Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/131

 Neymann (N. Y.) gave a scholarly paper on German and American Independence Contrasted, in which she said:

The difference between the German and the American is simply this: Germans believe in monarchism, in the rule of the Emperor and Prince Bismarck, while Americans believe in the government by all the people, high or low, rich or poor. You have conferred the blessings of free citizenship upon the negro; you invite the humblest, the lowest men to cast their vote; you make them feel that they are sovereign human beings; you place those men above the most virtuous, intelligent women; you set them above your own daughters. Yes, your own child, if born a girl on this free soil, is not free, for she stands without the pale of the Constitution. She, and only she, is deprived of her rightful heritage.

Oh, shame upon the short-sightedness, the delinquency of American statesmen, who will quietly look on and suffer such an injustice to exist! Nowhere in the world is woman so highly respected as in free America, and nowhere does she feel so keenly and deeply her degradation. The vote—you know it full well—is the insignia of power, of influence, of position. And from this position the American woman is debarred.

Do you wonder at the low estimate of American politics? The exclusion of women means the exclusion of your best men. Not before the husband can take his wife, the brother his sister, the father his daughter to the primary meeting, to the political assembly and to the polls, will he himself become interested and fulfil his duty as a voter and a citizen.

"Look at the homes of the wealthy, or even of the large middle-class," it is often said; "what shallowness and pretense among the women; how they shrink from the responsibility of motherhood; how they spend their days in idle gossip, in hollow amusements; how they waste their hours in frivolities; see what extravagant, unhallowed lives they lead." Sad and true enough! For there is no aristocracy so pernicious as a moneyed aristocracy—no woman so dangerous as she who has privileges and no corresponding duties. There is nothing so wasteful as wasted energies, nothing so harmful as powers wrongfully directed; and the gifts and powers of our wealthy, well-to-do women are wrongfully directed. They are employed in the interest of vanity, of worldly ambition, of public display, of sense gratification.

From whence arises this misdirected ambition? The harm is caused by the false standard man holds up to woman. If men would no longer admire the shallowness of such women they would undoubtedly aim higher. On the one side man subordinates himself to woman's whims and caprices, and on the other side she is. made conscious all the time of her dependence and subordination in all that pertains to the higher interests of life; and while he makes a slave of her, she revenges herself and makes a slave of him. See how these women hold men down to their own low level; for women who have no higher aspirations than their own immediate pleasure