Chapter V · THE RIGHT OF WOMEN TO THE BALLOT

It is now generally accepted that that legislation has proved wholly beneficent which has, during the past half century, afforded to women and girls their present wide-spread opportunity for education. Indeed, we are so accustomed to it that we realize with difficulty the fact that such provision on so large a scale is new to human experience. As a result of this far-reaching movement there is present in the community an element of distinctive intelligence available for social and civic usefulness such as never before existed. That we are far from getting the full benefit of the virtue and intelligence stored up in the community; that the leisure and culture which have come to home-keeping women might be utilized on a far larger scale than we have yet attained; that an ethical gain has been made whenever the new intelligence of women has become available in the body politic; and, finally, that other important gains may reasonably be expected in proportion as its availability is extended by conferring the franchise upon women, it is the object of this chapter to indicate.

It has been urged by opponents of the enfranchisement of women, that there are other methods by which this intelligence may be utilized without active participation in political life, and this is not denied. Indeed, men who are faithful in the performance of their duty as voting citizens carry on, in addition thereto, many lines of social and civic activity. They do not, however, appear to believe that they would be more valuable in the performance of these voluntarily assumed tasks if relieved of their political duties. It is not members of philanthropic and civic committees who absent themselves from the polls; on the contrary. Why, then, should not women follow both lines of activity and prove even more effective in their philanthropic and educational work, by reason of their added powers as voting citizens?

Does anyone believe that the efforts of the Public Education Association of New York would have been less effective during the past ten years, if they had been reënforced by the presence in the electorate of the mothers, the teachers, and the other interested women, including the members of the Association itself?

The fear lest the votes of ignorant women may outweigh those of the intelligent could be met by the imposition of an educational requirement such as is already in force in Massachusetts. The utterly unreasonable fear that the votes of the depraved may outnumber those of the righteous scarcely needs mention. The balance of virtue and depravity among women compares at least fairly with that of the present electorate.

Women’s Opportunities on Public Boards and Commissions.—Naturally, the first tentative step in the direction of securing for the community the benefit of the newly attained intelligence embodied in educated women, took the form of appointment of women upon public bodies having to do with women and children. In this connection, however, there must be noticed the curious phenomenon that some women, whose valuable services entitle them to a respectful hearing, have expressed the opinion that, in such positions, women may be of greater value by reason of their non-political position, which gives assurance of disinterestedness not thought attainable by voting citizens. It seems to indicate a not unnatural loss of the sense of proportion that these faithful servants of the community, deeply impressed with the great need for work such as they have been doing, should forget that their number is so insignificant as to weigh but lightly in comparison with the disadvantage arising from the loss out of the voting mass of the accumulated intelligence of the vast body of women, including all the teachers. Indeed, these alleged, exceptional cases of advantage arising from the non-political position of women serving in public capacities must be regarded as fully offset by those other cases in which able women, also serving on boards, have found themselves shelved by being placed on committees and sub-committees whose work was unimportant; and far more than offset by the exceedingly small number of women serving at all in such capacities compared with the great numbers who are qualified by nature and education for this work.

In general, the statement is true that in states in which women do not vote, they are not appointed to salaried positions on public boards and commissions, unless it is expressly provided in the statute creating the public body that a certain proportion of the members shall be women. Where the word may is used, there is a strong tendency towards the gradual replacement of non-voting women by voting men. And in many cases this involves a distinct loss to the dependent persons in whose interests such public bodies exist. Nor is this disparity confined to salaried positions. It is also most unusual to find an equal number of men and women on unpaid boards and commissions, even when the duties required are such as women are preëminently fitted for, and where the number of available women of intelligence is very large, as in New York and Massachusetts.

The precarious nature of the opportunity for public service open to women, where they have not been admitted to the electorate, is well illustrated by an episode in the recent history of Illinois. During his term of office, 1893-1897, Governor Altgeld appointed fifteen women to state boards of education, health, charities, factory inspection and the management of penal and reformatory institutions, among them women of such well-known philanthropic activity as Miss Julia C. Lathrop, Mrs. Alzina Stevens, and Dr. Sarah Hackett Stevenson. All these appointees served the state faithfully and several with distinction. The succeeding governor, however, continued the appointment of only two of the fifteen, replacing the remainder with men, who were voters.

A more recent example of the same precarious opportunity for service is afforded by the experience of the women members of the London School Board. From 1870 to 1902, women both voted for the members of the board and were eligible for election to it, several women having served long and usefully. But in 1902, Parliament legislated the School Board out of existence and, in 1903, relegated its duties to the County Council, for election to which women are not eligible. In this case a twofold right,—that of voting for the members of the School Board and of serving upon it,—was legislated out of existence after having been exercised for more than thirty years. Parliament, which used its powers to this end, is, of course, wholly independent of women, since they possess only the municipal franchise and the right of voting for members of the School Board. Obviously those minor forms of the franchise, and the right of serving on boards for public purposes, are held by an insecure tenure until the full power, the Parliamentary franchise, confirms their possession.

Despite the unstable nature of their opportunities, however, women have begun to work out interesting and suggestive changes in certain branches of the local governments. Thus, in connection with the police department, which was formerly regarded as utterly alien to them, women now serve as police matrons and probation officers, regularly recognized as officers of the court. Women attendance agents connected with the schools prevent many children from needing the attention of the men officers, and may be regarded as in a sense preventive or substitute police. Reformatories for women and girls, established and maintained out of the public funds, and conducted by women, are beneficent manifestations of the same tendency to utilize the fund of new intelligence for communal purposes. In the same line of modification of the courts and their personnel is the activity of women lawyers as counsel for Societies for the Legal Protection of Women and Children. This is perhaps the most gracious form of activity yet accessible to the growing number of women who have read law; and the marked improvement in the attitude of the Bench towards women and minors in both civil and criminal cases of importance, observable during the past fifteen years, is believed by the writer to be directly due to the patient efforts of many such societies.

Women who serve as inspectors of immigrant women and children, both meeting incoming vessels at the Atlantic ports and awaiting the arrivals at Ellis Island, are filling posts of duty of the highest value both to the immigrants and to the society of which they may become a part; as are the women acting as factory inspectors, sanitary inspectors and inspectors of tenements. The addition of nurses who have received hospital training to the federal army and to the public schools of the city of New York, is another form of enrichment of the resources of the community by reason of the newly acquired intelligence among women. Unfortunately, the small number and insecure tenure of office of these valuable servants of the public still deprive the community of a vast deal of useful service which cannot become available until the constituency attains its full complement of women voters as much interested in these human affairs as the present constituency is absorbed in manufacture, commerce and transportation.

Need of Women in Educational Work.—By nature, by training, and by the accepted usage of the national life, women are chiefly occupied with the care, nurture and education of the young. Moreover, for reasons economic as well as pedagogic, the teachers in the public schools are largely women. It was, therefore, in following the line of least resistance that women have, in many places, become eligible for appointment or election to the school-boards; or enfranchised sufficiently to vote for the members of the boards of education. It is the belief of the writer that the results of such enfranchisement are conspicuously beneficial; that a broad line divides the communities in which women perform the duties of voting citizens in all matters relating to the schools, from those in which they are prevented from exercising those functions. It is the commonly accepted division of labor throughout the Republic that men are occupied with business and professional duties, and women take care of the children. In the administration of the schools this division of labor expresses itself in the fact that the teaching staff, which comes into daily contact with the children and is intimately acquainted with their needs, is composed chiefly of women, but the business of the schools, the work of the board of education, is conducted either wholly by men or by boards on which men constitute the majority of members. The consequences of this division, in communities in which women do not vote, are conspicuous. Business principles (keeping down the tax-rate), modified by political interest (corrupt awards of contracts, the spoils system in the appointment of teachers, etc.), exercise an undue influence,—greater than the consideration of the interests of the children, which do not readily become known to the business-men who compose the boards of education.

A case in point is the experience of the children in the schools of the city of Chicago. It is stated by citizens of Chicago, long and intimately acquainted with the Board of Education, that the membership of the board has in recent years, been composed with reference to the industrial and sectarian interests of the city rather than with exclusive reference to the welfare of the children. The railroad and traction companies (eager to keep down taxation), the real-estate and building interests, (alert in the matter of buildings and sites), the book-trust (ardently opposed to the introduction of free text-books), the school furniture companies, and certain ecclesiastical interests (keen to secure the appointment of teachers each after its own faith), are all said to have been represented by men of excellent ability upon the Board of Education. But the children and the teachers appear to have been somewhat lost sight of in the general concentration of zeal for the interests of manufacture, commerce and sectarian religion.

While it is true that there have been, for a number of years, one or more women members of the Board of Education in Chicago, they constituted a mere vanishing minority of the whole number of members, not sustained by a constituency of voting mothers, teachers, and other interested women, but appointed by the mayor of the city, apparently as a concession to the demand that the Board of Education shall not be wholly devoid of women. Their influence has, therefore, been of the slightest and seriously disappointing to such friends of the children and the teachers as have hoped unduly much from the mere presence in the membership of the board of women, unsustained by the power of an interested voting constituency.

Some of the results of the preponderant interest of the Board of Education in subjects apart from the welfare of the children of the city of Chicago, are picturesquely shown by the experience of a young neighbor of the writer. This Italian girl entered the public schools in early childhood, attending irregularly after the fashion of Italian children and with the connivance of an incompetent truancy department. In the course of eight years devoted chiefly to the study of language, she acquired the least possible broken and ungrammatical English. Seeing on the wall of the settlement a picture of Washington, she said confidently, “I know him, first man!” Being asked his name she said with certainty in her tone: “I learn him in school. First in peace, first in war, first in hearts of countrymen! Eyetalian man.” Being pressed for his name, this product of the schools said, “Garibaldi!”

Such was the foundation of English, history, and intelligent devotion to the ideals of the American Republic with which this adopted citizen left school, and entered upon the serious business of education in a neighboring bakery belonging to the biscuit trust. There she learned at once that her continued employment depended upon her becoming one of the Lady Cracker Packers, whose ideals she found it easy to understand and appreciate. Within a year she learned to vote as to the amount of dues which she and her fellow workers should pay, and how these dues were to be expended, for what purposes and by what officers, in the election of whom she naturally participated. She attended meetings, at which the objects of the organization were explained, and was taught that her short working day depended upon the strength of the organization. To this organization she devoted the fervor of the Latin temperament, which had never been aroused by the daily perfunctory salute to Old Glory at the opening of the sessions of that school which had left her to believe that George Washington’s name was Garibaldi. At the age of sixteen years this girl was thoroughly accustomed to exercising in the union of her trade all those functions which at twenty-one she will still be unqualified for in the larger life of the commonwealth. The union looms correspondingly large in her consciousness.

The state of Illinois, through the decision of the supreme court, tells this girl that it is powerless to restrict the hours of daily work which the biscuit trust requires of her; but the union confidently undertakes the task by means of organization and its label, with the possibility of a strike in the background. When the state tells her through another decision of the court that it is powerless to constrain the biscuit trust or any other employer to pay her wage weekly in money of the United States, the union performs this function effectively by the same means,—organization, the use of the label and the possibility of strikes.

When the lads with whom she works reach the age of twenty-one years, their interests are broadened and their allegiance to the union divided by the demands of the political parties upon their attention. Even on the most sordid plane of their immediate self-interest, the city council and the state legislature claim their thoughts. But the girl on reaching twenty-one years will have escaped from all farther educational influences; will have been long married and actively engaged in bringing up in the most unreasonable manner the large family which continues to the second generation in the Italian colonies. She will feed her infants bananas, bologna, beer and coffee; and many of these potential native citizens will perish during their first year, poisoned by the hopeless ignorance of their school-bred mother. She, however, will always remain a faithful ally of the union as the only institution which has ever invited her intelligent participation.

However convinced one may be of the value of the trade union in the community, it is hardly reassuring that, in the presence of the vast machinery of public education, the union should be, in practise, the chief educational agency vitally affecting the children and young girls in the immigrant colonies of the great manufacturing centers.

This girl is only one of thousands who are carried on the rolls of the public schools for years, but whose lives are so little touched by the work of the schools that, after two or three years in the factory, they have forgotten how to read unless, indeed, they are gathered into some union which carries forward their education in a one-sided manner, wholesome enough if balanced by other broadening and deepening experiences, but sadly inadequate as a substitute for the education supposedly afforded by the public schools to all the children.

Wherever a powerful business interest is involved, laws are readily enforced in its behalf and the administration of local government rises to meet its requirements. This has been strikingly illustrated in the efficiency of the fire department of Chicago throughout all the years of the uttermost political corruption of the city, when every other department reached the deepest depths of incompetence and inefficiency. The fire marshal of the underwriters arrives at the scene of every conflagration, large or small, as soon as the city’s firemen, if not sooner;—and woe betide the man, or beast, or machine that falls below the highest achievement possible in every given case.

It is the contention of this chapter that women, all women, of a given community have the same interest in the children that the underwriters have in the conflagrations and the administration of the fire department. But, while the underwriters are voters, contributors to campaign funds, and representatives of the keenest interests of the business men, and have for all these reasons, very great local power to constrain the municipality to keep its fire department up to the highest point of efficiency, the women of Chicago have no corresponding power of making felt their interest in the schools. The community is, therefore, denied a reënforcement of moral power, and of educational interest, which it sorely needs to counterbalance the excessive pressure of business interest.

To the preponderance of the interests of business over the interests of the children, expressed in the majority of business men and the minority of women on boards of education, is due, doubtless, in other cities as well as in Chicago, the idiosyncrasy of the curriculum whereby the daughters of working-people are taught just those things which tend to make them valuable as stenographers, typewriters, cheap bookkeepers, clerks, copyists,—if they stay in school throughout the years of compulsory attendance. If they drop out earlier, they have still acquired habits valuable for factory hands of low grade and miserable pay. They have been taught punctuality, obedience, working in crowds, listening to instructions. What more does a cheap factory hand need for beginning work? But of the qualities which fit girls for home-making and intelligent motherhood, what preparation for the development of these have our business men been able to imagine and introduce into the curriculum? True it is that, in rare cases, a woman serving upon a school board has carried weight enough, by reason of unusual personality, to override the adverse pressure of other influences and secure the introduction of some slight beginnings of domestic science into the schools. But this has occurred in those schools which needed it least, i. e., in the upper grades, which are not reached by the children of day laborers. For the general introduction of domestic science into the lower grades, in which the children of the immigrants spend their sadly few school years, the lack of space and the cost of equipment on the necessary large scale have hitherto been effectively deterrent. It is here that Boston stands forth as a fine example of the effects of admitting to the electorate in the matter of the schools those who know most of the children’s needs, the women of the community, including the mothers and the teachers.

In London, too, for more than a quarter of a century, the women elected to the School Board have assured to the girls in the board-schools at least instruction in cooking. As long ago as 1879 the writer enjoyed the privilege of visiting, with Miss Hill, a member of the board, one of the cooking-centers in a London board-school to which little girls came from neighboring schools; and the memory abides quite fresh after the lapse of so many years, of one little girl who, after cooking peas, carefully wrapped them in a copy of the London Times to carry them home to a family whose tastes evidently needed cultivation in the matter of vehicles for the transportation of soft, moist, warm vegetables.

Due to the preponderance of the interests of business over the interests of the children in the composition of school boards including few or no women, is the almost universal absence of adequate school accommodations. It is not an accident, but a fact of the highest significance that the two important cities in the United States which afford school accommodations for all the children throughout the period of compulsory attendance at school are Boston, where women vote for the members of the Board of Education, and Denver, where women vote for all officials. Does anyone doubt that the enlightened policy of Boston and of Denver is due, in large measure, to the influence of the women teachers in the electorate? Granted that, in Boston, the Buildings and Grounds Commission is separate from the Board of Education, the interest in school questions engendered by the annual election of members of the Board of Education, and the general participation of women voters both in the election and in the annual lively campaign which precedes it, keep the tax-paying public apprised of the inner condition and life of the schools to an extent impossible by any other means and actually not approached in other cities.

By reason of the rapid growth of American cities, the provision of adequate seating facilities for the increasing number of children constitutes one of the most difficult problems with which boards of education have to deal. Families move from older portions of a city where school buildings are first erected, and it is not easy to foresee and provide for the sudden expansion of one suburb or another. Moreover, there are influences at work uninterruptedly, bringing to bear silent pressure adverse to the expenditure of funds sufficient to provide seats and equipment for all the children. Taxpayers desire a low tax-rate, not perceiving that cheap primary schools involve in the long run costly reformatories, and jails, accompanying an untrained and unintelligent working class. Corporations desire an abundant supply of available children to work at trivial wages. Children for whom there is no school room begin to work earlier in New York City despite the excellent new statutes, than children in Denver or in Boston who are kept in school to the age nominally required in New York. In New York city, where the Board of Education is appointed by the Mayor, who in turn is elected by the suffrages of men only and who does not usually appoint even one woman to the central board, the deficit in school seating accommodations has not for many years been less than fifty thousand. Indeed, no administration ventures to take a school census, because no administration can afford to let the actual deficit be accurately ascertained and definitely located. It is politically safer to pooh! pooh! the estimates of the friends of the unfortunate excluded children and the children in half-day sessions, than to face the facts as they would be recorded by a school census.

The inability of boards composed wholly or chiefly of business men to deal adequately with the business of the board, i. e., the education of the children of the city, is revealed on a vast scale in the case of the children who fail of promotion. The most overcrowded classes are the lower ones, and these are congested largely by reason of the presence in them of children who have been in school long enough to have been moved on into higher and less crowded classes if they had been ready for promotion in due order. In London, where women have voted for the School Board and have served on it for thirty years, the scope and gravity of the problem of the children who fail of promotion have long been recognized, and comprehensive efforts to deal with it are persistently made. In New York, where the same problem has existed since the foundation of the public schools, it was not discovered, and then by a woman superintendent, until the year 1903, when the new law took effect which requires that children, before beginning work in manufacture and commerce, must be fourteen years of age and must also have accomplished as much of the work of the curriculum as a child of twelve years who had failed of no promotions. Several causes of the failure of children to move forward in due order are removable by the Board of Education, e. g., the half-time classes arising from insufficient school accommodations; the excessive number of children carried on the roll of one teacher; the suspension of unruly boys who, until very recently, were not brought before a magistrate and committed to a school, but merely turned into the street to waste their school years in idle mischief or to go to work in violation of the child-labor law; the dismissal of children by visiting physicians (before the very recent appointment of nurses who now follow up the children and get them back into school with the least possible loss of time). Other causes of the failure of children to be promoted are municipal defects curable if the Board of Education made effective demand for cure. Among these is the insufficient provision for hospital care of infectious and contagious disease. Because scarlet fever and measles are left to be nursed in the tenements, healthy children of the family spend weeks and months in banishment from school and fail of promotion through no fault of their own.

Does anyone doubt that American cities which should follow the example of London and enlist women of discretion and leisure as school visitors would make short work of the clogging of the lowest grades by children who are wasting their own time, that of the teachers, and that of the children who properly belong in these grades? Could there be a more unbusinesslike procedure than this defeat of the purpose of the schools, for want of the personal contact of women with the children, in work supplementing that of the schoolroom tasks of the teachers? It is clearly due to the passive rôle assigned to all women except those professionally engaged in the schoolroom.

The consequences of this clogging of the lowest classes are many and evil. Among them is the truancy of children discouraged by failing of promotion, with the attendant probability of arrival in the juvenile court under the charge of playing ball in the street, or some similar anti-social offense, or of arrival at the legal age for beginning work without having accomplished the meager amount of school work required by the law, an experience which bears most heavily upon those families in which it is most liable to occur,—those of the very poor.

In this relation, the interests of the teachers and the children are strictly identical; it is most desirable for the teachers that school accommodations should be abundant and wholesome; that the children in one class should not exceed thirty; that salaries for teachers should be such as to enlist in the profession able and well-trained persons. To enfranchise the teachers is to give to the children the best informed possible advocates in the electorate, and to strengthen every effort made on behalf of the unfortunate children who now fail of promotion year after year and finally defeat the object of the schools either by falling out without completing even the required minimum of work, or else cover each stage long after they have passed the age to which it is appropriate, and when it has lost all real value for them.

Protection of Children in Colorado.—Compared with the children of New York City the children of Denver appear to be singularly fortunate in the protection which they receive by means of legislation. A child in Denver is required to attend school regularly to the age of sixteen years, unless he is released from this duty by the joint action of the superintendent of schools and the county judge; and in that case he must complete the work of the first eight years of the curriculum of the public schools. A boy released from school attendance is subject to the supervision of the two authorities mentioned, and can work only on condition that his record continues satisfactory to them, being kept on the roll of the juvenile court, not as an offender, but as a ward of the court. If he should be required or permitted by an employer to work longer than eight hours in a day, or at an occupation injurious to his health, it is within the power, and is clearly the duty of the superintendent and the judge to cancel his permit and return him to school or require a change of his occupation.

Where the great body of children in a city are kept in school until they reach the age of sixteen years, and all must finish the work of the first eight grades of the public schools, the rising generation goes into the bread-winning occupations with an unusually high level of efficiency of mind and body; and where all the wage-earning children under the age of sixteen years are virtually wards of the court, the exploitation or demoralization of children by means of their work becomes almost impossible.

In Colorado, children under the age of sixteen years enjoy, also, an unusual degree of protection by reason of that brief and comprehensive statute which renders any person who contributes to the delinquency of a child liable to a fine or imprisonment not exceeding one year. Under this recent statute, the dealer who sells a cigarette to a boy, the mother who sends a child to fetch beer, or who permits him to read dime novels so that he is led to run away, the telegraph operator who sends a boy to a disreputable house to deliver a telegram or message, the coal-train conductor who permits a child to “hop a train” or to pilfer coal,—one and all may be brought into court, placed under a suspended fine for the first offense, and sent to jail for a year if any continue to offend. In practise, more than a score of fathers were sent to jail during the first half of the year 1904, for contributing to the delinquency of their children. Hardship to their unoffending wives arising from loss of the earnings of the breadwinner was obviated by arranging to have the offender in jail only from Saturday noon to Monday morning, the remainder of the sentence being suspended.

It is the common experience that statutes of exceptional rigor for the protection of children are apt to remain dead letters, and this has been sadly true of child-labor laws, where powerful corporations have secured the removal of officials who were conscientious and efficient in enforcing such measures. How, then, is it to be accounted for that the county judge of Denver has for years enforced penalties upon saloon keepers, cigarette dealers (irrespective of their relation to the brewers, the whiskey trust and the cigar trust), telegraph operators (agents of two of the most powerful corporations, and the largest single employers of boys in the Republic); and has, nevertheless, not only not been retired from office but, on the contrary, was the only candidate upon whom every political party in Denver united at the last election? Citizens of Denver assert that this significant fact is due to the voting mothers, teachers and other interested women in Denver. It is a part of the recent history of the city that, when the corrupt political machine found Judge Lindsey unbending in his opposition, it dropped his name from the proposed list of nominees for the next election. But when the women of Denver heard of this, they held meetings and made known their will in such effective manner that, when the day came, no other name appeared as candidate for the office of county judge upon the ballots of any of the seven political parties which complicate elections in that lively city.

Opponents of the extension of the franchise to women have pointed out that political corruption in Colorado still exists, despite the fact that women have for ten years been admitted to the electorate. But in so doing, they mistake the direction in which ethical gain is to be expected to result from the enfranchisement of women. Political corruption is not a matter of sex; it results from the unethical basis of our business activities, and cannot be abolished until that basis is altered and made ethically sound. The ethical gain which may reasonably be expected from admitting women to the electorate is the extended activity of those members of the community who are primarily interested in the nurture and safeguarding of the young.

A suggestive comparison is that between the cherishing and nurture afforded to the children of Colorado by means of legislation due to the voting constituency of women, and the unsheltered state of the children of Georgia, where women are in every way excluded from public life, and where boys and girls at any tender age are wholly without protection from the demands and the cruel neglect of cotton-mill owners, as is indicated in the decision of the Supreme Court of Georgia in the case of the Canton Cotton Mills.

Equally suggestive is the comparison of the defenseless position of girls in South Carolina, where women have no political power and the age of consent is ten years, with the careful safeguarding of girls in Colorado. It is not accidental that one of the first measures introduced into the legislature of Colorado after women were elected to that body, was the bill successfully carried by a woman senator, raising the age of consent to eighteen years, at that time higher than the corresponding law of any other state. Such a law affords protection to the boys and youths of the community which they are wholly unable to estimate. It saves them those temptations which beset youth in communities in which, as in North Carolina, the offense of tempting girls carries but a slight penalty, if any, with no certainty of enforcement against a white man. When the age of consent is raised to eighteen years, this is a protection not only to all the young girls and boys in the community, it is a protection to the community itself against the children of ruined girls. Denver needs no foundling asylum like that institution which confesses the disgrace of New York City. It is at the opposite pole from the legally sanctioned and medically supervised vice of the cities of Continental Europe, with the accompaniment of lock hospitals and foundling asylums. It now remains for Colorado to deal effectively with the quacks and their newspaper advertisements, and to substitute for their polluting influence wise instruction in physiology, biology and morals, in the public schools.

Never before in human history has the right of the young to pure living, the claim of the adolescent to guidance and restraint, the need of the child for nurture at the hands of father, mother, school and the community been recognized as in Colorado to-day. Never have the good influences of good homes received such reënforcement by means of legislation.

These gains have not been made because the subject matter ever developed political issues. Elections have not hinged upon them. But the accent has been shifted; the emphasis is different. It appears that, on the whole, the interests of children and youths are unusually well guarded in a community whose affairs are all carried on by men and women together.

Advantages of the Recognition of the Right of Women to the Ballot.—The slight contribution of time, thought and effort required of all the voting citizens, if spent by all, not merely as at present by men, may reasonably be expected to prevent the need of much of the remedial and reformatory work now demanded of individuals for individuals. Infancy, old age and the misfortunes of congenital defectives, constitute a legitimate claim upon the leisure and charity of women, as of men. But the endless, cheerless task of attempting to repair by philanthropic methods the wreckage due to bad laws, which women have no part in making, and the lax enforcement of good laws, is a burden which should no more be inflicted upon women than the task of enforcing demands for industrial improvements in the lot of workingwomen arbitrarily disfranchised should be saddled upon workingmen.

Reference has been made to the value of the addition of the women teachers to the electorate. It remains to point out a distinct disadvantage arising from their continued disfranchisement. It is, for instance, an anomaly not likely to remain permanent that many able and successful teachers of civics and political and industrial history to boys and young men are women who are themselves not voters. The effect upon the minds of the pupils must be highly confusing. They seem forced to the inference that these subjects are of minor importance, since they can be taught by persons who are not permitted to perform the duties and functions which form the real content of the teaching. But what could be more unfortunate for the Republic than to inculcate in the minds of coming voters any idea calculated to minimize the importance of the subjects of civic duties and political and industrial history?

In an essay strongly adverse to the admission of women to the electorate, published in 1893 by Mr. Goldwin Smith, there occurs the following passage: “Woman’s Suffrage is a change fraught with the most momentous results, not only to the commonwealth but to the household. Let Wyoming and New Zealand try it, say for ten years. The success of the Wyoming experiment is publicly proclaimed and the universe is exhorted to do likewise by Wyoming, whose voice is now that of the female voters. Private accounts are not so favorable, nor have the neighboring states, which must have the clearest view of the results, been induced to follow the example. To Wyoming for the present, Woman’s Suffrage in the United States remains confined. The New Zealand experiment will be more satisfactory, though New Zealand, having no warlike neighbors, does not run the same risk of emasculating her government which is run by a European State. If at the end of ten years it appears from the two experiments that legislation and government have become wiser, more far-sighted, and more just, without detriment to the peace and order of the home, let the world follow the example, and be grateful to those by whom the first experiment was made.”

It is worthy of note in this connection that, according to the latest census of the United States, Wyoming heads the list of all the states when they are graded according to the number of children between the ages of ten and fourteen years who are illiterate. Including the Indians, Wyoming is charged with but 72 such children. Inquiry has elicited the fact that this is due directly to the efforts of the women voters, who long since worked out a plan by which traveling teachers are sent to remote portions of the state, where scattered children are gathered from ranges and ranches until they can read, when the teacher proceeds to another post and the process is repeated with another gathering of children. In order that the children may not forget what they have learned, traveling libraries are sent in the wake of the teachers.

It is respectfully submitted that the period suggested by Professor Goldwin Smith has elapsed; that the three neighboring states, Colorado, Utah and Idaho have now all followed the example of Wyoming; that legislation has become wiser, more far-sighted and more just without detriment to the peace and order of the home. Moreover, the Australian Federation and South Australia have followed the example of New Zealand. What is to be gained by farther delay?

Within the family an interesting and ennobling modern relation due to the education of women is the mutual sympathy, respect and understanding between the college-going youth and his college-bred mother. The unconscious contempt, mitigated by affection, felt by Pendennis at Oxford for Helen at home in the country, is alien to the experience of sons whose preparation for college has been guided by the joint counsels of both parents. On a larger scale the same seriousness of respect of adult sons for their mothers may be noted even by casual travelers in states in which women vote on all subjects. Something of this greater unity of interest between mothers and their adult sons and daughters in the performance of a common duty of the highest importance, may reasonably be expected in humbler walks of life with the extension of the ballot to women in the great industrial states. At present, this form of common interest exists among the members of a family of working-people chiefly where the wife has, before marriage, been a wage-earner and member of a trade-union, and after marriage continues her interest as an active member of the Union Label League or the Women’s Trade Union League. It would surely be more wholesome for the family and the Republic, to extend the common interest of mother and adult sons and daughters to the affairs of the whole commonwealth, than to leave it confined exclusively to the industrial affairs of life.

It is now more than twenty years since the writer printed in the International Review a paper on “The Law and the Child” in which it was pointed out that the two agencies which had chiefly modified the life of the children of the working class during the nineteenth century were the development of steam-driven machinery, which had made the labor of children available on a large scale in manufacture, and the emergence of women from the exclusively domestic life of former centuries to a participation, first in the education, and later in the philanthropic and educational work of modern times. During the intervening years since the publication of that paper the task of obtaining or promoting legislation on behalf of workingwomen, girls and children, or of securing its enforcement, has never ceased to be one of the deepest interest. The progress achieved, however, is so slight, the obstacles in the way of any real protection for young children are still so great, in all the industrial states, that it has become the settled conviction of the writer that, until women are universally admitted to the franchise, direct measures involve almost certain illusion and disappointment. This conviction is confirmed, not merely by the affirmative experience of Colorado, but by the negative experience connected with the effort to establish by statute the right to leisure of women and children in Illinois, where women vote only for the trustees of the state university. It is still farther confirmed by the overwhelming disparity between the advantages gained for themselves by workingmen who are voters, compared with the excessive difficulty involved in making any gain whatever, during the same period of twenty-years, on behalf of workingwomen and children.

For years the friends of the young clerks in retail stores have striven to obtain for them the poor privilege of being seated when at work, and with what success? In many states, laws have been enacted making diverse provisions for seats in stores. In New York City, for instance, the law has required, since 1896, that one seat be provided for every three clerks. In some stores the seats have been supplied for the third floor, because the clerks were chiefly employed upon the first. In many stores chairs are abundantly supplied in the fitting-rooms of the cloak, tailoring and dressmaking departments, for the use of customers, and are included in the general reckoning according to which there are, on the premises, chairs in the proportion of one to three clerks. In still other cases, chairs or seats are wholly absent from the notion counters and from the counters or tables in the aisles of the stores where half-grown girls serve as sales-clerks. The absence of the seats is suavely explained by the fact that the employees are there only temporarily. But their employment lasts day after day, and the pretext is utterly transparent. In still other places, seats are provided ostentatiously, but girls who use them are censured or dismissed. All these variations of the art of evading the statute have been found by the writer in reputable establishments in New York City.

It has been shown in another chapter that the power of the Retail Dealers’ Association is such as to prevent the appointment of special mercantile inspectors as provided for by the mercantile employees’ law. That classic example illumines the whole subject. On one side are wealth, the prestige of the large employers, and the effective control of the enforcement or non-enforcement of laws;—for the employers not only vote, but exercise power as large potential contributors to campaign funds. On the other side are youth, ignorance, inexperience, poverty, and that irresponsibility which arises from the hope of marriage and resultant escape from the inconveniences, great and small, which attend any given occupation. It may be said that the men who are clerks represent the interests of the women and girls and should be able to secure inspection of mercantile institutions and stores. But they are increasingly hampered by the pressure of competition of the very women and girls whom they are thus asked to protect. They have their hands more than full with their own difficulties, and cannot reasonably be asked by the community to fight the battles of their arbitrarily disfranchised female competitors. Nor do competing workingmen by any means always recognize an identity of interest with the women beside whom they work. It is only very recently that they have gone so far as to welcome them to the trade unions.

The slow and ineffectual steps towards the establishment of an adequate force for mercantile inspection, in a state in which the principle of state inspection is so long established and clearly recognized as in New York, are obviously due to the absence of a voting constituency behind the demand for such inspection.

Because, in all great industrial states, women are disfranchised, except for certain strictly limited powers in connection with educational affairs, the industrial disadvantages of the minor wage-earners are aggravated by this powerlessness of the adult workingwomen to make the needs of the whole class felt, by those methods which are slowly and gradually but surely improving the position of workingmen; and are no less aggravated by the equal political impotence of those other women who are the natural friends and protectors of the young workers,—the women of wealth, leisure, intelligence, and philanthropic interest.

It has been made sufficiently clear in the foregoing chapters that the exertions of the Retail Clerks’ Protective Association, the Working Women’s Societies, the Consumers’ League, and Church Association for Improving the Condition of Labor, and the League of Women Workers have availed little for changing industrial conditions affecting workingwomen and children compared with what voting workingmen have been able to do for themselves.

The burden of the tale of this book is the difficulty of enforcing legislation on behalf of children and minor workers. Their position is zero minus. The element which, under normal conditions, is primarily concerned with their interests consists of the adult wage-earning women, the mothers and the teachers, with philanthropic women of education and leisure. So long as these either shirk the duty of securing and using the opportunity to vote, or are debarred from doing so, the difficulty of enforcement of protective laws must continue.

The exceptional disadvantage attaching to the position of minor working girls is such as to call for humane exertion on the part of all who can in any way contribute to their welfare. And the response is found in the rapidly growing series of philanthropic undertakings of which working girls are the objects. While the Young Men’s Christian Associations aim to enhance the efficiency of their beneficiaries, by furnishing instruction and facilities for systematic exercise, bathing and wholesome recreation, the corresponding organization dealing with minor working-girls provides, not only these aids to efficiency, but a variety of sustaining and curative measures in addition. What is the meaning of the homes for convalescent working-girls which are springing up in so many directions? Is it not that working-girls are being worn out and used up at a rate such that no savings of their own brief working period could possibly provide for their needs? And these homes are without exception overcrowded (or burdened with waiting-lists) largely by sufferers from nervous prostration or pelvic disorders induced by long hours of work and needless standing arbitrarily imposed in connection with their work. Boarding houses for working girls, furnishing board at four and five dollars a week and supplying a modicum of comforts paid for by philanthropic subscribers, exist in a score of states. Why all this provision for which nothing corresponding is asked on behalf of young men? Is it not due to the general feeling that the morals of working-girls must be buttressed, their wages eked out in the interest of society itself? Rescue homes and shelters tell their own chapter of the story of insufficient pay coupled with overwork and temptation; and this chapter is supplemented by the rapid growth of foundling asylums, and committees for finding places in friendly families for mothers with one infant each.

It may be many years before any of the efforts now made on behalf of working-girls can be safely relaxed. But why should all this effort be confined, in their case more than in that of young workingmen and boys, to the forms of philanthropy? Why should not effort on their behalf go forward on two feet, the philanthropic and the political together, as the movement of workingmen goes forward? Why should it limp haltingly along upon the one foot of philanthropy? Is it not quite possible that, with the extension of political power to all the women in the community, such improvement in the conditions of employment must result that the minor wage-earners will be more nearly self-supporting, less often placed in the humiliating position of working and yet being objects of charity? For any body of wage-earners to be disfranchised is to be placed at an intolerable disadvantage in all matters of legislation.

It has been shown that in states in which women have been admitted to the electorate, certain substantial advantages have accrued to the schools and the children. It is entirely reasonable to infer that with a farther extension of the franchise to women, a similar gradual improvement in the lot of the minor wage-earners will come about, and that these improvements cannot be achieved so promptly or so lastingly in any other way.

While leisure has been increasing in the class of prosperous, home-keeping women, the need of their help, sympathy and protection has been growing among the young workers. Since the leisure of prosperous women is due largely to the labor of young wage-workers (who are engaged chiefly in the food and garment trades, the textile industries and that retail commerce which lives by the patronage of home-keeping women), it behooves the fortunate to assume their full share of the duty of making and enforcing laws for the protection of these young wage-workers. But this they can do only when they perform all the duties of citizenship, voting and serving on public boards and commissions when elected or appointed to them. It is because women are less under the stress of competitive business, because they do, in fact, represent children and youth, that their vote is needed.

One alleged form of philanthropic work in behalf of working girls would certainly go out of existence if women were added to the electorate, namely those so-called reformatory institutions under sectarian management in which for years at a stretch girls are detained without trial, kept at work for the benefit of the institution or of the ecclesiastical organization under whose auspices it is conducted. Only the members of a disfranchised class can be subjected to treatment such as this.

Right of Women to a Share in the Enactment of Marriage and Divorce Laws.—A subject of the highest ethical importance is kept effectively under discussion by the unwearied efforts of the Divorce Reform League to obtain the enactment by Congress of a uniform law dealing with marriage and divorce throughout the Republic. No other law touches in the same manner the welfare of every man, woman and child in the nation, as the law governing marriage and divorce. No other law, therefore, so peremptorily requires the assent of every citizen. Men and women are alike affected by the legal basis of family life; and since the points of view from which the subject is approached by men and women are fundamentally different, that law alone can be an essentially just and righteous one which is so framed as to satisfy the needs of both men and women and to rest upon their agreement.

For a federal law, at the present time, there is no machinery by which the assent of women can be obtained. Such a law, therefore, if enacted while the present suffrage restrictions remain, must be the product of the will of far less than half of the adults whom it would affect. However wise the measure recommended might appear in the abstract to be, the manner of its adoption would constitute an intolerable injustice.

It is sometimes urged by the advocates of the congressional measure that the method of securing the adoption of legislation by the action of the separate states is injuriously slow; that evils attending the present variety of legislation are such that haste is required. To this it may, however, be replied that the machinery of legislation in the states responds more quickly and sensitively to the will of the people than does the machinery of federal legislation. If, therefore, the people of the various states are slow to alter their laws governing marriage and divorce, this may arise from the fact that the existing laws are more or less adapted to the life of the people in the states. If they are not so adapted, the first preliminary change should logically be the extension of the electorate to include the non-voting elements of the population now silently affected by the laws. That being done, a just basis would have been formed upon which to proceed with farther changes in legislation in the individual states. If it be true that the evils arising from the existing chaos of legislation affecting marriage and divorce in the different states have become, or are becoming intolerable, surely it is fair to infer that these evils may be due to the enforced silence in matters of legislation of half the people affected by them.

The need of haste is a strange reason to assign for the transfer of the power to legislate upon the most intimate relation of human life, from those governments which are most easily controlled by the people affected, to that which is farthest removed from them.

Four states are now in a position to deal with this or any other question on a basis of entire justice, namely those states in which men and women alike vote; many other states possess all the needed machinery for submitting important measures to the vote of the people; and it is perfectly easy to provide, in any given case, that women may vote on the question submitted. There is obviously more need for such submission in the case of a bill dealing with marriage and divorce than in the case of any other subject. Not until the responsibility for the change can be shared by the whole adult population should so grave a change be undertaken as the transfer of the power of legislation upon this most vital of all subjects from the states to the federal government.