to govern any other class? Does it not mean that in order to have
a democratic government every adult in the community must have an
opportunity to express his opinion as to how he wishes to be
governed and to have that opinion counted? A vote is in the last
analysis an expression of a need--either a personal need known to
one as an individual as it can be known to no one else, or an
expression of a need of those in whom we are
interested--sister-women or children, for instance. The moment
that one admits this concept of the ballot that moment
practically all of the anti-suffrage argument is done away
with.... Is it to strengthen the hands of the strong? Oh, no; it
is to put into the hands of the weak a weapon of self-protection.
And who are the weak? Those who are economically
handicapped--first of all the working classes in their struggle
for better conditions of life and labor. And who among the
workers are the weak? Wherever the men have suffered, the women
have suffered more.

But I would also like to point out to you how this affects the
homekeeping woman, the wife and mother, of the working class,
aside from the wage-earning woman. Consider the woman at home who
must make both ends meet on a small income. Who better than she
knows whether or not the cost of living advances more rapidly
than the wage does? Is not that a true statement in the most
practical form of the problem of the tariff? And who better than
she knows what the needs of the workers are in the factories?
Take the tenement-house woman, the wife and mother who is
struggling to bring up a family under conditions which constantly
make for evil. Who, better than the mother who has tried to bring
up six or seven children in one room in a dark tenement house,
knows the needs of a proper building? Who better than the mother
who sees her boy and her girl playing in the streets knows the
need of playgrounds? Who better than a mother knows what it means
to a child's life--which you men demand that she as a wife and a
mother shall care for especially--who, better than she, knows the
cruel pressure that comes to that child from too early labor in
what the U. S. census report calls "gainful occupations"?

There is a practical wisdom that comes out of the pressure of
life and