eagues which blend the handling of local
activities everywhere with a demand for the ballot in keeping with the
needs of the modern community. No clear-eyed woman can work long in
this sort of atmosphere without realizing how unequally social burdens
press, how unequally social advantages are allotted, whether the
burdens come through hours of work, inadequate remuneration, sanitary
conditions, whether in home or in factory, and whether the advantages
are obtainable through public education, vocational training, medical
care, or in the large field of recreation.

So important does work through organization, appear to me that,
remembering always that tendencies are more important than conditions,
it would seem in some respects a more wholesome and hopeful situation
for women to be organized and working for one of their common aims,
even though that aim be for the time being merely winning of the vote,
rather than to have the vote, and with it working merely as isolated
individuals, and with neither the power that organization insures nor
the training that it affords.

But with what we know nowadays there should be no need for any such
unsatisfactory alternative. It would be much more in keeping with the
modern situation if the object of suffrage organizations were to read,
not "to obtain the vote" but "to obtain political, legal and social
equality for women."

Then as each state, or as the whole country (we hope by and by)
obtains the ballot, so might the organizations go on in a sense as if
nothing had happened. And nothing would have happened, save that a
great body of organized women would be more effective than ever. The
members would individually be equipped with the most modern instrument
of economic and social expression. The organizations themselves would
have risen in public importance and esteem and therefore in influence.
Moreover, and this is the most important point of all, they would be
enrolled among those bodies, whose declared policy would naturally
help in guiding the great bulk of new and untrained feminine voters.

In the early days of the woman movement, the leaders, I believe,
desired as earnestly and as keenly saw the need for legal and social
or economic equality as we today with all these years of experience
behind us. But the unconscious assumption was all the time that given
political equality every other sort of equality would readily and
logically follow. Even John Stuart Mill seems to h