rated with every social reform advocated by men, and it
is to be noted that wherever their judgment has been in error they have
conscientiously erred in favor of a wider democracy, a more exalted
social ideal.

[Illustration: SUFFRAGE DEMONSTRATION IN UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK]

However long-deferred Woman Suffrage may prove to be, it is pretty
generally conceded that women will inevitably vote some day. The
evolution of society will bring them into political equality with men
just as it has brought them into intellectual and industrial equality.
The first woman who followed her spinning-wheel out of her home into the
factory was the natural ancestress of the first woman who demanded the
ballot.

The application of steam to machinery took women's trades out of the
home and placed them in the factory. The effect of this was that men
were confronted with a singular dilemma. They had to choose between two
courses; they had to support their women in idleness, or else they had
to allow them to leave the home and go where their trades had gone. The
first course involving the intolerable burden of doing their own and
their women's work, they were obliged to choose the second. The
jealously-guarded doors of the home were opened, and little by little,
grudgingly, the men admitted women to full industrial freedom.

Women's housekeeping, or most of it, has gradually been withdrawn from
the home and transferred to the municipality. There was a time when
women could ensure their families pure food, good milk, clean ice,
proper sanitation. They cannot do that now. The City Hall governs all
such matters. Again the men find themselves facing the old dilemma. They
must either support their women in idleness--do all their own as well as
the women's housekeeping--or they must allow their women to leave the
home and follow their housekeeping to the place where it is now being
done,--the polls.

Women are beginning to understand the situation. They are even beginning
to understand how badly the men are providing for the municipal family.
They are demanding their old housekeeping tasks back again. To this
point has the Suffrage movement, begun in 1848 by a band of women called
fanatics, arrived.

CHAPTER XI

IN CONCLUSION

I have tried to set down in these pages the collective opinion of women,
as far as it has expressed itself through deeds. I have not succeeded if
any reader lays down the book with the impression that he h