Page:The Business of being a Woman by Ida Tarbell.djvu/228

 thrusts upon their indolent minds and into their restricted visions the actualities of life.

It should be said, however, that the recent agitation for the ballot has served as such an experience for a good many women, particularly in the East. Perhaps for the first time they have heard from the suffrage platform of the "little mother," the factory child, the girl living on $6 a week. They have done more than espouse the suffrage cause for the sake of the child; they have gone out to find where they could serve.

It is a new knowledge of that tide of life which breaks at her very gate that the childless and the free American woman needs, if she is to discharge her obligation to the uncared-for child. To force these facts upon her, to cry to her, "You are the woman,—you cannot escape the guilt of the woe and crime which