While agreeing with Professor Thomas that some suffrage arguments do on the surface appear inconsistent with historical facts, I believe the inconsistency to be more formal than real.

As the centuries pass a larger and still larger proportion of human affairs passes away from individual management and comes under social and community control.  As this process goes on, more and more does the individual, whether man or woman, need the power to control socially the conditions that affect his or her individual welfare.  In our day political power rightly used, gives a socialized control of social conditions, and for the individual it is embodied in and is expressed by the vote.

To go back only one hundred years.  The great bulk of men and women were industrially much more nearly on a level than they are today.  A poor level, I grant you, for with the exception of the privileged classes, few and small were the political powers and therefore the social control of even men.  But every extension of political power as granted to class after class of men has, as far as women are concerned, had the fatal effect of increasing the political inequality between men and women, thus placing women, though not apparently, yet relatively and actually upon a lower level.

Again, the status of woman has been crushingly affected by the contemporaneous and parallel change which has passed over her special occupations; so that the conditions under which she works today are decidedly less than ever before by purely personal relationships and more by such impersonal factors as the trade supply of labor, and interstate and international competition.  This change has affected woman in an immeasurably greater degree than man.  The conditions of industrial life are in our day in some degree controllable by political power so that at this point woman again finds herself civilly and industrially at greater disadvantage than when her status in all these respects depended principally upon her individual capacity to handle efficiently problems arising within an area limited by purely personal relationships.  To alter so radically the conditions of daily life and industry, and not merely to leave its control in the hands of the old body of voters, but to give over into the hands of an enlarged and fresh body of voters, and these voters inevitably the men of her own class who are her industrial competitors, that degree of control represented by the vote and to refuse it to women is to place women (though not apparently, yet actually and relatively) upon a distinctly lowered level.

So that what suffragists are asking for is in reality not so much a novel power, as it is liberty to possess and use the same new instrument of social control as has been already accorded to men.  Without that instrument it is no mere case of her standing still.  She is in very truth retrogressing, as far as effective control over the conditions under which she lives her life, whether inside the home or outside of it.  In this instinctive desire not to lose ground, to keep up both with altered social claims of society upon women and with the improved political equipment of their brothers, is to be found the economic crux of women’s demand for the vote in every country and in every succeeding decade.