Page:Theresa Serber Malkiel - Woman of Yesterday and To-day.djvu/15

 States, Wyoming, braved the prejudice of the world and gave its women full suffrage alike with men.

The decade 1890–1900 witnessed the enfranchisement of women in three more States: Colorado, Utah and Idaho.

The difficulties encountered by the early champions of the suffrage cause disappeared; people were accepting the event as a matter of course. This may, perhaps, be explained by the fact that during the decade in question women made another stride forward, their numbers in the bread-winning occupations increasing faster than the numbers of men. During that period the number of women workers rose to nearly 5,000,000, according to the census of 1900.

Suffrage met with great opposition only so long as it was not an absolute necessity; so long as women did not come in direct contact with the outside world. Political liberation was always the result of economic advance. The pressure from below brought to bear upon society by the ever growing host had its effect.

The new century was greeted by a woman as vastly different from the Great Grandmother of a century ago as the hand loom and spinning wheel differ from the steam engine and electric motor.

In one century woman passed through five hundred years of progress. She grew to full womanhood, struck out for herself and entered all but seven branches of the world's occupations, became the buyer of the world's retail goods, constituted three-fourths of all the retail sellers, four-fifths of its educators, everywhere bearing the world's burdens, sharing in its responsibilities. The