s than men, especially if the weather is bad.
Probably about three-quarters as many women as men go to the polls.
Often I met women who said that they did not care for the vote, and
sometimes one who said she thought women ought not to vote; but these
same women often added that since they had the responsibility they felt
it their duty to cast a ballot; and no woman told me that she did not
fulfil the obligation.

In the first legislature which met after the granting of equal suffrage,
that of 1898, three women were seated, Mrs. Hattie F. Noble, Clara L.
Cambell, and Mary A. Wright; Mrs. Wright afterward became chief clerk of
the House. In 1908, another woman, Mrs. Lottie J. McFadden, was
returned; but there was no woman in the last legislature, and so far as
I can learn, only these four have taken part in law-making. When asked
why, after the first ardor of emancipation, women have taken so little
part in legislation, most people said it was because they had found the
work and conditions surrounding it unsuited to them. It seems generally
agreed, however, that a woman could be elected to the legislature at any
time if she represented a cause which needed to be brought before the
people through that body.

Theorists have always insisted that equal suffrage would greatly improve
the material conditions which surround the polls on election day. One of
the prominent political leaders in Idaho, who has been intimately in
touch with conditions for a quarter of a century, said that of course
there had been great improvement in the last fifteen years. "Things
would have improved any way," he said, "but I am sure that the women
have had a large influence. No woman has ever been insulted at the polls
in Idaho and she runs no more danger of annoyance than she would in
buying her ticket at a railway window. Men are not always sober in
either place; but if a man made a remark to a woman that was not polite,
or used annoying language in her presence, he would be mobbed by the
men even in the roughest mining camp in the State." Doubtless women have
helped to break the connection between the saloon and the polling-place,
but no one claims that women have made voting into a drawing-room
ceremony. On the contrary, women are very persistent workers at the
polls, seeking to direct doubtful voters.

Advocates of equal suffrage have pretty generally held the belief that
if women were given the ballot their superior moral standards would l