Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/110

 Always, always it is the frantic cry for financial independence, the demand of the worker for her wage; the futile, bitter protest of the woman with the broom against the injustice of taking her work without pay. Men will say that in supporting their wives, in furnishing them with houses and food and clothes, they are giving the women as much money as they could ever hope to earn by any other profession. I grant it; but between the independent wage-earner and the one who is given his keep for his services is the difference between the free-born and the chattel. The present state of affairs brings about a disastrous condition in the woman's world of labor, so that the woman wage-earner must not only compete with the man worker but with the domestic woman who has her home and clothes supplied her and who does things on the side in order to get a little money that she may spend as she pleases. When men grow just enough to abandon the idea that keeping house and doing the family sewing and rearing children is a "snap" and not a profession; when they grow broad enough to realize that the woman with the broom is a laborer just as much worthy of her hire as a typewriter, we shall have fewer women yearning to go out into the world and earn a few dollars of spending money.

Edwin Merrick, the son of a Chief Justice of Louisiana and Mrs. Caroline E. Merrick, its pioneer suffragist, began his address on A Political Anomaly by referring to the distinguished women he had been privileged to meet in his home. He spoke of the constitution drawn up on the Mayflower to give equal liberty to all without the slightest conception of what true liberty really meant, and of the larger conception of it which was imbedded in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. "But," he said, "while the words were there, slavery still existed and the people of the Union were slowly led to see the handwriting on the wall and slavery had to go. Had the great leader of his day, Abraham Lincoln, been preserved to help shape the destinies of this country, what followed would no* have happened." He then spoke of the crime of enfranchising "a horde of ignorant negro men when at that time there were nearly 4,000,000 intelligent white women keenly alive to the interests of their country to whom the ballot was denied." He sketched the steady degeneration of national and State politics and exposed the conditions in Louisiana. He showed how the reforms that had been accomplished had been largely aided by women and concluded: Always, always it is the frantic cry for financial independence, the demand of the worker for her wage; the futile, bitter protest of the woman with the broom against the injustice of taking her work without pay. Men will say that in supporting their wives, in furnishing them with houses and food and clothes, they are giving the women as much money as they could ever hope to earn by any other profession. I grant it; but between the independent wage-earner and the one who is given his keep for his services is the difference between the free-born and the chattel. The present state of affairs brings about a disastrous condition in the woman's world of labor, so that the woman wage-earner must not only compete with the man worker but with the domestic woman who has her home and clothes supplied her and who does things on the side in order to get a little money that she may spend as she pleases. When men grow just enough to abandon the idea that keeping house and doing the tamily sewing and rearing children is a "snap" and not a profession; when they grow broad enough to realize that the woman with the broom is a laborer just as much worthy of her hire as a typewriter, we shall have fewer women yearning to go out into the world and earn a few dollars of spending money.

Edwin Merrick, the son of a Chief Justice of Louisiana and Mrs. Caroline E. Merrick, its pioneer suffragist, began his address on A Political Anomaly by referring to the distinguished women he had been privileged to meet in his home. He spoke of the constitution drawn up on the Mayflower to give equal liberty to all without the slightest conception of what true liberty really meant, and of the larger conception of it which was imbedded in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. "But," he said, "while the words were there, slavery still existed and the people of the Union were slowly led to see the handwriting on the wall and slavery had to go. Had the great leader of his day, Abraham Lincoln, been preserved to help shape the destinies of this country, what followed would no* have happened." He then spoke of the crime of enfranchising "a horde of ignorant negro men when at that time there were nearly 4,000,000 intelligent white women keenly alive to the interests of their country to whom the ballot was denied." He sketched the steady degeneration of national and State politics and exposed the conditions in Louisiana. He showed how the reforms that had been accomplished had been largely aided by women and concluded: