Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 6.djvu/736

 72O HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE is that, not only among the Tagalogs but also among the Christian Filipinos, the woman is the active manager of the family, so if you expect to confer political power on the Filipinos it ought to be given to the women. Following is part of the Archbishop's statement. (Senate Document, p. 109.) : The woman is better than the man in every way in intelligence, in virtue and in labor and a great deal more economical. She is very much given to trade and trafficking. If any rights and privi- leges are to be granted to the natives, do not give them to the men but to the women. Q. Then you think it would be much better to give the women the right to vote than the men? v A. O, much better. Why, even in the fields it is the women who do the work ; the men go to the cock fights and gamble. The woman is the one who supports the man there, so every law of justice demands that in political life they should have the privilege over the men. Notwithstanding this and other testimony of a similar nature the Commission framed a Code giving a Municipal or local franchise to certain classes of men and excluding all women, taking away from them the privileges they always had possessed. The men soon began demanding their own lawmaking body and in response Congress passed an Act to take effect Jan. 15, 1907, to provide for the holding of elections in the Islands for a Legislative Assembly. The Act limited the voters to "male persons 23 years of age or over," thus again putting up the barriers against women and including them in the list of the disqualified as listed "insane, feeble-minded, rebels and traitors." The U. S. Government did, however, give women to the same extent as men all educational advantages, which heretofore had been denied them and their progress was very rapid. In 1912 Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, visited Manila on her trip around the world and was warmly received. A meeting was called at the Manila Hotel for August 15 and twelve women responded. After mak- ing an address she helped them form a club which they called Society for the Advancement of Women. Thirty attended the next meeting two weeks later and they took up active philan- thropic work. In a little while most of the women of influence were members of it and it was re-organized as the Woman's Club