Page:Women Wanted.djvu/339

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AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT
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time of national crisis we should have no confusion of terms. Without the participation of women, no franchise can be universal. We have come for an official declaration concerning the abolition of all limitations with regard to women. We demand a clear and definite answer to two questions: Are women to have votes in Russia? And are women to have a voice in the Constituent Assembly which only in that case can represent the will of the people? We are here to remain until we receive the answer."

Well, the answer came. It was an unconditional affirmative, received in turn from the men who came out from the government house to reply to the waiting women: M. V. Rodzianko, prescient of the Imperial Duma; N. S. Tchkeidze, president of the Council of Workingmen's and Soldiers' Deputies, and Prince Lvoff, president of the Council of Ministers. And when the preliminary parliament of the Russian Republic was opened at Petrograd in October, 1917, the chair was offered to Madame Breshkovsky, the celebrated "Little Grandmother" of the Russian Revolutionaries, as the senior member of the council.

In New York City on election night of November, 1917, the newsboys shrilled out a new cry, "The wimmin win!" "The wimmin win!" It was like a victory at Verdun or the Somme. The cables throbbed with the news that New York State, where the woman movement for all the world began ninety years before, had made its over three million women people. It is now only a question of time when all