Page:Women Wanted.djvu/336

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
304
WOMEN WANTED

afford to do without our point of view in your national deliberations?" The Grand Council of Switzerland is considering a bill which is before it, proposing to give women the franchise in communal affairs. Mexico is struggling toward national freedom with her women at the side of her men. It was not even considered necessary to incorporate in the new constitution the woman suffrage provision suggested by Hermila Galinda at the national convention. The new Mexican Federal constitution states explicitly that "Voters are those Mexicans who are 21 if unmarried and over 18 if married and possessed of an honest means of livelihood." And under this constitution, in the March, 1917, elections, Mexican women quietly voted as a matter of course along with the other citizens.

In all of Russia's turbulent revolutionary unrest, none of the divers parties struggling for supremacy there, denies the claim of half the race to the freedom which it is hoped ultimately to establish. The Provisional government's first announcement was for universal suffrage. But the Russian women weren't going to take any chance. They remembered a French revolution that also proclaimed "universal" suffrage and has not yet done anything of the kind. The Russian League for the Defence of Women's Rights said, "Let's be certain about this. We want our calling to citizenship made sure." So Dr. Shiskina Yavein, the president of the League, led 45,000 women to the Imperial Duma in Petrograd. As their spokesman she told the government: "At this