nal, industrial,
religious and political body--we have turned them all into debating
societies on the woman question."

U. S. Senator Joseph M. Carey (Wy.) sent a letter reaffirming his
conviction that the granting of full political rights to women would
be for the best interests of the country. Mr. Blackwell sketched the
successive extensions of suffrage to women, and set forth the special
importance of their trying to secure the Municipal and the
Presidential franchises, both of which could be granted by the
Legislature. Mrs. Ellen Battelle Dietrick (Mass.) read an able paper
on The Best Methods of Interesting Women in Suffrage, in which she
said:

The truth is, the American woman has been so pleasantly soothed
by the sweet opiate of that high-sounding theory of her
"sovereignty," that until very recently she could not be aroused
to examine the facts. Forty years ago the voices of a few crying
in the wilderness began to prepare the way for the present
awakening....

The deliverance of woman must have as its corner-stone
self-support. The first step in this direction must be to explode
the fallacy that marriage is a state of being supported. As men
are most largely the gatherers of money, it is mistakenly assumed
that they are most largely the creators of wealth. The man goes
abroad and gives his daily labor toward earning his board and
clothes; but what he actually receives for his work can neither
be eaten nor worn. It does nothing whatever until he puts it into
his wife's hands, and upon her intelligence, energy and ability
depend how much can be done through the using of it. Not until
her labor in transforming raw material, in cooking, sewing, and
rendering a house habitable, is joined to his, can a man be said
to have really received anything worth having. He begins, she
completes, the making of their joint wealth. Their dependence is
mutual; the position of the one who turns the money into usable
material by her labor being equally important, equally valuable,
with that of him who turned his labor into money; and this must
be fully recognized if woman is ever to come into her true
relation to man. She supports him exactly as he supports her, and
this is equally the case with the wife who herself produces
directly, or the one who gives her time and intelligence to
direct