Chapter 3
Women's Suffrage by Bertha Remba from The Birth of the New Party or Progressive Democracy Reading by Bologna Times Woman's Suffrage This is not the first time that a party with a national platform has placed in that platform a plank favoring woman's suffrage.
Both the socialists and prohibitionists have in repeated presidential campaigns included it in their program. But this is the first time when the adoption or rejection of such plank has had more than an academic interest, because for the first time the question comes before the people in the program of a party, not of doctrinaries and dreamers, but of men intent, to be sure,
upon principle, but also intent upon carrying, and capable of carrying, such principle to a practical victory. The inclusion of this plank in the platform of the National Progressive Party is significant, and it is gratifying to those of us who have for many years, in season and out of season, preached woman's suffrage.
But it is not surprising, and it is not unexpected. It is the logical and natural development of those impulses and those forces which have made the Progressive Party. That party is in existence as the result of the expression, overt and insistent at last, of a great and growing demand among the people of the United States that the standards of
political morality shall true up to those of private morality, that the conscience of the collective whole shall be of the same fiber as the conscience of the majority of the individuals who make up that whole, that the American citizen shall be at least as decent in his methods as a politician as he is in his home and in his private business. It is natural that in the platform of this party should appear a demand for woman's suffrage,
for to this awakened moral sense that demand directly appeals, and it appeals for various cogent reasons. In the first place, the history of the nation has made democracy with us a moral instinct rather than a political doctrine. It is beside the point to discuss the intellectual section of this instinct.
It is enough that the instinct is so deeply implanted in the national consciousness that even those persons and combinations of persons who most outrage the principles of democracy in their conduct have not the effrontery to deny it in their speech, that with what continental Europe calls our Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy, all of us talk respectively of the rights of the people no matter how we violate them.
This sense of democracy, part of our heritage from our revolutionary forefathers, while it has endured throughout our national life, has had moments of increased and moments of decreased vitality. The present is one of the moments of increased vitality. Everywhere is the demand that the democracy we profess shall become real, and that the
people shall, in fact, be allowed to rule. If the people, in fact, rule, woman's suffrage is inevitable. There can be no true democracy if one half of demos is paralyzed and helpless, and unless we stultify ourselves and give the lie to all our history, there can be no perfection of American political institutions upon the lines of American development and American
moral consciousness until all the American people are part of those political institutions, free to function in them directly and powerfully. Instead of slowly and inefficiently by indirect influence. Furthermore, the moral sense of the nation is increasingly conscious of the inherent abstract injustice of its political attitude towards its women.
That one half of the population, who must bear equally with the other half all the burdens its taxes, direct and indirect, who must equally conform to its edicts or pay the equal penalty for their violation, that this one half of the population can have no control or influence upon the creation or management of that government is inherently unjust. Surely, if the philosophers and economists have left us permission to believe in any
fundamental and natural rights, such rights must be violated by this discrimination. But the most vital, the most compelling, because the most concrete reason for the interest of the awakened American citizen in woman's suffrage lies in the large body of questions before him, which have ceased to be entirely or even mainly economic and which have now become moral questions, and in the presence before him for solution of an even larger
number of other questions, dealing directly with that personal and individual morality, which is the one field where from time immemorial woman's judgment and woman's instinct has been held to be of as sound and cogent equality as man's. Women have been often in the past thought mentally or physically incapable of this or that effort, mentally or physically unworthy of this or that privilege. They have never
been thought inferior when it came to the vision of duty or to its performance. Now the question of this vision of duty and its performance is increasingly becoming a factor in politics. The American people have realized the significance of that pestilence, which for lack of some more accurate name we call the white slave traffic and the moral and physical damnation wrought by it every year to thousands of men and women. They have
begun to realize the cost in human souls as well as bodies of letting little children work out their school time and their playtime in factories. They have even begun to realize what happens when women are compelled to work for such hours and under such conditions as make it impossible for them to maintain decent homes and rear normal children. They have to realize that when police officials take money for allowing gamblers to break the law
and kill or connive at the killing of possible informers to stop their tails, something else has happened besides a miscarriage of administrative efficiency. They have begun to realize when big business eliminates competition and reduces the cost of production that something else may have happened besides commendable business organization. They have begun to realize that great, simple and personal moral laws have been broken in these cases and that
communities as well as persons may be criminals. It is no reflection upon the morality of men nor upon their intelligence that they are coming to see the great moral political questions. The constructive value of much that they have already done and that they are now trying to do upon these lines is admitted. Neither is it claimed that women will solve these problems at once or that they could, unaided, do better at the solution than men have done.
Perhaps alone they might not even do as well. Least of all, is it any accusation that there has been on the part of men intentional injustice toward women or intentional blindness toward the moral questions and issues for which women have cared? We are willing to allow, as indeed we feel we must allow, due credit for all the devotion to the ideals of public morality and decency and efficiency for which great men have times without number splendidly sacrificed
themselves, for which many men have striven nobly and for which the average man has, with average constancy, done his average best. We admit, moreover, that women are politically inexperienced, that they have much to learn in the matter of playing the game, that they will doubtless make many blunders in the progress of their learning. We admit, if you like, that women have upon many occasions been very silly, very hysterical, and very impractical.
Also that they will probably be so again. We admit that utopia will not come at once when women vote. Perhaps utopia will never come anyway. But we do claim that the men facing these new old problems of public ethics as applied to concrete public facts and conditions cannot afford, if they wish to solve these problems intelligently, to ignore one half of the people who might assist them in their work, a part of the people just now deeply
stirred to great endeavor, who would bring a new and unfettered moral outlook to the electorate and a new and vital force to the public service. In the early days of the movement for women's suffrage, it was met by many arguments against its fitness, against its possibility, and against its inherent righteousness. The day of these arguments has gone by, and in their place we are met with an almost endless array of more or less practical questions,
half-veiled hostility, half real inquiry. We are asked whether the undesirable and criminal women will not make more use of the ballot in proportion to their numbers than the respectable women, whether the number of the ignorant foreign voters will not be increased out of proportion to the increase of the electorate. We are asked what has been the effect of woman suffrage where tried on various economic questions, such as equal pay for equal work.
We are asked whether, as a matter of fact, the woman voter will not sooner or later find herself, because of her inherent temperament, in the ranks of the conservatives and stand patters, and so will prove a drag on human progress and not a help to it. We are asked whether, as a matter of fact, nine-tenths of the women voters do not eventually find themselves in the ranks of the socialists. We are asked innumerable questions, some silly,
some wise, all of them answerable, we believe, to the satisfaction of any fair-minded citizen. But to answer them would require space and time, not now at my disposal. This recording is on the public domain.
