No one needs all the powers of the fullest citizenship more urgently than the wage-earning woman, and from two different points of view—that of actual money wages and that of her wider needs as a human being and a member of the community.
The wages paid any body of working people are determined by many influences, chief among which is the position of the particular body of workers in question. Thus the printers, by their intelligence, their powerful organization, their solidarity and united action, keep up their wages in spite of the invasion of their domain by new and improved machinery. On the other hand, the garment-workers, the sweaters' victims, poor, unorganized, unintelligent, despised, remain forever on the verge of pauperism, irrespective of their endless toil. If, now, by some untoward fate the printers should suddenly find themselves disfranchised, placed in a position in which their members were politically inferior to the members of other trades, no effort of their own short of complete enfranchisement could restore to them that prestige, that good standing in the esteem of their fellow-craftsmen and the public at large which they now enjoy, and which contributes materially in support of their demand for high wages.
In the garment trades, on the other hand, the presence of a body of the disfranchised, of the weak and young, undoubtedly contributes to the economic weakness of these trades. Custom, habit, tradition, the regard of the public, both employing and employed, for the people who do certain kinds of labor, contribute to determine the price of that labor, and no disfranchised class of workers can permanently hold its own in competition with enfranchised rivals. But this works both ways. It is fatal for any body of workers to have forever hanging from the fringes of its skirts other bodies on a level just below its own; for that means continual pressure downward, additional difficulty to be overcome in the struggle to maintain reasonable rates of wages. Hence, within the space of two generations there has been a complete revolution in the attitude of the trades-unions toward the women working in their trades. Whereas forty years ago women might have knocked in vain at the doors of the most enlightened trade-union, to-day the Federation of Labor keeps in the field paid organizers whose duty it is to enlist in the unions as many women as possible. The workingmen have perceived that women are in the field of industry to stay; and they see, too, that there can not be two standards of work and wages for any trade without constant menace to the higher standard. Hence their effort to place the women upon the same industrial level with themselves in order that all may pull together in the effort to maintain reasonable conditions of life.
But this same menace holds with regard to the vote. The lack of the ballot places the wage-earning woman upon a level of irresponsibility compared with her enfranchised fellow workingman. By impairing her standing in the community the general rating of her value as a human being, and consequently as a worker, is lowered. In order to be rated as good as a good man in the field of her earnings, she must show herself better than he. She must be more steady, or more trustworthy, or more skilled, or more cheap in order to have the same chance of employment. Thus, while women are accused of lowering wages, might they not justly reply that it is only by conceding something from the pay which they would gladly claim, that they can hold their own in the market, so long as they labor under the disadvantage of disfranchisement?...
Finally, the very fact that women now form about one-fifth of the employes in manufacture and commerce in this country has opened a vast field of industrial legislation directly affecting women as wage-earners. The courts in some of the States, notably in Illinois, are taking the position that women can not be treated as a class apart and legislated for by themselves, as has been done in the factory laws of England and on the continent of Europe, but must abide by that universal freedom of contract which characterizes labor in the United States. This renders the situation of the working woman absolutely anomalous. On the one hand, she is cut off from the protection awarded to her sisters abroad; on the other, she has no such power to defend her interests at the polls, as is the heritage of her brothers at home. This position is untenable, and there can be no pause in the agitation for full political power and responsibility until these are granted to all the women of the nation.
Mrs. Mariana W. Chapman (N. Y.) spoke from the standpoint of Women as Capitalists and Taxpayers.
The first impulse toward the organization of women to protect their own rights came from the injustice of laws toward married women, and in 1848 it manifested itself in the first Woman's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls. Slowly the leaven spread. There was agitation in one State after the other about the property rights of women.... Now in many States married as well as single women are proprietors of business enterprises upon the same basis as men, and are interested as capitalists and tax-payers in every law which affects the country industrially or financially.
In 1894 a careful copy was made of the women taxpayers of Brooklyn. Names with initials were not placed on the list, so that the total was probably under rather than over estimated. This showed 22.03 or nearly one-fourth of all the assessable realty in the names of women, amounting to $110,000,000, besides many large estates in which they were interested. In 1896 the assessed value of real estate in the State of New York was $4,506,985,694, which, if estimated in the same ratio, would give taxable property owned by women to the extent of $1,124,221,423.
They are agriculturally interested, inasmuch as they are frequently owners of large tracts of land in the West as well as of smaller farms in our Eastern States. What shall we say to a Government that gives land in severalty to the Indian, supplies him with tools and rations, puts a ballot in his hand, and then says to the American woman who purchases the same right to land, "You shall not have the political privileges of American citizenship?" Under the laws of our country every stock company is obliged to give men and women shareholders a vote upon the same basis, and one fails to see why a government, which professedly exists to maintain the rights of the people, should practice in its own dealing such flaunting injustice....
Women help to support every public institution in the State and should have representation upon every board, and in the laws which control them. They help to pay the army pensions and should be allowed to help in deciding how much shall be paid. They help to pay for standing armies and for navies and they have the larger part in the nurture and training of every man who is in army or navy, and this is not the smaller part of the tax, since it is at times the matter of a life for a life. Women pay their part of the taxes to support our public schools and have intense interests in their well-doing. Twenty-six States have recognized this fact and have given to women some kind of School Suffrage, one has granted Municipal Suffrage and four Full Political Equality; but this is only a fraction of the justice which belongs to a government founded by statesmen whose watchword was, "No taxation without representation."
Miss Elizabeth Burrill Curtis (N. Y.) answered the question, Are Women Represented in our Government?
"Taxation without representation is tyranny" was one of the slogans of liberty in this country one hundred and twenty years ago. Have we outlived this principle? If not, why is it supposed to have no application to women?
That a century ago the latter were not thought of as having any rights under this motto is not surprising. So few women then held property in their own name that the injustice done them was not so apparent. But the situation is changed now, and the right of women to be considered as individuals is everywhere acknowledged save in this one particular. Even those who feel that the granting of universal male suffrage was a mistake, and that the right to self-government should be proved by some test, educational or otherwise—even those do not assert that it would be anything but gross injustice to tax men without allowing them a voice in the disposal of their money....
But there is still another side to the question. It is not only that the disfranchised women are unfairly treated, but the public good inevitably suffers from the political nonexistence of half the citizens of the republic. Either women are interested in politics or they are not. If the former, the country is distinctly injured, for nothing is more fatal to good government than the intermeddling of a large body of people who have never studied the questions at issue and whose only interest is a personal one. If, on the other hand, women are not interested in politics, what is the condition of that country, half of whose citizens do not care whether it be well or ill governed? That women influence men is never denied, even by the most strenuous opponents of woman