rd of
trustees, or of a few individuals, or have needed no official or
formal sanction. The suffrage alone must be had through a change of
the constitution of the State and this can be obtained only by consent
of the majority of the voters. Therefore this most valuable of all
rights--the one which if possessed by women at the beginning would
have brought all the others without a struggle--is placed absolutely
in the hands of men to be granted or withheld at will from women. It
is an unjust condition which does not exist even in a monarchy of the
Old World, and it makes of the United States instead of a true
republic an oligarchy in which one-half of the citizens have entire
control of the other half. There is not another country having an
elected representative body, where this body itself may not extend the
suffrage. While the writing of this volume has been in progress the
Parliament of Australia by a single Act has fully enfranchised the
800,000 women of that commonwealth. The Parliament of Great Britain
has conferred on women every form of suffrage except that for its own
members, and there is a favorable prospect of this being granted long
before the women of the United States have a similar privilege.

Not another nation is hampered by a written Federal Constitution which
it is almost impossible to change, and by forty-five written State
constitutions none of which can be altered in the smallest particular
except by consent of the majority of the voters. Every one of these
constitutions was framed by a convention which no woman had a voice in
selecting and of which no woman was a member. With the sole exception
of Wyoming, not one woman in the forty-five States was permitted a
vote on the constitution, and every one except Wyoming and Utah
confined its elective franchise strictly to "male" citizens.

Thus, wherever woman turns in this boasted republic, from ocean to
ocean, from lakes to gulf, seeking the citizen's right of
self-representation, she is met by a dead wall of constitutional
prohibition. It has been held in some of the States that this applies
only to State and county suffrage and that the Legislature has power
to grant the Municipal Franchise to women. Kansas is the only one,
however, which has given such a vote. A bill for this purpose passed
the Legislature of Michigan, after years of effort on the part of
women, and was at once declared unconstitutional by its Supreme Court.
Similar bills have be