Looking back now, we can see that whatever thinkers and statesmen fifty years ago may have argued for as best meeting the immediate needs of the hour, the organized suffrage movement in all the most advanced countries should long ago have broadened their platform, and explicitly set before their own members and the public as their objective not merely “the vote,” but “the political, legal and social equality of women.”

We are not abler, not any broader-minded nor more intellectually daring than those pioneers, but we have what they had not, the test of results.  Let us briefly glance at what has been the course of events in those states and countries which were the earliest to obtain political freedom for their women.

In none of the four suffrage states first enfranchised in this country, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho and Colorado, in Australia or in New Zealand, did any large proportion of women ask for or desire their political freedom.  In that there is nothing strange or exceptional.  Those who see the need of any reform so clearly that they will work for it make up comparatively a small proportion of any nation or of any class.  Women are no exception.  Note Australia.  As the suffrage societies there, as elsewhere, had been organized for this one purpose, “to obtain the vote,” with the obtaining of the vote all reason for their continued existence ceased.  The organizations at once and inevitably went to pieces.  The vote, gained by the efforts of the few, was now in the hands of great masses of women, who had given little thought to the matter previously, who were absolutely unaware of the tremendous power of the new instrument placed in their hands.  A whole sex burst into citizenship, leaderless and with no common policy upon the essential needs of their sex.

Except in Victoria, where the state franchise lagged behind till 1909, the women of Australia have been enfranchised for over twelve years, and yet it is only recently that they are beginning to get together as sister women.  Those leaders who all along believed in continuous and organized work by women for the complete freeing of the sex from all artificial shackles and unequal burdens are now justified of their belief.  New young leaders are beginning to arise, and there are signs that the rank and file are beginning to march under these leaders towards far-off ends that are gradually being defined more clearly from the mists of these years.  But they have much ground to make up.  Only so lately as 1910 there were leading women in one of the large labor conferences who protested against women entering the legislature, using against that very simple and normal step in advance the very same moss-grown arguments as we hear used in this country against the conferring of the franchise itself.