Occasion: A pamphlet originally, it was
subsequently placed in Woman Suffrage: History, Arguments, And Results. As described on
the title page, Woman Suffrage is "[a] collection of seven popular booklets covering
practically the entire field of suffrage claims and evidence. Designed especially for the
convenience of suffrage speakers and writers and for the use of debaters and
libraries."
Why Women Should Vote
FOR many generations it has been believed that woman's place is within the walls
of her own home, and it is indeed impossible to imagine the time when her duty there shall
be ended or to forecast any social change which shall release her from that paramount
obligation.
1
This paper is an attempt to show that many women to-day are failing to discharge
their duties to their own households properly simply because they do not perceive that as
society grows more complicated it, is necessary that woman shall extend her sense of
responsibility to many things outside of her own home if she would continue to preserve
the home in its entirety. One could illustrate in many ways. A woman's simplest duty, one
would say, is to keep her house clean and wholesome and to feed her children properly. Yet
if she lives in a tenement house, as so many of my neighbors do, she cannot fulfill these
simple obligations by her own efforts because she is utterly dependent upon the city
administration for the conditions which render decent living possible. Her basement will
not be dry, her stairways will not be fireproof, her house will not be provided with
sufficient windows to give light and air, nor will it be equipped with sanitary plumbing,
unless the Public Works Department sends inspectors who constantly insist that these
elementary decencies be provided. Women who live in the country sweep their own dooryards
and may either feed the refuse of the table to a flock of chickens or allow it innocently
to decay in the open air and sunshine. In a crowded city quarter, however, if the street
is not cleaned by the city authorities-no amount of private sweeping will keep the
tenement free from grime; if the garbage is not properly collected and destroyed a
tenement house mother may see her children sicken and die of diseases from which she alone
is powerless to shield them, although her tenderness and devotion are unbounded. She
cannot even secure untainted meat for her household, she cannot provide fresh fruit,
unless the meat has been inspected by city officials, and the decayed fruit, which is so
often placed upon sale in the tenement districts, has been destroyed in the interests of
public health. In short, if woman would keep on with her old business of caring for her
house and rearing her children she will have to have some conscience in regard to public
affairs lying quite outside of her immediate household. The individual conscience and
devotion are no longer effective.
2
Chicago one spring had a spreading contagion of scarlet fever just at the time that the
school nurses had been discontinued because business men had pronounced them too
expensive. If the women who sent their children to the schools had been sufficiently
public-spirited and had been provided with an implement through which to express that
public spirit they would have insisted that the schools be supplied with nurses in order
that their own children might be protected from contagion. In other words, if women would
effectively continue their old avocations they must take part in the slow upbuilding of
that code of legislation which is alone sufficient to protect the home from the dangers
incident to modern life. One might instance the many deaths of children from contagions
diseases the germs of which had been carried in tailored clothing. Country doctors testify
as to the outbreak of scarlet fever in remote neighborhoods each autumn, after the
children have begun to wear the winter overcoats and cloaks which have been sent from
infected city sweatshops. That their mothers charter was the unexpected enthusiasm and
help which came from large groups of foreign-born women. The Scandinavian women
represented in many Lutheran Church societies said quite simply that in the old country
they had had the municipal franchise upon the same basis as men for many years; all the
women living under the British Government, in England, Australia or Canada, pointed out
that Chicago women were asking now for what the British women had long ago. But the most
unexpected response came from the foreign colonies in which women had never heard such
problems discussed and took the prospect of the municipal ballot as a simple device -
which it is - to aid them in their daily struggle with adverse city conditions. The
Italian women said that the men engaged in railroad construction were away all summer and
did not know anything about their household difficulties. Some of them came to Hull-House
one day to talk over the possibility of a public wash-house. They do not like to wash in
their own tenements; they had never seen a washing-tub until they came to America, and
find it very difficult to use it in the restricted space of their little kitchens and to
hang the clothes within the house to dry. They say that in the Italian villages the women
all go to the streams together; in the town they go to the public wash-house; and washing,
instead of being lonely and disagreeable, is made pleasant by cheerful conversation. It is
asking a great deal of these women to change suddenly all their habits of living, and
their contention that the tenement house kitchen is too small for laundry work is well
taken. If women in Chicago knew the needs of the Italian colony they would realize that
any change bringing cleanliness and fresh air into the Italian household would be a very
sensible and hygienic measure. It is, perhaps, asking a great deal that the members of the
City Council should understand this, but surely a comprehension of the needs of these
women and efforts toward ameliorating their lot might be regarded as matters of municipal
obligation on the part of voting women.
3
The same thing is true of the Jewish women in their desire for covered markets which
have always been a municipal provision in Russia and Poland. The vegetables piled high
upon the wagons standing in the open markets of Chicago become covered with dust and soot.
It seems to these women a violation of the most rudimentary decencies and they sometimes
say quite simply: "If women had anything to say about it they would change all
that."
4
If women follow only the lines of their traditional activities, here are certain
primary duties which belong to even the most conservative women, and which no one woman or
group of women can adequately discharge unless they join the more general movements
looking toward social amelioration through legal enactment.
5
The first of these, of which this article has already treated, is woman's
responsibility for the members of her own household that they may be properly fed and
clothed and surrounded by hygienic conditions. The second is a responsibility for the
education of children: (a) that they may be provided with good books; (b) that they may be
kept free from vicious influences on the street; (c) that when working they may be
protected by adequate child-labor legislation.
6
(a) The duty of a woman toward the schools which her children attend is so
obvious that it is not necessary to dwell upon it. But even this simple obligation cannot
be effectively carried out without some form of social organization, as the mothers'
school clubs and mothers' congresses testify, and to which the most conservative women
belong because they feel the need of wider reading and discussion concerning the many
problems of childhood. It is, therefore, perhaps natural that the public should have been
more willing to accord a vote to women in school matters than in any other, and yet women
have never been members of a Board of Education in sufficient numbers to influence largely
actual school curiculi. If they had been, kindergartens, domestic science courses and
school playgrounds would be far more numerous than they are. More than one woman has been
convinced of the need of the ballot by the futility of her efforts in persuading a
business man that young children need nurture in something besides the three r's. Perhaps,
too, only women realize the influence which the school might exert upon the home if a
proper adaptation to actual needs were considered. An Italian girl who has had lessons in
cooking at the public school will help her mother to connect the entire family with
American food and household habits. That the mother has never baked bread in Italy - only
mixed it in her own house and then taken it out to the village oven - makes it all the
more necessary that her daughter should understand the complications of a cooking-stove.
The same thing is true of the girl who learns to sew in the public school, and more than
anything else, perhaps, of the girl who receives the first simple instruction in the care
of little children, that skillful care which every tenement house baby requires if he is
lo be pulled through his second summer. The only time, to my knowledge, that lessons in
the care of children were given in the public schools of Chicago was one summer when the
vacation schools were being managed by a volunteer body of women. The instruction was
eagerly received by the Italian girls, who had been "little mothers" to younger
children ever since they could remember.
7
As a result of this teaching I recall a young girl who carefully explained to her
Italian mother that the reason the babies in Italy were so healthy and the babies in
Chicago were so sickly was not, as her mother had always firmly insisted, because her
babies in Italy had goat's milk and her babies in America had cow's milk, but because the
milk in Italy was clean and the milk in Chicago was dirty. She said that when you milked
your own goat before the door you knew that the milk was clean, but when you bought milk
from the grocery store after it had been carried for many miles in the country, "you
couldn't tell whether or not it was fit for the baby to drink until the men from the City
Hall, who had watched it all the way, said that it was all right." She also informed
her mother that the "City Hall wanted to fix up the milk so that it couldn't make the
baby sick, but that they hadn't quite-enough votes for it yet." The Italian mother
believed what her child had been taught in the big school; it seemed to her quite as
natural that the city should be concerned in providing pure milk for her younger children
as that it should provide big schools and teachers for her older children. She reached
this naive conclusion because she had never heard those arguments which make it seem
reasonable that a woman should be given the school franchise, but no other.
8
(b) But women are also beginning to realize that children need attention outside of
school hours; that much of the petty vice in cities is merely the love of pleasure gone
wrong, the over-strained boy or girl seeking improper recreation and excitement. It is
obvious that a little study of the needs of children, a sympathetic understanding of the
conditions under which they go astray, might save hundreds of them. Women traditionally
have had an opportunity to observe the plays of children and the needs of youth, and yet
in Chicago, at least, they had done singularly little in this vexed problem of juvenile
delinquency until they helped to inaugurate the Juvenile Court movement a dozen years ago.
The Juvenile Court Committee, made up largely of women, paid the salaries Of the probation
officers connected with the court for the first six years of its existence, and after the
salaries were cared for by the county the same organization turned itself into a Juvenile
Protective League, and through a score of paid officers are doing valiant service in
minimizing some of the dangers of city life which boys and girls encounter.
9
This Protective League, however, was not formed until the women had bad a civic
training through their semi-official connection with the juvenile Court. This is, perhaps,
an illustration of our inability to see the duty "next to hand" until we have
become alert through our knowledge of conditions in connection with the larger duties. We
would all agree that social amelioration must come about through the efforts of many
people who are moved thereto by the compunction and stirring of the individual conscience,
but we are only beginning to understand that the individual conscience will respond to the
special challenge largely in proportion as the individual is able to see the social
conditions because he has felt responsible for their improvement. Because this body of
women assumed a public responsibility they have seen to it that every series of pictures
displayed in the five-cent theatre is subjected to a careful censorship before it is
produced, and those series suggesting obscenity and criminality have been practically
eliminated. The police department has performed this and many other duties to which it was
oblivious before, simply because these women have made it realize that it is necessary to
protect and purify those places of amusement which are crowded with young people every
night. This is but the negative side of the policy pursued by the public authorities in
the fifteen small parks of Chicago, each of which is provided with balls in which young
people may meet nightly for social gatherings and dances. The more extensively the modern
city endeavors on the one hand to control and on the other hand to provide recreational
facilities for its young people, the more necessary it is that women should assist in
their direction and extension. After all, a care for wholesome and innocent amusement is
what women have for many years assumed. When the reaction comes on the part of taxpayers,
women's votes may be necessary to keep the city to its beneficent obligations toward its
own young people.
10
(c) As the education of her children has been more and more transferred to the school,
so that even children four years old go to the kindergarten, the woman has been left in a
household of constantly-narrowing interests, not only because the children are away, but
also because one industry after another is slipping from the household into the factory.
Ever since steam power has been applied to the processes of weaving and spinning woman's
traditional work has been carried on largely outside of the home. The clothing and
household linen are not only spun and woven, but also usually sewed by machinery; the
preparation of many foods has also passed into the factory and necessarily a certain
number of women have been obliged to follow their work there, although it is doubtful, in
spite of the large number of factory girls, whether women now are doing as large a
proportion of the world's work as they used to do. Because many thousands of those working
in factories and shops are girls between the ages of fourteen and twenty-two, there is a
necessity that older women should be interested in the conditions of industry. The very
fact that these girls are not going to remain in industry permanently makes it more
important that some one should see to it that they shall not be incapacitated for their
future family life because they work for exhausting hours and under insanitary conditions.
11
If woman's sense of obligation had enlarged as the industrial conditions changed she
might naturally and almost imperceptibly have inaugurated movements for social
amelioration in the line of factory legislation and shop sanitation. That she has not done
so is doubtless due to the fact that her conscience is slow to recognize any obligation
outside of her own family circle, and because she was so absorbed in her own household
that she failed to see what the conditions outside actually were. It would be interesting
to know how far the consciousness that she had no vote and could not change matters
operated in this direction. After all, we see only those things to which our attention has
been drawn, we feel responsibility for those things which are brought to us as matters of
responsibility. If conscientious women were convinced that it was a civic duty to be
informed in regard to these grave industrial affairs, and then to express the conclusions
which they had reached by depositing a piece of paper in a ballot-box, one cannot imagine
that they would shirk simply because the action ran counter to old traditions.
12
To those of my readers who would admit that although woman has no right to shirk her
old obligations, that all of these measures could be secured more easily through her
influence upon the men of her family than through the direct use of the ballot, I should
like to tell a little story. I have a friend in Chicago who is the mother of four sons and
the grandmother of twelve grandsons who are voters. She is a woman of wealth, of secured
social position, of sterling character and clear intelligence, and may, therefore, quite
fairly be cited as a "woman of influence." Upon one of her recent birthdays,
when she was asked how she had kept so young, she promptly replied: "Because I have
always advocated at least one unpopular cause." It may have been in pursuance of this
policy that for many years she has been an ardent advocate of free silver, although her
manufacturing family are all Republicans! I happened to call at her house on the day that
Mr. McKinley was elected President against Mr. Bryan for the first time. I found my friend
much disturbed. She said somewhat bitterly that she had at last discovered what the
much-vaunted influence of woman was worth; that she had implored each one of her sons and
grandsons; had entered into endless arguments and moral appeals to induce one of them to
represent her convictions by voting for Mr. Bryan; that, although sincerely devoted to
her, each one had assured her that his convictions forced him to vote the Republican
ticket! She said that all she had been able to secure was the promise from one of the
grandsons, for whom she had an especial tenderness because he bore her husband's name,
that he would not vote at all. He could not vote for Bryan, but out of respect for her
feeling he would refrain from voting for McKinley. My friend said that for many years she
had suspected that women could influence men only in regard to those things in which men
were not deeply concerned, but when it came to persuading a man to a woman's view in
affairs of politics or business it was absolutely useless. I contended that a woman had no
right to persuade a man to vote against his own convictions; that I respected the men of
her family for following their own judgement regardless of the appeal which the honored
bead of the house had made to their chivalric devotion. To this she replied that she would
agree with that point of view when a woman had the same opportunity as a man to register
her convictions by vote. I believed then as I do now, that nothing is gained when
independence of judgment is assailed by "influence," sentimental or otherwise,
and that we test advancing civilization somewhat by our power to respect differences and
by our tolerance of another's honest conviction.
13
This is, perhaps, the attitude of many busy women who would be glad to use the ballot
to further public measures in which they are interested and for which they have been
working for years. It offends the taste of such a woman to be obliged to use indirect
"influence" when she is accustomed to well-bred, open action in other affairs,
and she very much resents the time spent in persuading a voter to take her point of view,
and possibly to give up his own, quite as honest and valuable as hers, although different
because resulting from a totally different experience. Public-spirited women who wish to
use the ballot, as I know them, do not wish to do the work of men nor to take over men's
affairs. They simply want an opportunity to do their own work and to take care of those
affairs which naturally and historically belong to women, but which are constantly being
overlooked and slighted in our political institutions. In a complex community like the
modern city all points of view need to be represented; the resultants of diverse
experiences need to be pooled if the community would make for sane and balanced progress.
If it would meet fairly each problem as it arises, whether it be connected with a freight
tunnel having to do largely with business men, or with the increasing death rate among
children under five years of age, a problem in which women are vitally concerned, or with
the question of more adequate streetcar transfers, in which both men and women might be
said to be equally interested, it must not ignore the judgments of its entire adult
population. To turn the administration of our civic affairs wholly over to men may mean
that the American city will continue to push forward in its commercial and industrial
development, and continue to lag behind in those things which make a City healthful and
beautiful. After all, woman's traditional function has been to make her dwelling-place
both clean and fair. Is that dreariness in city life, that lack of domesticity which the
humblest farm dwelling presents, due to a withdrawal of one of the naturally co-operating
forces? If women have in any sense been responsible for the gentler side of life which
softens and blurs some of its harsher conditions, may they not have a duty to perform in our American cities? In closing, may I recapitulate that if woman would fulfill her
traditional responsibility to her own children; if she would educate and protect from
danger factory children who must find their recreation on the street; if she would bring
the cultural forces to bear upon our materialistic civilization; and if she would do it
all with the dignity and directness fitting one who carries on her immemorial duties, then
she must bring herself to the use of the ballot - that latest implement for
self-government. May we not fairly say that American women need this implement in order to
preserve the home?
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