accorded to the small shopkeeper, artisan, lodger, agricultural labourer, and to the illiterate who knows no difference between one party and the other, either as to tendencies or methods of government. The Anglo-Saxon confers rights of citizenship upon the foreigner, upon the negro (as in the United States), upon the Maori (as in New Zealand)—the last of whom, sitting in the New Zealand House of Representatives, helped to maintain this glorious prerogative of sex by giving their casting-votes against a measure intended to meet the claims of the Anglo-Saxon in New Zealand.[1]
And all this despite the admitted fact that the social and economic problems, which are coming more and more into the field of parliamentary labours, are all but incapable of solution without the help of enfranchised women.
Must women then, following the example of men, learn to put sex in the first place and regard all other interests as secondary? Is this really what men wish to force women to do? One would think not. At present women have not adopted any such principle of action. They are divided rather than otherwise, according to the relations they occupy with regard to men. The married woman, on the one hand, seems opposed to the claims of the widowed and single, on the other—and vice versa; and both together combine to ostracise some of their own sex. It seems probable, however, that we women will have to learn to drop all such rivalries, and determine to form one vast organisation, which shall include within its ranks all sorts and conditions of women, and shall extend over the whole of the United Kingdom, if we would not see this nineteenth century completed without Woman's Emancipation becoming an accomplished fact.
- ↑ The Parliamentary Franchise was conferred on the women of New Zealand in 1893, the same year in which the above was printed. In 1907 the Hon. R. Oliver, late member of the Legislative Council, writes: "The interest now taken by women in New Zealand in the politics of the country is remarkable, and is regarded as a decided gain to the community."
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