are strange gods at whose shrines they
are forbidden to worship; if they feel upon themselves the stigma of
inferiority, of being incapacitated from speaking to their children
about the public affairs and the interests of the nation and the State?

All social classes are entitled to representation in the legislative
houses and are thus enabled to work for legislation favoring their
interests: the merchants, the laborers, the manufacturers, all can
choose one of their own number; but the women, who are not merely one
group or class, but a collection of groups or classes, who represent
one-half of the country and have interests of their own to defend,
not only with relation to their sex, but also with relation to their
position in the family, are not allowed to vote and are therefore
not permitted to have representatives to promote and defend laws
and measures necessary for their protection and betterment. Is this
just? Is this even moral? Female labor can be exploited in shop and
factory; feminine virtue can be made the object of commerce, and yet
woman is not allowed to defend directly the interests of her sex,
owing to one of those aberrations of the moral sense that spring from
the crass egoism and brutal tyranny of man.

If woman were at least exempt from complying with the laws! But no;
the law binds the woman as well as the man; the Penal Code menaces man
and woman alike with the sword of justice, and the burden of taxation
rests upon both the masculine and the feminine wealth. Consequently,
before the law, their duties are the same, but their rights are not.

Is it not strange that our laws should contain so much social injustice
towards woman, so much exasperating discrimination, all based upon the
theory of the servile dependency of woman upon man, resulting from her
congenital mental and physical inferiority? Moebius is incarnated in
our Codes, governs our policy, and influences all the customs and
usages of our social and political life, to such a point that we
ought to be ashamed that in the midst of this era of vindication,
when all classes have secured their right to liberty and equality,
woman has been kept indefinitely upon the same level as in the
centuries of subjection and slavery.

True democracy can not exist with one-half of the people free and
the other half in a stage of slavery, with one-half of the people
with representation in the public affairs and the other half without
it. The people do