Page:The Woman Socialist - Snowden - 1907.djvu/68

 of the great cities of the civilised world there is a city of another kind—a city of "fallen women"—of outraged sisters; many of them driven into that life in order to keep soul and body together; others there because of one false step which society would not pardon. It is this knowledge which makes an honest woman sick and angry when she hears men prate of chivalry and tenderness and protection being the divine rights of women.

The men of to-day divide their women-kind into two classes. They keep the two classes rigidly apart, professedly because of their high ideal of womanhood; really, in order that the one may not confess to the other the wrongs they have suffered. There are the "good women," whom they marry, and who serve them in a hundred ways in return for their support; and there are the "bad women," upon whom they exercise their vilest passions, degrading, poisoning, killing thousands of the unhappy creatures every year, and still demanding a fresh army to supply the places of those they have wickedly destroyed.

Here is the greatest problem which will face the women when the franchise