suffrage arguments do
on the surface appear inconsistent with historical facts, I believe
the inconsistency to be more formal than real.

As the centuries pass a larger and still larger proportion of human
affairs passes away from individual management and comes under social
and community control. As this process goes on, more and more does the
individual, whether man or woman, need the power to control socially
the conditions that affect his or her individual welfare. In our day
political power rightly used, gives a socialized control of social
conditions, and for the individual it is embodied in and is expressed
by the vote.

To go back only one hundred years. The great bulk of men and women
were industrially much more nearly on a level than they are today.
A poor level, I grant you, for with the exception of the privileged
classes, few and small were the political powers and therefore the
social control of even men. But every extension of political power
as granted to class after class of men has, as far as women are
concerned, had the fatal effect of increasing the political inequality
between men and women, thus placing women, though not apparently, yet
relatively and actually upon a lower level.

Again, the status of woman has been crushingly affected by the
contemporaneous and parallel change which has passed over her special
occupations; so that the conditions under which she works today are
decidedly less than ever before by purely personal relationships and
more by such impersonal factors as the trade supply of labor, and
interstate and international competition. This change has affected
woman in an immeasurably greater degree than man. The conditions
of industrial life are in our day in some degree controllable by
political power so that at this point woman again finds herself
civilly and industrially at greater disadvantage than when her status
in all these respects depended principally upon her individual
capacity to handle efficiently problems arising within an area limited
by purely personal relationships. To alter so radically the conditions
of daily life and industry, and not merely to leave its control in the
hands of the old body of voters, but to give over into the hands of an
enlarged and fresh body of voters, and these voters inevitably the men
of her own class who are her industrial competitors, that degree of
control represented by the vote and to refuse it to women is to place
women (though