State
are not willing to share their power with a class over whom as
equals they could never obtain absolute control, whose votes they
could not manipulate to maintain the present conditions of
injustice and oppression....

Again, the rulers in the church are hostile to liberty for a sex
supposed for wise purposes to have been subordinated to man by
divine decree. The equality of woman as a factor in religious
organizations would compel an entire change in church canons,
discipline, authority, and many doctrines of the Christian faith.
As a matter of self-preservation, the church has no interest in
the emancipation of woman, as its very existence depends on her
blind faith....

Society at large, based on the principle that might makes right,
has in a measure excluded women from the profitable industries of
the world, and where she has gained a foothold her labor is at a
discount. Man occupies the ground and holds the key to the
situation. As employer, he plays the cheap labor of a
disfranchised class against the employe, thus in a measure
undermining his independence, making wife and daughter in the
world of work the rivals of husband and father.

The family, too, is based on the idea of woman's subordination,
and man has no interest, as far as he sees, in emancipating her
from that despotism by which his narrow, selfish interests are
maintained under the law and religion of the country.

Here, then, is a fourfold bondage, so many cords tightly twisted
together, strong for one purpose. To attempt to undo one is to
loosen all.... To my mind, if we had at first bravely untwisted
all the strands of this fourfold cord which bound us, and
demanded equality in the whole round of the circle, while
perhaps, we should have had a harder battle to fight, it would
have been more effective and far shorter. Let us henceforth meet
conservatives on their own ground and admit that suffrage for
woman does mean political, religious, industrial and social
freedom--a new and a higher civilization....

Woman's happiness and development are of more importance than all
man's institutions. If constitutions and statute laws stand in
the way of woman's emancipation, they must be amended to meet her
wants and needs, of which she is a better judge than ma