to vote be not that difference, what is? If either sex as a class
can dispense with the right to vote, then take it from the
strong and do not longer rob the weak of their defense for the
benefit of the strong. But it is impossible to conceive of the
suffrage as a right dependent at all upon such an irrelevant
condition as sex. It is an individual, a personal right, and if
withheld by reason of sex it is a moral robbery.

It is said that the duties of maternity disqualify for the
performance of the act of voting. It can not be, and I think is
not claimed by any one, that the mother who otherwise would be
fit to vote is rendered mentally or morally less fit to exercise
this high function in the State because of motherhood. On the
contrary, if any woman has a motive more than another person, man
or woman, to secure the enactment and enforcement of good laws,
it is the mother, who, besides her own life, person and
property--to the protection of which the ballot is as essential
as to those of man--has her little contingent of immortal beings
to conduct safely to the portals of active life through all the
snares and pitfalls woven around them by bad men and bad laws,
and to prepare rightly for the discharge of all the duties of
their day and generation, including, if boys, the exercise of the
very right denied to their mother.

Certainly if but for motherhood woman should vote, then ten
thousand times more necessary is it that the mother should be
armed with this great social and political power for the sake of
all men and women who are yet to be. It is said that she has not
the time. Let us see. By the best deductions I can make from the
census and from other sources, of the women of voting age in this
country not more than one-half are married and still liable to
the duties of maternity; for it will be remembered that a
considerable proportion of the mothers at any given time are
below the voting age, while another large proportion have passed
beyond the point of this objection. Then why disfranchise the
half to whom your objection, even if valid as to any, does not
apply at all; and most of these, too, the most mature and
therefore the best qualified to vote of any of their sex?

But how much is there of this objection of want of time o