She called attention
to the fact that the next day, February 15, would be the 20th
anniversary of its granting by the Legislature. Miss Anna E. Nicholes
of Chicago spoke on The Ballot for Working Women, saying in part:

The women who work in our city have a special claim to Municipal
enfranchisement, inasmuch as they not only help create Chicago's
wealth but are subject to the industrial conditions regulated by
the city voters....

Legislation is becoming more and more industrial in its aspect.
Abating sweating and its evils, inspection of toilets, hygienic
conditions in shops are now matters frequently controlled by our
city fathers. Women are more and more coming into the industrial
field. The 5,000,000 now gainfully employed in the United States
represent one-fifth of the total number of wage-earners and this
number are non-voters. This is a serious handicap to labor in its
efforts to secure humane industrial legislation.... To these
working women this matter of suffrage is an economic question--a
bread-and-butter necessity. It is a fact, acknowledged by many
large employers of labor and stated also by Carroll D. Wright in
Government bulletins, that one of the leading reasons for the
preference of women wage-earners to men is that they can be
secured more cheaply. Employers are frank in acknowledging that
the women work for less, that they are more reliable, more
temperate, less inclined to strike and more faithful.

It was quite as much for the industrial opportunity as for
maintaining personal liberty that Lincoln insisted on the
necessity of enfranchising the negroes. Such prominent economists
as the Webbs of England, Carroll D. Wright and Richard T. Ely of
our own country state that woman's lack of the ballot is one of
the determining causes in placing her in the ranks of the cheap
laborer with all its attending evils. So placed she becomes a
menace in industry and drags down the wages of the men. At the
last convention of the American Federation of Labor this
necessity of the ballot for the working woman was recognized when
the resolution was adopted stating that woman would never come
into the full wage scale until she came into her full rights of
citizenship.... To the large body of women in our city who have
to shift for themselves as com