are outside this
law, and that you shall come into the knowledge that disfranchisement
means the same degradation to your daughters as to your sons.

Governments can not afford to ignore the rights of those holding the
ballot, who make and unmake every law and law-maker. It is not because
the members of Congress are tyrants that women receive only half pay and
are admitted only to inferior positions in the departments. It is simply
in obedience to a law of political economy which makes it impossible for
a government to do as much for the disfranchised as for the
enfranchised. Women are no exception to the general rule. As
disfranchisement always has degraded men, socially, morally and
industrially, so today it is disfranchisement that degrades women in the
same spheres.

Again men say it is not votes, but the law of supply and demand which
regulates wages. The law of gravity is that water shall run down hill,
but when men build a dam across the stream, the force of gravity is
stopped and the water held back. The law of supply and demand regulates
free and enfranchised labor, but disfranchisement estops its operation.
What we ask is the removal of the dam, that women, like men, may reap
the benefit of the law. Did the law of supply and demand regulate work
and wages in the olden days of slavery? This law can no more reach the
disfranchised than it did the enslaved. There is scarcely a place where
a woman can earn a single dollar without a man's consent.

There are many women equally well qualified with men for principals and
superintendents of schools, and yet, while three-fourths of the teachers
are women, nearly all of them are relegated to subordinate positions on
half or at most two-thirds the salaries paid to men. The law of supply
and demand is ignored, and that of sex alone settles the question. If a
business man should advertise for a book-keeper and ten young men,
equally well qualified, should present themselves and, after looking
them over, he should say, "To you who have red hair, we will pay full
wages, while to you with black hair we will pay half the regular price;"
that would not be a more flagrant violation of the law of supply and
demand than is that now perpetrated upon women because of their sex.

And then again you say, "Capital, not the vote, regulates labor."
Granted, for the sake of the argument, that capital does control the
labor of women, Chinamen and slaves; but no one with eyes to see and