Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/382

 est development of the womanly character. Mrs. Elsie Cole Phillips of Wisconsin showed the standpoint of the so-called working classes, saying in part:

The right to vote is based primarily on the democratic theory of government. "The just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed." What does that mean? Does it not mean that there is no class so wise, so benevolent that it is fitted — to govern any other class? Does it not mean that in order to have a democratic government every adult in the community must have an opportunity to express his opinion as to how he wishes to be governed and to have that opinion counted? A vote is in the last analysis an expression of a need—either a personal need known to one as an individual as it can be known to no one else, or an expression of a need of those in whom we are interested—sister-women or children, for instance. The moment that one admits this concept of the ballot that moment practically all of the anti-suffrage argument is done away withIs it to strengthen the hands of the strong? Oh, no; it is to put into the hands of the weak a weapon of self-protection. And who are the weak? Those who are economically handicapped—first of all the working classes in their struggle for better conditions of life and labor. And who among the workers are the weak? Wherever the men have suffered, the women have suffered more.

But I would also like to point out to you how this affects the home-keeping woman, the wife and mother, of the working class, aside from the wage-earning woman. Consider the woman at home who must make both ends meet on a small income. Who better than she knows whether or not the cost of living advances more rapidly than the wage does? Is not that a true statement in the most practical form of the problem of the tariff? And who better than she knows what the needs of the workers are in the factories? Take the tenement-house woman, the wife and mother who is struggling to bring up a family under conditions which constantly make for evil. Who, better than the mother who has tried to bring up six or seven children in one room in a dark tenement house, knows the needs of a proper building? Who better than the mother who sees her boy and her girl playing in the streets knows the need of playgrounds? Who better than a mother knows what it means to a child's life— which you men demand that she as a wife and a mother shall care for especially—who, better than she, knows the cruel pressure that comes to that child from too early labor in what the U. S. census report calls "gainful occupations"?

There is a practical wisdom that comes out of the pressure of life and an educational force in life itself which very often is more efficient than that which comes through textbooks of collegeThe ignorant vote that is going to come in when women are enfranchised is that of the leisure-class woman, who has no responsibilities and knows nothing of what life means to the rest of the world, who has