able conditions of life.

But this same menace holds with regard to the vote. The lack of
the ballot places the wage-earning woman upon a level of
irresponsibility compared with her enfranchised fellow
workingman. By impairing her standing in the community the
general rating of her value as a human being, and consequently as
a worker, is lowered. In order to be rated as good as a good man
in the field of her earnings, she must show herself better than
he. She must be more steady, or more trustworthy, or more
skilled, or more cheap in order to have the same chance of
employment. Thus, while women are accused of lowering wages,
might they not justly reply 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