Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/69

 is full of just such illuminating facts as these.

The legal status of Russian women is not so low as in other Slavonic countries. They may own their property and keep for themselves their own earnings. Here and there the wife may vote, in small communities, if the husband is dead. In large cities the qualified woman votes by proxy.

The woman suffrage movement has a precarious existence, but it is there, and is doing its work in educating the women to a sense of their rights and needs. The chief difficulty which dwellers in a huge empire have to face is the infinite variety of people, language, custom, tradition and point of view, which have to be sufficiently blended to make a working whole. The vast distances that have to be travelled; the superstition that has to be overcome; the strange, blind worship of authority by the ignorant peasant; the unequal development in citizens of the same land; the censorship of the press and the difficulties of propaganda; the suspicion of the Government and the tyranny of the official—all these things, added to the native, instinctive idea, the product of generations of domination, of the inferiority of women, make the solution of the woman's question in Russia one of the gravest complication. But the spirit of freedom knows nothing of the boundaries which