picked
men of the community, its intelligence, its judgment, the best
that the country has. That is the supposition.

The Chairman: That supposition applies to Congress also, does it?

Mrs. Harper: In a larger degree.

Representative Victor L. Berger of Wisconsin, who was out of the city,
sent a statement which Miss Addams requested Mrs. Elsie Cole Phillips
of Wisconsin to read to the committee. It said in part:

Woman suffrage is a necessity from both a political and an
economic standpoint. We can never have democratic rule until we
let the women vote. We can never have real freedom until the
women are free. Women are now citizens in all but the main
expression of citizenship--the exercise of the vote. They need
this power to round out and complete their citizenship.... In
political matters they have much the same interests that we men
have. In State and national issues their interests differ little,
if at all, from ours. In municipal questions they have an even
greater interest than we have. All the complex questions of
housing, schooling, policing, sanitation and kindred matters are
peculiarly the interests of women as the home makers and the
rearers of children. Women need and must have the ballot by which
to protect their interests in these political and administrative
questions.

The economic argument for woman suffrage is yet stronger.
Economics plays an increasingly important part in the lives of
us all and political power is absolutely necessary to obtain for
women the possibility of decent conditions of living. The low pay
and the hard conditions of working women are largely due to their
disenfranchisement. Skilled women who do the same work as men for
lower pay could enforce, with the ballot, an equal wage rate.

The ideal woman of the man of past generations (and especially of
the Germans) was the housewife, the woman who could wash, cook,
scrub, knit stockings, make dresses for herself and her children
and take good care of the house. That ideal has become
impossible. Those good old days, if ever they were good, are gone
forever.... Moreover, then the woman was supported by her father
first and later by her husband. The situation is entirely
different now. The woman has to go to work often when she is no
more than fourteen years