Jasper County Democrat, Volume 7, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 December 1904 — THE POSITION OF AMERICAN WOMEN. [ARTICLE]

THE POSITION OF AMERICAN WOMEN.

By Dr. Mary Putman Jacobi: All women —no matter how well born, how well educated, how intelligent, how rich, how serviceable to the State —are the political inferiors of all men, no matter how base born, how poverty stricken, how ignorant, how vicious, how brutal. The pauper in the almshouse may vote; the lady who devotes herself to getting that almshouse made habitable may not. The tramp who begs cold victuals in the kitchen may vote; the heiress who feeds him and endows a university may not. Communities are agitated and Legislatures convulsed to devise means to secure the right of suffrage to the illiterate voter. And the writers, journalists, physicians, teachers, the wives and daughters, and companions of the best educated men in the State are left in silence, blotted out, swamped, obliterated, behind this cloud of often besotted ignorance. To-day the immigrants pouring in through the open gates of our seaport towns, the Indian when settled in severalty, the negro hardly emancipated from the degradation of 200 years of slavery, may all share in the sovereignty of the State. The white woman —the American woman —the woman in whose veins runs the blood of those heroic colonists who founded our country, of those women who helped to sustain the courage of their husbands in the Revolution; the woman who may have given the flower of her youth and health in the service of our Civil War, this woman is excluded. To-day women constitute the only class of sane people excluded from the franchise, the only class deprived of political representation, except the tribal Indians and the Chinese.