Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/386

 bread. We working women want the ballot as our right. You say it is not a right but a privilege. Then we demand it as a privilege. All women ought to have it, wage-earning women must have it." After plainer speaking than the committee had ever heard from a woman she concluded: "You may tell us that our place is in the home. There are 8,000,000 of us in these United States who must go out of it to earn our daily bread and we come to tell you that while we are working in the mills, the mines, the factories and the mercantile houses we have not the protection that we should have. You have been making laws for us and the laws you have made have not been good for us. Year after year working women have gone to the Legislature in every State and have tried to tell their story of need in the same old way. They have gone believing in the strength of the big brother, believing that the big brother could do for them what they should, as citizens, do for themselves. They have seen time after time the power of the big interests come behind the big brother and say to him, 'If you grant the request of these working women you die politically.'

"It is because the working women have seen this that they now demand the ballot. In New York and in every other State, we plead for shorter hours. When the legislators learn that women today in every industry are being overspeeded and overworked, most of them would, if they dared, vote protective legislation. Why do they neglect the women? We answer, because those who have the votes have the power to take the legislator's political ladder away from him, a power that we, who have no votes, do not haveWhile the doors of the colleges have been opened to the fortunate women of our country, only one woman in a thousand goes into our colleges, while one woman in five must go into industry to earn her living. And it is for the protection of this one woman in every five that I speak"

Mrs. Jean Nelson Penfield, chairman of the Woman Suffrage Party of New York numbering 60,000 members, said in part:

In the few moments given me I will confine myself to the handicap women have found disfranchisement to be in social-service work. It is supposed by many that because our so-called leisure women have been able to do so much apparently good community betterment work without the ballot we do not need it. I should like to ask