AFFIRMATIVE DISCUSSION

Woman's Journal. 43: 57. February 24, 1912.

Votes for Women Should Be Granted. Joseph V. Denney.

The movement to secure equal suffrage is part of the larger movement to realize the democratic ideal in human society. Its growth is coincident with society's growing esteem for the individual.

In the progress of legislation and judicial interpretation concerning women and their rights and privileges, one fact stands out in prominence. Each concession has been an acknowledgment of individual personality. At the time when our forefathers declared that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, it was not recognized anywhere in law or in human society that a woman is a complete and self-competent personality. Now that fact has been so far established in human society and law as to warrant full governmental recognition. The mark and badge of full governmental recognition of personality is the ballot.

If full recognition is not the logical end, the granting of partial rights should never have been begun. Women should have been kept in complete subjection, higher education should have continued to be a thing denied, and the theoretical unity of every woman with some man should not have been invaded by the humane progress of legislation and legal interpretation. Logically, the granting of partial suffrage calls for the granting of complete suffrage. Most of our states have granted suffrage to women on some subjects, and six have granted complete suffrage. It is no wonder that English women, even though they have voting power on practically everything except for members of Parliament, still remain unsatisfied, nay, are more discontented

than ever before. It is no wonder that American women, who have been given a partial franchise, also want the logical process completed. They have been given rights in larger and larger measure; they have been permitted a more public sphere of ordinary activity; economic pressure has turned millions of them into bread-winners; and the social status of all of them has been so altered that the last step must now be taken or all previous steps are meaningless. They have been educated up to the very point when the last prize is just before them, and it must not be denied. They have been permitted to attain a state of self-competency, and the one mark of self-competency-the badge of sovereignty, the highest governmental recognition of individual personality—must now be conferred.

The proposal for a plebiscite of women to decide in any state whether that state should provide for their complete enfranchisement is based upon no fundamental idea of suffrage. It is not even a fundamental question to ask whether they would use the ballot if they had it. No set of people, either in America or in Europe, on the eve of possible enfranchisement, was ever required to meet such tests. Rights have always been extended on high grounds of public justice and morality, and in recognition of personality. Suffragists do not fear such tests; but the tests, if applied, would not be decisive. The case does not rest finally on the wishes of the set of people to be benefitted, or upon the use they will make of the privilege. It rests finally upon the moral obligation of a free state to recognize a person as a person. The statement of the British statesman applies with much greater force to the women of to-day than it did to any class ever before enfranchised-"A free government and a large number of people excluded from its privileges cannot exist together.”

United States. Senate. Hearings before a Joint Committee of the Committee on the Judiciary and the Committee on Woman Suffrage. March 13, 1912. pp. 10-2.

Statement of Mrs. Elsie C. Phillips.

There is sometimes danger in any great question of this kind, which presents a thousand phases, that we are going to lose sight of the underlying principles involved, and I think it best, even though it seems simple, to go back to first principles and consider the real basis of the ballot.

Now, the right to vote is based, first and foremost and primarily, on the democratic theory of government, the theory of government to which this country was committed in the great phrase that "The just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed." What does that mean? Does it not mean that there is no class so wise, so benevolent that it is fitted to govern for any other class, no matter how wise or benevolent that ruling class may be? Does it not mean that, in order to have a democratic government, we must be sure that every adult in the community has an opportunity to express his opinion as to how he wishes to be governed, and to have that opinion counted? A vote is, in the last analysis, an expression of a need—either a personal need known to you as an individual, as it can be known to no one else, or an expression of a need of those in whom you are interested-sister-women or children, for instance. The moment that one gets that concept of the ballot, the moment one grants that it rests on that democratic theory-upon which is based the whole claim for any adult suffrage, men or women-that moment a large part, practically all, of the antisuffrage argument is done away with.

For instance, take the theory that women are "represented" by men. The theory of republican government rests, does it not, on the theory of delegated authority? Now, it is perfectly obvious to any reasonable being that one can not delegate what he never had. Until women have the vote, they can not delegate the vote. Again, even if

that were not a logical and practical impossibility, there remains the other fact that man can not know the needs of woman as women know them; and if, as is true democratically, a ballot is an expression of a need and opinion as to how that need shall be met, surely the men, having a different life experience from the women, can not adequately express woman's need or know how it should be met.

I will give an instance, right from the progressive state of Wisconsin, of which we are all justly proud. The men there are noted throughout the country for having put through the legislature the most progressive social legislation that this country has yet seen. No one doubts for a moment that the men in that progressive state desire to see justice for women just as much as for men. But there are certain frightful gaps in that legislation that show that it is impossible for men, with the best intentions in the world, to understand and legislate for the needs of women. To take an instance, there is no reformatory for women in the state of Wisconsin. If a woman commits a crime or a misdemeanor in the state of Wisconsin, it is either jail or prison; there is no halfway substitute. More fundamental, and very much more important than that, is the fact that in this progressive state, where undoubtedly the men wish to protect the women, there still remains the fact that women have not equal guardianship of their children. In the state that is regarded as the foremost in progressive legislation women have no right in their children; not only have they no right in the husband's lifetime, but he may, in his will, will those children to anyone whom he selects, even if the child is born after his death.

Now we can have, it seems to me, no better proof of the fact that it is impossible for the women to have their needs and views expressed by the men than such facts as these concerning a truly progressive body of men, such as the Wisconsin legislators are.

Again, there is the fact that the ballot is fundamentally a means of protecting the weak. From one point of view we might say that that little slip of paper represents all that

the human race has achieved in the democratic struggle, in the struggle of the democratic mass to secure for itself some control over its own living, in the struggle of the dispossessed of this earth to wrest from the possessors thereof the means of controlling their own standards of life and of work.

Now, if this is true, as it seems to be, for the pages of history show how in the workshop of time, on the anvil of life, shaped and reshaped by the hammer and blow of social experience, there has been forged at last this so potent weapon, ask yourself for what it has been forged? Is it to strengthen the hands of the strong? Oh, no; it is to put into the hands of the weak a weapon of self-protection. And who are the weak? Those, of course, who are economically handicapped, first and foremost the working classes in their struggle for better conditions of life and labor. And who among the workers are the weak? Wherever the men have suffered, the women have suffered more. That point will be brought out to you again and again in the plea of the wage-earning women.

But I would also like to point out to you how this affects the home-keeping woman, the wife and mother, of the working class, aside from the wage-earning women who have been pushed by economic necessity into the struggle of life. Consider the woman who is at home and must make both ends meet on a small income. Who better than she knows whether or not the cost of living advances more rapidly than the wage does? Is not that merely a true statement, in the most practical form, of the problem of the tariff? And who better than she knows what the needs of the workers are in the factories? Take the tenement-house woman, the wife and mother who is struggling to bring up a family. under conditions which constantly make for evil. Who, better than the mother who has tried to bring up six or seven children in one room in a dark tenement house, knows the needs of a proper building? Who, better than the mother who sees her boy and her girl playing in the streets and in the gutter, knows the needs of playgrounds? Who, better than a mother, knows what it means to a child's life