Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/26

 The point of this brief reference to the position of women throughout the world is this: that the women's movement shares with other great vital movements based on principle, the happiness and the dignity of being a world-wide movement. There is no corner of the globe into which it has not penetrated. There is no land in existence in which there are not rebellious, aspiring women—rebelling against convention and prejudice, and aspiring towards the possibility of developing all their God-given capacities. A defeat in one part of the world makes itself sadly felt in every other land; a victory for the woman's cause, such as the great woman suffrage victories in the United States in 1912, thrills through the universe and stimulates to renewed effort all those struggling against selfishness and prejudice in its thousand hateful, ugly forms.

There is this thought to comfort and console the over-anxious citizen who fears the coming of the free woman: that no great world-tragedy has followed on the granting of a partial freedom to women. Those who fight against the hosts to-day are among the loudest in praising the women for the use they have made of opportunities formerly denied to them. Those who oppose the granting of the vote to women speak with warm approval of the scholastic accomplishments