after the battle of Gettysburg, the negro is still fighting for the liberty which the bloodiest war in history could not confer on him. He must get it for himself.

Women have been fighting longer than that for freedom.

It is the glory of the women's labor movement that working women struck the first blow for women's liberty in this country.

For a hundred years, working women have made straight the way for all women to follow. It was the women in the mills and the shops and factories who made it possible sixty years ago for women to enter the schools and the professions.

Today, in the ultimate analysis, it is the women in the mills of commerce who gave women the ballot in the suffrage states. It is they who are paying the price. Their strikes are all hunger strikes; not a hunger for bread alone, but a hunger for life and the liberty of soul.

Not till these strikes end in victory, not till the last burning-factory martyr has rendered up her life as a sacrifice necessary to the destruction of the system which thrives on factory fires, can we count the price which working women have paid to make all women free.

"No people can long endure half slave and half free."

If the working women had consented to be slaves, there would have been no woman movement. More than that-without the woman's trade unions there could be no organized labor movement.

Theirs is the strategic point in the conflict in which the whole world is lining up. Around them will rage the fiercest fight; but the stars in their courses fight for them.

Woman's Right

By Olive Schreiner

(South African novelist. Contemporary. Author of "An African Farm," "Three Dreams in a Desert,' "Woman and Labor,''

etc.

The following is from "Woman and Labor.''*)

Thrown into strict logical form, our demand is this: We do not ask that the wheels of time should reverse themselves, or the stream of life flow backward. We do not ask that our ancient spinning wheels be again resuscitated and placed in our hands; we do not demand that our old grindstones and hoes be returned to us, or that man should again betake himself entirely to his province of war and the chase, leaving to us all domestic and civil labor. We do not even demand that society shall immediately so reconstruct itself that every woman may again be a child bearer (deep and overmastering as lies the hunger for motherhood in every virile woman's heart!); neither do we demand that the children we bear shall again be put exclusively into our hands to train. This, we know, cannot be. The past material conditions of life have gone forever; no will of man can recall them. But this is our demand: We demand that, in that strange new world that is arising alike upon the man and the woman, where nothing is as it was, and all

* Frederick A. Stokes Co.

things are assuming new shapes and relations, that in this new world we also shall have our share of honored and socially useful human toil, our full half of the labor of the Children of Woman. We demand nothing more than this, and will take nothing less. This is our WOMAN'S RIGHT!"

From "The Convert"

By Elizabeth Robins

(English contemporary. Actress, playwright, novelist. Author of "Way Stations," "The Convert," etc. The following is from a suffrage speech by one of her characters, Miss Claxton, in "The Convert."')

What, women don't want it? Are you worrying about a handful who think because they have been trained to like subservience everybody else ought to like subservience, too? . . . The women who are made to work over hours-they want the vote. To compel them to work over hours is illegal. But who troubles to see that laws are fairly interpreted for the unrepresented. . . .I know a factory where a notice went up yesterday to say that the women employed there will be required to work 12 hours a day for the next few weeks. . . . Much of woman's employment is absolutely unrestricted except that they may not be worked on Sunday. And while all this is going on, comfortable gentility sit in arm chairs and write alarmist articles on the falling birth-rate and the horrible amount of infant mortality. Here and there we find a man who realizes that the main concern of the State should be its children, and that you can't get worthy citizens when the

...

mothers are sickly and enslaved. The question of statecraft rightly considered always reaches back to the mother. That State is most prosperous that most considers her. No State that forgets her can survive. The future is rooted in the real being of women. If you rob the women, your children and your child's children pay. Men haven't realized it-your boasted logic has never yet reached so far. Of all the community the women who give the next generation birth, and who form its character, during the most impressionable years of its life of all the community, these mothers now, or mothers to be, ought to be set free from the monstrous burden that lies upon the shoulders of millions of women.

Rights, Privileges and Capacities

By Catherine Waugh McCulloch

(American contemporary. Former President Illinois Woman Suffrage Association, and practicing attorney. The following is from a pamphlet, "Illinois Laws Concerning Women," issued by the I. W. S. A.)

We read that no person shall be denied any political rights, privileges, or powers on account of religion. The word sex should have been added. People may change their religion, but never their sex. Rights, privileges and capacities ought never to depend on color of eyes or hair, cast of features, sex or any other accident for which a person is not to be blamed and which a person can never overcome. Any other qualification demanded of a voter may be acquired by one's own exertion, or the lapse of time. Property may be earned, minority out

.

grown, education secured, sanity regained, alienage removed, imprisonment outlived. But no industry, no age, no brilliancy, no morality, can change sex. Sex should be made less a disgrace instead of more of a disgrace than poverty, minority, alienage, insanity and criminality.

cialist.

The Working Woman's Awakening

By Theresa Malkiel

So

(In "The Progressive Woman." American contemporary. Speaker and writer on woman, child and labor problems.)

Unconsciously, with closed eyes, driven, perhaps, by the herd instinct that makes her follow the others, the working woman is rising at last from her long slumber. . . .

The solution of the problem of existence is pressing upon her more and more. Even the mantle of marriage does no longer save her from it. The patient sufferer cannot and will not see her children destitute and hungry. She wants some of the celestial promises to be realized here on earth. Hence this general unrest of womanhood the world

over.

Woman's Weak Dependency

By Gertrude Atherton

(American contemporary. Said by the London critics to be the most brilliant of American women novelists. The following is from "Julia France and Her Times.'')

No wonder so few women had left an impression on history. How could any brain, even if endowed