Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/375

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