and 50's in this country compare favorably with that of the men and
women in any revolutionary period in any country that we may select.

The American woman has played an honorable part in the making of our
country, and for this part she should have full credit. If she had
been as poor a stick, as downtrodden and ineffective as sometimes
painted, she would not be a fit mate for the man beside whom she has
struggled, and she would be as utterly unfit for the larger life she
desires as the most bigoted misogynist pictures her to be.

Moreover, all things considered, she has been no greater sufferer from
injustice than man. I do not mean in saying this that she has not had
grave and unjust handicaps, legal and social; I mean that when you
come to study the comparative situations of men and women as a mass at
any time and in any country you will find them more nearly equal than
unequal, all things considered. Women have suffered injustice, but
parallel have been the injustices men were enduring. It was not the
fact that she was a woman that put her at a disadvantage so much as
the fact that might made right, and the physically weaker everywhere
bore the burden of the day. Go back no further than the beginnings of
this Republic and admit all that can be said of the wrong in the laws
which prevented a woman controlling the property she had inherited or
accumulated by her own efforts, which took from her a proper share in
the control of her child,--we must admit, too, the equal enormity of
the laws which permitted man to exploit labor in the outrageous way he
has. It was not because he was a man that the labor was exploited--it
was because he was the weaker in the prevailing system. Woman's case
was parallel--she was the weaker in the system. It had always been the
case with men and women in the world that he who could took and the
devil got the hindermost. The way the laborer's cause has gone hand
in hand in this country the last hundred years with the woman's cause
is a proof of the point. In the 30's of the nineteenth century, for
illustration, the country was torn by a workingman's party which
carried on a fierce agitation against banks and monopolies. Many of
its leaders were equally ardent in their support of Women's Rights as
they were then understood. The slavery agitation was coupled from the
start with the question of Women's Rights. It was injustice that was
being challenged--the right of the stronger to put the wea