Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/590

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Woman Suffrage
551

dren. But there is another and, what we might term, the indirect benefit resulting from equal suffrage. This is the influence of public life and its great responsibilities upon women themselves. In exercising the rights and duties of citizenship they read and discuss questions of real importance. Their lives widen out, they have enlarged sympathies and higher standards of life for themselves and their country. They acquire an intense wish to be of real use in the world, and they now know how to work, and are at last given the power to work with individual freedom and independence. The testimony of the most distinguished men and women is that the results of equal suffrage are good. Norway says: 'Nothing but good, nothing but purity has come from suffrage.' New Zealand says: ’If again brought to the question, not two men would be found to oppose.' The same witness comes from all the lands beyond the seas, while in our country the distinguished Judge Ben Lindsay says: 'We have in Colorado the most advanced laws of any state in the Union for the care and protection of the home and the children. I believe I voice the general impression when I say we owe this condition more to woman suffrage than to any other cause. The results of woman suffrage have been so altogether satisfactory that it is hard to understand how it encounters opposition in other states. I never heard a criticism directed against woman suffrage that ever worked out in practice, or, if it did, was not equally applicable to male suffrage.' As briefly as may be I would like to base on these facts an appeal for votes for women. I say nothing of the right to vote. That is a self-evident truth. One writer says: 'All powers of government are either delegated or assumed, and all assumed powers are usurpations.' Since women never gave men such powers they are usurpations; they are tyranny. Taxation without representation is another form of oppression. Why is it tyranny for men and not for women? Why should women, the mothers who bear and care for and train the children, teachers who give education and noble pur-