an and American Independence Contrasted, in
which she said:

The difference between the German and the American is simply
this: Germans believe in monarchism, in the rule of the Emperor
and Prince Bismarck, while Americans believe in the government by
all the people, high or low, rich or poor. You have conferred the
blessings of free citizenship upon the negro; you invite the
humblest, the lowest men to cast their vote; you make them feel
that they are sovereign human beings; you place those men above
the most virtuous, intelligent women; you set them above your own
daughters. Yes, your own child, if born a girl on this free soil,
is not free, for she stands without the pale of the Constitution.
She, and only she, is deprived of her rightful heritage.

Oh, shame upon the short-sightedness, the delinquency of American
statesmen, who will quietly look on and suffer such an injustice
to exist! Nowhere in the world is woman so highly respected as in
free America, and nowhere does she feel so keenly and deeply her
degradation. The vote--you know it full well--is the insignia of
power, of influence, of position. And from this position the
American woman is debarred.

Do you wonder at the low estimate of American politics? The
exclusion of women means the exclusion of your best men. Not
before the husband can take his wife, the brother his sister, the
father his daughter to the primary meeting, to the political
assembly and to the polls, will he himself become interested and
fulfil his duty as a voter and a citizen....

"Look at the homes of the wealthy, or even of the large
middle-class", it is often said; "what shallowness and pretense
among the women; how they shrink from the responsibility of
motherhood; how they spend their days in idle gossip, in hollow
amusements; how they waste their hours in frivolities; see what
extravagant, unhallowed lives they lead". Sad and true enough!
For there is no aristocracy so pernicious as a moneyed
aristocracy--no woman so dangerous as she who has privileges and
no corresponding duties. There is nothing so wasteful as wasted
energies, nothing so harmful as powers wrongfully directed; and
the gifts and powers of our wealthy, well-to-do women are
wrongfully directed. They are employed in the interest of vanit