Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/108

96 made by that section of womanhood in insurrection against the present social order, and the implications which lie behind their specific demands, who does not see the radical changes that will come finally as a result of conceding these demands. However disastrously the experiment may issue, the difficulties of either turning back or arresting the movement will be nearly insurmountable.

Certain discontented women say they want the ballot, in order that they may with it open to themselves, on the same terms and for the same compensation, a free career in all the professions and occupations in which men are engaged. They want to place all women in the condition of service and hardship in which the casualties of life and the precarious fortunes of business now place a few women. They wish to make wounds which the present social structure now receives here and there parts of its normal status. For they want to be lawyers and physicians charging the same fees, ministers having the same salaries, artisans and workmen having the same wages as men. The greater competition among the many women as against the few men in the occupations now open to women they propose to counteract by a statutory equalization of wages for the same kind of work.

The great labor crises and the imperiled industrial equilibrium in the whole civilized world being confessedly due to the excessive number of competitors for such paying work as machinery has left to be done, it is proposed to aggravate the situation by turning into the competition the whole mass of able-bodied women, not hitherto generally reckoned among the working class.

In the woman-suffrage movement the "insurgent women" virtually serve notice upon us men, that they do not desire any of our courtesies, which are a badge of their servitude, and that our politeness in giving them the best places in the concert room and the horse-car is superserviceable and compromises their sense of independence. They do not longer care to be petted or exempted from perils and hardships or to be maintained by labor not their own. They only want an equal chance to "paddle their own canoe" in quest of their own fortunes.

Whatever the answer to this demand may be, it will not be likely to be this: Very well, please yourselves; rough it with us in the struggle for life, asking no favors if such a contest invites you. Enlist in the military companies and stand the drill, and when the next war comes, go to the front. Join the fire company in your ward, and run with the machine, when the next fire calls you out at midnight. There is a ship in port bound round Cape Horn, on a year's voyage; the owners have had such bad luck with drunken men, that they mean to try a crew of