Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/273

 1,000 lawyers. Then only a few poorly-paid employments were open to women; now they are in more than three hundred occupations and comprise 80 per cent. of our school teachers. Then there were scarcely any organizations of women; now such organizations are numbered by thousands. Then the few women who dared to speak in public, even on philanthropic questions, were overwhelmingly condemned by public opinion; now the women most opposed to woman suffrage travel about the country making speeches to prove that a woman's only place is at home. Then a married woman in most of our States could not control her own person, property or earnings; now in most of them these laws have been largely amended or repealed and it is only in regard to the ballot that the fiction of woman's perpetual minority is still kept up."

Mrs. Catt's powerful address was entitled The Battle to the Strong but nothing is preserved except newspaper clippings. She ended by saying: "In all history there has been no event fraught with more importance for the generations to follow than the present uprising of the women of the world. ... Every struggle helps and no movement for right, for reform in this country or in England but has made the woman's movement easier in every other land. We have brought the countries of the world very close together in the last few years. Papers and cables and telegraph spread the news almost instantly to the centres of the earth and then to the obscure corners, so that the women of other nations know what the women here are doing and what they are doing in every other part of the world The suffrage campaign in England has become the kind of fanaticism that caused the American Revolution. These women are no longer reformers, they are rebels, and they are going to winWoman's hour has struck at last and all along the line there is a mobilization of the woman's army ready for service. We are going forward with flags flying to win. If you are not for us you are against us. Justice for the women of the world is coming. This is to be a battle to the strong— strong in faith, strong in courage, strong in conviction. Women of America, stand up for the citizenship of our own country and