Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/77

 and established a Republic, and, as far as women are concerned, one of the interesting by-products of the Revolution has been their receipt of a limited suffrage. Now all women of twenty-five years of age, who have received a secondary school education, may vote for political candidates. The education qualification was the thought of astute men, for so few women in Portugal possess it that the number enfranchised is too small to constitute a serious menace to the interests of any party. This was probably their greatest fear, as it is undoubtedly the greatest obstacle to the enfranchisement of women in this country.

A somewhat briefer statement of the condition of women in the other civilised countries of the world must be made in order that time and space may be devoted to the movement in Great Britain, which is, for various reasons, the present storm-centre of the world's feminist movement. It may be said broadly of all those lands which come under the denomination Germanic, that the position of women is better and happier than in those countries already discussed. A higher idea of the value of the individual appears to possess the peoples of new countries like the United States of America and the British Colonies; or, perhaps, it would be more correct to say that the blood in the veins of the pioneers of these new lands was the blood of the free men and