e in government,
religion, laws and social customs makes but little change in the
relative status of woman to the self-constituted governing
classes, so long as subordination in all countries is the rule of
her being. Through suffering we have learned the open sesame to
the hearts of each other. With the spirit forever in bondage, it
is the same whether housed in golden cages with every want
supplied, or wandering in the dreary deserts of life, friendless
and forsaken. Long ago we of America heard the deep yearnings of
the souls of women in foreign lands for freedom responsive to our
own. Mary Wollstonecraft, Madame de Stael, Madam Roland, George
Sand, Frederica Bremer, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Frances
Wright and George Eliot alike have pictured the wrongs of woman
in poetry and prose. Though divided by vast mountain ranges,
oceans and plains, yet the psalms of our lives have been in the
same strain--too long, alas, in the minor key--for hopes deferred
have made the bravest hearts sometimes despairing. But the same
great over-soul has been our faith and inspiration. The steps of
progress already achieved in many countries should encourage us
to tune our harps anew to songs of victory....

I think most of us have come to feel that a voice in the laws is
indispensable to achieve success; that these great moral
struggles for higher education, temperance, peace, the rights of
labor, international arbitration, religious freedom, are all
questions to be finally adjusted by the action of government and
thus, without a direct voice in legislation, woman's influence
will be entirely lost.

Experience has fully proved that sympathy as a civil agent is
vague and powerless until caught and chained in logical
propositions and coined into law. When every prayer and tear
represents a ballot, the mothers of the race will no longer weep
in vain over the miseries of their children. The active interest
women are taking in all the great questions of the day is in
strong contrast with the apathy and indifference in which we
found them half a century ago, and the contrast in their
condition between now and then is equally marked. Those who
inaugurated the movement for woman's enfranchisement, who for
long years endured the merciless storm of ridicule and