The next aim of the leaders in the woman movement of the last century had been to accord to woman equality before the law.  This affecting primarily and chiefly woman in her sex relations, had its permanent results in reference to the legal status of the married woman and the mother, bearing at the same time secondarily upon the safety and welfare of the child; hence in the different states a long series of married women’s property acts, equal guardianship acts, modifications of the gross inequalities of the divorce law, and the steady raising of the age of protection for girls.

At least that was the position ten years ago.  But today the tide has turned.  Partly is this due to the growth of industrial organization among women, a development that has followed the ever-increasing need of mutual protection.  Trade unionism has helped to train the working-woman to listen to the suffrage gospel, though therein she has often been slower than the workingman, her better educated brother.  On the other hand a great many influences have combined to wake up the suffragist of our day to the true meaning and value of what she was asking.  Especially has the work of the National Women’s Trade Union League and the campaign of publicity it has conducted on behalf of the working-woman, both within and without its membership, focused attention upon the woman in industry as a national responsibility.  Then again the tremendous strikes in which such large numbers of women and girls have been involved were an education to others than the strikers—­to none more than to the suffrage workers who cooeperated with the ill-used girl strikers in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago.

An influence of even more universal appeal, if of less personal intensity, has been the suffrage movement in Great Britain.  That movement has educated the public of this country, as they never would have been educated by any movement confined to this country alone.  Inside the ranks of enrolled suffragists it has been an inspiration, showering upon their cause a new baptism of mingled tears and rejoicing.  In calmer mood we have learned from our British sisters much regarding policies adapted to modern situations, and they have assuredly shown us all sorts of new and original methods of organization and education.  The immense and nation-wide publicity given by the press of the United States to the more striking and sensational aspects of the British movement and all the subsequent talk and writing in other quarters has roused to sex-consciousness thousands of American women of all classes who had not been previously interested in the movement for obtaining full citizenship for themselves and their daughters.  These women also aroused, and men, too, have furnished the huge audiences which have everywhere greeted such speakers as Mrs. Pankhurst and Mrs. Philip Snowden, when in person they have presented the mighty story of the transatlantic struggle.  There is no difficulty nowadays in gathering suffrage audiences anywhere, for the man and the woman walking along the street supply them to the open-air speaker in the large city and the little country town as one by one city and town take up the new methods.