It is not strange that she with whom industry had its rise and upon whom all society rests should be the last to benefit by the forces of reorganization which are spiritually regenerating the race and elevating it to a level never before reached.  The very function of sex, whose exercise enters into her relation with her husband, has complicated what could otherwise have been a simple partnership.  The helplessness of her children and their utter dependence upon her, which should have furnished her with an additional claim for consideration, have only tied her more closely and have prevented her from obtaining that meed of justice from society which a less valuable servant had long ago won.  But in the sistership of womanhood, now for the first time admitted and hopefully accepted, fortunate and unfortunate clasp hands, and go forward to aid in making that future the whole world awaits today.

XII

THE WORKING WOMAN AND THE VOTE

Olive Schreiner, in “Woman and Labor,” lays it down as almost axiomatic that “the women of no race or class will ever rise in revolt or attempt to bring about a revolutionary readjustment of their relation to society, however intense their suffering, and however clear their perception of it, while the welfare and persistence of society requires their submission; that whenever there is a general attempt on the part of the women of any society to readjust their position in it, a close analysis will always show that the changed or changing conditions of society have made women’s acquiescence no longer necessary or desirable.”

If this be so, it can only be accepted as the application to women of a statement which could be made equally of all the down-trodden races and classes of humanity.  The one reason that makes me hesitate about accepting it as a complete explanation of the age-long submission of the oppressed is that we are all rather too ready to accept an explanation that explains away (shall I say?) or at least justifies the suffering of others.  The explanation fits so well.  Does it not fit too well?  Probably Olive Schreiner did not intend it to cover the whole ground.

In one detail, in any case, I take exception to it.  An oppressed class or race or sex may often suffer intensely and go on suffering and submitting, but not after they have gained a clear perception of the intensity of those sufferings, for then the first stage of rebellion has already begun.  Not one of us who has grown to middle age but can remember, looking back to her own girlhood, how meekly and as a matter of course women of all classes accepted every sort of suffering as part of the lot of woman, especially of the married woman, whether it was excessive child-bearing, pain in childbirth, physical overwork, or the mental suffering arising out of a penniless and dependent condition, with the consequent absolute right of the