e remains the
same, and that remains because it is a part of the necessary
evolution of democratic society and is an immortal thing.

I recall those early audiences; the rows of quiet faces in Quaker
bonnets in the foreground; the rows of exceedingly unquiet
figures of Southern medical students, with their hats on, in the
background. I recall the visible purpose of those energetic young
gentlemen to hear nobody but the women, and the calm
determination with which their bootheels contributed to put the
male speakers down. I recall also their too-assiduous attentions
in the streets outside when the meeting broke up....

Woman suffrage should be urged, in my opinion, not from any
predictions of what women will do with their votes after they get
them, but on the ground that by all the traditions of our
government, by all the precepts of its early founders, by all the
axioms which lie at the foundation of our political principles,
woman needs the ballot for self-respect and self-protection.

The woman of old times who did not read books of political
economy or attend public meetings, could retain her self-respect;
but the woman of modern times, with every step she takes in the
higher education, finds it harder to retain that self-respect
while she is in a republican government and yet not a member of
it. She can study all the books that I saw collected this morning
in the political economy alcove of the Bryn Mawr College; she can
master them all; she can know more about them perhaps than any
man of her acquaintance; and yet to put one thing she has learned
there in practice by the simple process of dropping a piece of
paper into a ballot-box--she can no more do that than she could
put out her slender finger and stop the planet in its course.
That is what I mean by woman's needing the suffrage for
self-respect.

Then as to self-protection. We know there have been great
improvements in the laws in regard to women. What brought about
those improvements? The steady labor of women like these on this
platform, going before Legislatures year by year and asking for
something they were not willing to give, the ballot; but, as a
result of it, to keep the poor creatures quiet, some law was
passed removing a restriction. The old English writer Pepys,