Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/439

 erty and representation, can not be denied, for if we go back. to first principles, where did the few get the right, through all time, to rule the many? They never had it, any more than pirates had the right to scour the high seas, and take whatever they could lay hands upon.

Miss Elizabeth Sheldon Tillinghast (Conn.) considered The Economic Basis of Woman Suffrage:

However we may explain it, and whether we like it or not, woman has become an economic factor in our country and one that is constantly assuming larger proportions. The question is now what treatment will make her an element of economic strength instead of weakness as at present. The presence of women in business now demoralizes the rate of wages even more than the increase in the supply of labor. Why? Principally because she can be bullied with greater impunity than voters—because she has no adequate means of self-defense. This seems a hard accusation, but I believe it to be true.

Trade is a fight—an antagonism of interests which are compromised in contracts in which the economically stronger always wins the advantage. There are many things that contribute to economic strength besides ability, and among them the most potent is coming more and more to be the power which arises from organization expressing itself in political action. Without political expression woman's economic value is at the bottom of the scale. She is the last to be considered, and the consideration is usually about exhausted before she is reached.

She must do better work than men for equal pay or equal work for less pay. In spite of this she may be supplanted at any time by a political adherent, or her place may be used as a bribe to an opposing faction. Women are weak in the business world because they are new in it; because they are only just beginning to learn their economic value; because their inherent tendencies are passive instead of aggressive, which makes them as a class less efficient fighters than men.

For these reasons women are and must be for years, if not for generations, economically weaker than men. Does it appeal to any one's sense of fairness to give the stronger party in a struggle additional advantages and deny them to the weaker one? Would that be considered honorable—would it be considered tolerable—even among prize-fighters? What would be thought of a contest between a heavy-weight and a feather-weight in which the heavy-weight was allowed to hit below the belt and the feather-weight was confined to the Marquis of Queensberry's rules? And yet these are practically the conditions under which women do business in forty-one of our States.

While the State does not owe any able-bodied, sound-minded man or woman a living, it does owe them all a fair—yes, even a generous opportunity to earn their own living, and one that shall not be pro-