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 (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, She who went down to the gates of death, She, your comrade, who steadfast stood Shoulder to shoulder, through storm and night, Held up your hands till victory pealed- Who trips laughing across your life, Mothers and wives and daughters, we, We, who are builders in the land! A Prisoner in Bow By Sylvia Pankhurst is an account of (A leader of the Suffragette movement of England. The following, quoted from "The Woman's Journal,' 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 One of them took out their fingers into my flesh. 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. on. Then I walked on and on, five short steps across the cell and five short steps back, on and on, and 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 vio let, 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 redroofed house under St. Stephen's church and the kind hearts of Bow. |