Page:The case for women's suffrage.djvu/70

 BY ROSALIND NASH

T is only of late that the voice of married working women has been heard in the suffrage movement. The older school of suffragists did not ask for the enfranchisement of married women. Some of the party, indeed, cared little about it; and even now, many men who would willingly allow single women to vote abhor the notion that their own wives could possibly have independent political opinions which ought to be expressed at the poll. The pioneers appealed to a thoroughly established constitutional principle, that representation should go with taxation, but did not carry this principle to its full logical length. Married women, to be sure, seem in effect to pay taxes as well as single, and poor as well as rich. But then it has long been doubtful whether a married woman is altogether a person; and we always think of a taxpayer as a dignified householder on whom the collector calls, and not as a mere drinker of cheap tea or eater of sultana pudding, who pays his or her too heavy share of the house tax in the rent of a single room.

The trade unionists of the north of England were 66