that so many hundreds of girls were out of work that they could not possibly do anything for her. She walked the streets day after day without success. For three days she had almost nothing to eat. “Oh,” she said, with the tears streaming down her cheeks, “there is always some place where a man can crowd in and keep decent, but for us girls there is no place, no place but one, and it is thrown open to us day and night. Hundreds of girls—girls that worked by me in the shop—have gone into houses of impurity.”

Has Katie Malloy and the five thousand working girls who are forced into lives of shame each month no need of a voice in a Government that should protect them from this worse than death!

The New Woman

By Dora B. Montefiore

(In “The Progressive Woman.” English Contemporary. Writer and speaker on woman and labor problems.)

Pausing on the century’s threshold,

With her face toward the dawn,

Stands a tall and radiant presence;

In her eyes the light of morn,

On her brow the flush of knowledge

Won in spite of curse and ban,

In her heart the mystic watchword

Of the Brotherhood of Man.

She is listening to the heartbeats

Of the People in its pain;

She is pondering social problems

Which appeal to heart and brain.

She is daring for the first time

Both to think—and then to act;

She is flouting social fictions,

Changing social lie—for Fact.

Centuries she followed blindfold

Where her lord and master led;

Lived his faith, embraced his morals;

Trod but where he bade her tread.

Till one day the light broke round her,

And she saw with horror’s gaze,

All the filth and mire of passion

Choking up the world’s highways.

Saw the infants doomed to suffering,

Saw the maidens slaves to lust,

Saw the starving mothers barter

Souls and bodies for a crust.

Saw the workers crushed by sweaters,

Heard the cry go up, “How long?”

Saw the weak and feeble sink ’neath

Competition’s cursed wrong.

For a moment paused she shuddering;

Hers in part the guilt, the blame—

Untrue to herself and others,

Careless to her sister’s shame.

Then, she rose—with inward vision

Nerving all her powers for good;

Feeling one with suffering sisters

In a perfect womanhood.

Rising ever ’bove the struggle

For this mortal fleeting life;

Listening to the God within her

Urging Love—forbidding Strife.

Love and care for life of others

Who with her must fall or rise.

This the lesson through the ages

Taught to her by Nature Wise.

She had pondered o’er the teaching,

She had made its truths her own;

Grasped them in their fullest meaning,

As “New Woman” she is known.

’Tis her enemies have baptized her

But she gladly claims the name;

Hers it is to make a glory

What was meant to be a shame.

Thinking high thoughts, living simply,

Dignified by labor done;

Changing the old years of thraldom

For new freedom—hardly won.

Clear-eyed, selfless, saved through knowledge,

With her ideals fixed above,

We may greet in the “New Woman”

The old perfect Law of Love.

What Is This Government?

By Mrs. Belle Case La Follette

(American contemporary. Wife of the United States Senator, Robert La Follette. The following is from a speech on suffrage, given in Boston.)

What is this government that we women have been taught to think of as something so remote from our interests, so unrelated to the immediate personal preoccupations of our daily lives? There are three great matters in which we are all concerned: religion, education and government. In religion men and women share equally (indeed, men sometimes are content that women should do more than their share). In education it has come to pass that both men and women participate equally, though that was not always so. It is less than two generations that our universities and even our high schools have been open to women upon the same terms as to men.

But government is considered as man’s exclusive province—a limitation that has narrowed the lives of the women, that has robbed the children, and that has reacted most injuriously upon the State. For with what matters does government concern itself? Why, with matters that touch intimately home happiness and home prosperity, with laws and regulations that guard and further human lives.