Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/948

Rh respectively, the difference is always against women and in favor of men. They believe this state of things is a natural result of the exclusion of women from representation, and it will be found impracticable to amend it until women are admitted to a share in controlling the legislature.

By the deprivation of the parliamentary vote, women, in the purchase or renting of property, obtain less for their money than men. In a bill which passed the House of Commons last session, provision was made for the amalgamation in one list of the municipal and parliamentary registers of electors. In that list it appeared that the same house, the same rent and the same taxes conferred on a man the double vote in municipal and parliamentary government, and on a woman the single vote only, and that the less honorable and important one. When the occupation of a house is transferred from a man to a woman, say to the widow of the former owner, that home loses the privilege of representation in the imperial government, though its relations with the tax-gatherer continue unaltered. There have been various societies formed with a view to enable persons to acquire portions of landed or real property, partly for the sake of the vote attached to such property. Should a woman purchase or inherit such an estate, the vote, which has been one important consideration in determining the value, would be lost through her legal disability to exercise it.

The deprivation of the vote is a serious disadvantage to women in the competition for farms. A case is recorded of one estate in Suffolk from which seven widows have been ejected, who, if they had [sic]possesed votes, would have been continued as tenants. A sudden ejection often means ruin to a family that has sunk capital in the land, and it is only too probable that no day passes without the [sic]occurence of some such calamity to some unhappy widow, who, but for the electoral disability, might have retained the home and the occupation by which she could have brought up her family in comfort and independence.

Besides this definite manner in which the electoral disability injures women farmers, it has a more or less directly injurious influence on all self-dependent women who maintain themselves and their families by other than domestic labor. A disability, the basis of which is the presumed mental or moral incapacity of the subject of it to form a rational judgment on matters within the ordinary ken of human intelligence, carries with it a stigma of inferiority calculated to cause impediment to the entrance on or successful prosecution of any pursuit demanding recognized ability and energy. This presumed incapacity is probably the origin of the general neglect of the education of women, which is only now beginning to be acknowledged, and the absence of political power in the neglected class renders it difficult if not impossible to obtain an adequate share for girls in the application of educational funds and endowments. So long as women are specifically excluded from control over their parliamentary representatives, so long will their interests be postponed to claims of those who have votes to give; and while parliament shall continue to declare that the voices of women are unfit to be taken into account in choosing members of the legislature, the masses of men