to food and clothes and shelter; hears the
whisper in softest accents, "Come with me and I will give you all the
comforts, pleasures and luxuries that love and wealth can bestow." Since
the vast multitudes of human beings, women like men, are not born to the
courage or conscience of the martyr, can we wonder that so many poor
girls fall, that so many accept material ease and comfort at the expense
of spiritual purity and peace? Should we not wonder, rather, that so
many escape the sad fate?

Clearly, then, the first step toward solving this problem is to lift
this vast army of poverty-stricken women who now crowd our cities, above
the temptation, the necessity, to sell themselves, in marriage or out,
for bread and shelter. To do that, girls, like boys, must be educated to
some lucrative employment; women, like men, must have equal chances to
earn a living. If the plea that poverty is the cause of woman's
prostitution be not true, perfect equality of chances to earn honest
bread will demonstrate the falsehood by removing that pretext and
placing her on the same plane with man. Then, if she is found in the
ranks of vice and crime, she will be there for the same reason that man
is and, from an object of pity, she, like him, will become a fit subject
of contempt. From being the party sinned against, she will become an
equal sinner, if not the greater of the two. Women, like men, must not
only have "fair play" in the world of work and self-support, but, like
men, must be eligible to all the honors and emoluments of society and
government. Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a
necessity; an incident of life, not all of it. And the only possible way
to accomplish this great change is to accord to women equal power in the
making, shaping and controlling of the circumstances of life. That
equality of rights and privileges is vested in the ballot, the symbol of
power in a republic. Hence, our first and most urgent demand--that women
shall be protected in the exercise of their inherent, personal,
citizen's right to a voice in the government, municipal, state,
national.

Alexander Hamilton said one hundred years ago, "Give to a man the right
over my subsistence, and he has power over my whole moral being." No one
doubts the truth of this assertion as between man and man; while, as
between man and woman, not only does almost no one believe it, but the
masses of people deny it. And yet it is the fact of man's posses