send us back snowy linen, transparent muslins, and faultless flutings, but will perform for us also every species of dyeing and cleansing; while the co-operative sewing-rooms will add to themselves division after division of the feminine and household belongings, until finally all that is necessary to the complete furnishing and adorning of ordinary humanity and its home will be found within one ample circumference. When the profits begin to come in, the prudent housekeepers will first invest in farms and gardens, that our palace may be fitly set amid a smiling nature of its own; but as new means accumulate, new energies are roused, so that easily and swiftly they go on to lay the solid beams of its chambers, and to build high its goodly walls. Its centre will be a hall, lighted from above by heaven, and this noblest of all its apartments will be devoted to legislation.
"Feminine legislation?" Do we hear a laugh from our masculine law-givers assembled in their huge castle over the way?
Yes, gentlemen, the same. For co-operative housekeeping will, I think, settle the vexed question of women's voting.
Womanhood Suffrage.
Suppose that manhood suffrage, precisely as men now exercise it, were to be extended to women. As long as we agreed with the majority of men, all would go well. Not being able to fight ourselves, however, and too poor to bring mercenary armies into the field, what should we do in case of any irreconcilable difference of opinion or interest between men and women voters? Simply what we do now in our own families when we disagree with a determined husband or father,—give up! I suppose an extreme case that would probably never happen; but it is not impossible, and it lays bare the fundamental distinction which must exist between manhood and womanhood suffrage, though the leaders of the woman's rights movement seem unable to see it. The one will express Power, the other Influence.
