Page:Theresa Serber Malkiel - Woman of Yesterday and To-day.djvu/17

 bench and competed for the same honors. You moved on together from school to High School, from there to College or work.

Here came an abrupt change. After being brought up according to the new conception, prepared for a vocation in life on the same lines with your brother, YOU are given to understand that YOU are, after all, only a woman, that a woman is a different creature, the weaker sex, in spite of the fact that you may excel your brother as an athlete. You have to follow in the narrow path of prescribed convention and code of morality, while he has the freedom of the world. Upon entering on your vocation in life you find yourself hampered by the impediments of sex, your chances of advance are curtailed. When you both became of age he was given a voice and vote in the government and administration of the land, while you were denied this right.

YOU are dissatisfied, it is only natural that you should be so. The world cannot expect you to bow to eighteenth century laws, after it brought YOU up according to twentieth century methods. YOUR wings have grown, YOU must be given a chance to use them. It is little short of a crime to shackle you to the customs of the past. The Nation needs your assistance fully as much as YOU need the right to exercise your influence on its government. YOU need the suffrage in order to use your vote to change conditions, to put an end to all bloody wars, to the enslavement of one being by another, to the system of profit and greed, to make life worth living.

YOU dare not close your eyes to the serious questions of life, pass your days as if in a trance. You are doing an injustice to your intellect by this inactivity. Whether you recognize it or not, YOU want to be independent, YOU are longing for a purse of your own. YOU insist upon having your