husband to the custody and control of the children of the union.  And in all nations and classes where this state of affairs still continues, the women have as yet no clear intellectual perception of the keenness and unfairness of their suffering.  They still try to console themselves with believing and allowing others to suppose that after all, things are not so bad; they might be worse.  These poor women actually hypnotize themselves into such a belief.

Have you not heard a mother urge a daughter or a friend to submit uncomplainingly to the most outrageous domestic tyranny, for is not hers after all the common fate of woman?

No clear perception there!

This argument in no way touches the exceptional woman or man, belonging to an oppressed class.  Such a woman, for instance, as the Kaffir woman spoken of by Olive Schreiner in this passage, is the rare exception.

But so far Olive Schreiner is undoubtedly right.  When the revolt at length takes place it is in answer to an immediate and pressing need of the whole community.  When the restrictions upon a class have become hurtful to the whole, when their removal is called for because society is in need of the energies thus set free, then takes place a more or less general uprising of the oppressed and restricted ones, apparently entirely spontaneous and voluntary, in reality having its origin partly at least in the claim which society is making upon the hitherto restricted class to take up fuller social responsibilities.

When observing then the modern change of attitude among women, towards life, we can therefore only conclude that such an immediate and pressing need is felt by society today, a claim neither to be ignored nor denied.

On this reasoning, then, and observing the eager demand of women everywhere for increased freedom and independence, we can only draw the conclusion that the whole world is dimly recognizing an immediate and pressing need for the higher services of women, services which they cannot render unless freed legally, politically and sexually.  It is this immense and universal social claim which has been responded to by the whole organized movement among women, industrial as well as educational and political.

In order to understand the relation of the organized suffrage movement to the question of improving women’s industrial and economic conditions and status, we have to consider the changed conditions of society under which we live, and we will have to recognize that the demand for the vote in different countries and at different times may or may not coincide with the same social content.  Psychologically, indeed, as well as practically, the vote connotes all sorts of different implications to the women of today, contemporaries though they are.

It was with an appreciation of these complexities that Professor W.I.  Thomas has pointed out that in his opinion suffragists often place too great stress upon primitive woman’s political power, and ignore the fact that women held an even more important relation to the occupational than to the political life of those early days, and that in her occupational value is to be traced the true source of her power and therefore her real influence in any age.