by society on those who dare step outside
the prescribed sphere, and, stronger than all, perhaps, their
religious tendencies through which it has been impressed upon them
that their subordinate position was assigned by the Divine will and
that to rebel against it is to defy the Creator. In all the
generations, Church, State and society have combined to retard the
development of women, with the inevitable result that those of every
class are narrower, more bigoted and less progressive than the men of
that class.

While the girls are crowding the colleges now until they threaten to
exceed the number of boys, the demand for the higher education was
made by the merest handful of women and granted by an equally small
number of men, who, on the boards of trustees, were able to do so,
but it would have been deferred for decades if it had depended on a
popular vote of either men or women. The pioneers in the professions
found their most trying opposition from other women, instigated by the
men who did their thinking for them to believe that the whole sex was
being disgraced. Married women almost universally were opposed to laws
which would give them control of their property, being assured by
their masculine advisers that this would deprive them of the love and
protection of their husbands. Public sentiment was wholly opposed to
these laws and no such objections ever have been made in Legislatures
even to woman suffrage as were urged against allowing a wife to own
property. The contest was won by the smallest fraction of women and a
few strong, far-seeing men, the latter actuated not alone by a
sentiment of justice but also by the desire of preventing husbands
from squandering the property which fathers had accumulated and wished
to secure to their daughters, and fortunate indeed was it that this
action did not have to be ratified by the voters.

There are in the United States between three and four million women
engaged in wage-earning occupations outside of domestic service. Would
this be possible had they been obliged to have the duly recorded
permission of a majority of all the men over twenty-one years old? If
the question were submitted to the votes of these men to-day whether
women should be allowed to continue in these employments and enter any
and all others, would it be carried in the affirmative in a single
State?

And yet this prejudiced, conservative and in a degree ignorant and
vicious electorate possesses abs