are women.... That these 2,647,157
citizens of whom we have official information labor from
necessity and are everywhere underpaid is within the knowledge
and observation of every Senator upon this floor. Only the
Government makes any pretense of paying women in accordance with
the labor performed--without submitting them to the competition
of their starving sisters, whose natural dignity and self-respect
have suffered from being driven by the fierce pressure of want
into the few and crowded avenues for the exchange of their labor
for bread. Is it not the highest exhibit of the moral superiority
of our women that so very few consent to exchange pinching penury
for gilded vice?
Will the possession of the ballot multiply and widen these
avenues to self-support and independence? The most thoughtful
women who have given the subject thorough examination believe it,
and I can not but infer that many men, looking only to their own
selfish interests, fear it.
History teaches that every class which has assumed political
responsibility has been materially elevated and improved thereby,
and I can not believe that the rule would have an exception in
the women of to-day. I do not say that to the idealized women so
generally described by obstructionists--the dainty darlings whose
prototypes are to be found in the heroines of Walter Scott and
Fenimore Cooper--immediate awakening would come; but to the
toilers, the wage-workers and the women of affairs, the
consequent enlargement of possibilities would give new courage
and stimulate to new endeavor, and the State would be the gainer
thereby.
The often-urged fear that the ignorant and vicious would swarm to
the polls while the intelligent and virtuous would stand aloof,
is fully met by the fact that the former class has never asked
for the suffrage or shown interest in its seeking, while the
hundreds of thousands of petitioners are from our best and
noblest women, including those whose efforts for the amelioration
of the wrongs and sufferings of others have won for them
imperishable tablets in the temple of humanity. Would fear be
entertained that the State would suffer mortal harm if, by some
strange revolution, its exclusive control should be turned over
to an oligarchy composed of such wom
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