and which when thus taken
over are often not properly administered, women themselves must
have the franchise....

Introducing Representative Raker Miss Addams said smilingly that while
the women speakers were allowed ten minutes the men were to have but
five. Judge Raker of California referred to the fact that he had
pledged himself to this Federal Amendment when he was first a
candidate for Congress eight years before and said: "This matter, as
it appears to me, has passed beyond the question of sentiment; it has
passed beyond the question of advisability; it has passed beyond the
question of whether or not women ought to participate in the vote for
the benefit of the home or the benefit of the State. As I view it it
is a clean-cut question of absolute right and upon that assumption I
base my argument--that we today are depriving one-half of the
intelligence, one-half of the ability of this republic from
participating in public affairs and that from the economic standpoint
of better laws, better homes, better government in the country, the
city, the State and the nation, we need our wives', our sisters' and
our mothers' votes and assistance."

"May I introduce one of my own fellow townswomen, Miss Mary E.
McDowell," said Miss Addams, "who has had what I may call a
distressing life in the stockyards district of Chicago for many years,
and she will tell you what she thinks of the franchise for women."
Miss McDowell said in part:

We are all together very human, it seems to me, both men and
women, and it is because we are human, because this is a human
proposition and not a woman proposition, that I am glad to speak
for it and believe in it so firmly. Giving the vote to women is
not simply a woman's question, it has to do with the man, the
child and the home. Women have always worked but within much less
than a century millions of women and girls have been thrust out
of the home into a man-made world of industry and commerce. We
know that in the United States over 5,500,000, according to the
census of 1900, are bread winners.... Do we not see that the
working women must be given every safeguard that workingmen have
and now as they stand side by side with men in the factory and
shop they must stand with them politically? The ballot may be but
a small bit of the machinery that is to lift the mass of
wage-earning women up to a higher pl