t men have a right to the franchise must
include in the admission women also, for there are no reasons
capable of demonstrating an abstract right in behalf of one sex
which are not equally applicable to the other....

The assertion that women do not want to vote is absolutely
without authority, so long as each individual woman does not
speak out for herself. In Ohio 225,000, and in Illinois 185,000,
have signified a desire to use the ballot for home protection,
and yet it is still asserted in those States that women do not
want it. Over 100,000 women have already notified this Congress
that they desire equality of political rights, and still it is
declared all around us that women do not want to vote. Gentlemen,
this is most emphatically an assertion which no individual can be
justified in making for another.

Since the elective franchise is the parent stem from which branch
out legal, industrial, social and educational enterprises
necessary to the welfare of the citizens, it will be readily seen
how women engaged in reforms, public charities, social
enterprises, are hampered and trammeled in their progress without
the ballot. Women have beheld their plans frustrated, their
Herculean labor undone, their lives wasted, for want of
legislative power through the citizen's emblem of sovereignty....

All ranks and occupations are beginning to realize that monstrous
evils must ever crowd upon both classes while one side of
humanity only is represented, and while one sex has the
irresponsible keeping of the rights and privileges of the other.
To-day, throughout the length and breadth of our land, woman
finds the greatest need of the ballot through an almost
overpowering desire to have her wishes and opinions crystallized
into law.

I have no hesitancy in saying that if the conditions which
surround the women of this nation to-day were the conditions of
the male citizens of the country, they would rise up and
pronounce them the exact definition of civil and political
slavery, instead of the true interpretation of natural justice
and civil equity.

Many persons claim that men are born with the right to vote, as
they are to the right of life, liberty and happiness; that
suffrage is the gift of the State, and that the State has a right