ke it from the official report:
"A feature of the election was the orderliness and sobriety of the
people. Women were in no way molested."
At home, a standing argument against woman suffrage has always been that
women could not go to the polls without being insulted. The arguments
against woman suffrage have always taken the easy form of prophecy. The
prophets have been prophesying ever since the woman's rights movement
began in 1848--and in forty-seven years they have never scored a hit.
Men ought to begin to feel a sort of respect for their mothers and wives
and sisters by this time. The women deserve a change of attitude like
that, for they have wrought well. In forty-seven years they have swept
an imposingly large number of unfair laws from the statute books of
America. In that brief time these serfs have set themselves free
essentially. Men could not have done so much for themselves in that time
without bloodshed--at least they never have; and that is argument that
they didn't know how. The women have accomplished a peaceful revolution,
and a very beneficent one; and yet that has not convinced the average man
that they are intelligent, and have courage and energy and perseverance
and fortitude. It takes much to convince the average man of anything;
and perhaps nothing can ever make him realize that he is the average
woman's inferior--yet in several important details the evidences seems to
show that that is what he is. Man has ruled the human race from the
beginning--but he should remember that up to the middle of the present
century it was a dull world, and ignorant and stupid; but it is not such
a dull world now, and is growing less and less dull all the time. This
is woman's opportunity--she has had none before. I wonder where man will
be in another forty-seven years?
In the New Zealand law occurs this: "The word person wherever it occurs
throughout the Act includes woman."
That is promotion, you see. By that enlargement of the word, the matron
with the garnered wisdom and experience of fifty years becomes at one
jump the political equal of her callow kid of twenty-one. The white
population of the colony is 626,000, the Maori population is 42,000. The
whites elect seventy members of the House of Representatives, the Maoris
four. The Maori women vote for their four members.
November 16. After four pleasant days in Christchurch, we are to leave
at midnight to-night. Mr. Kinsey gave me
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