against each other. So far, therefore, from women's wishing for manhood suffrage as an enlargement from their present limitations, they ought rather to scorn it as something too narrow for their sympathies and aspirations, as, in fact, directly imprisoning them in all the prejudices, hates, mistakes, selfishness, greed, and lies of these grand but detestable masculine nationalities that have filled the world with woe and slaughter, ruin and barbarism, since the day that Cain first murdered his brother Abel. Which of them can we respect or trust sufficiently to wish to become identified with it, since not one has the fear of God before its eyes or the love of mankind in its heart? Nay, rather let all women meet on common ground as women, and at first in small assemblies, and afterward in august Feminine International Parliaments, take counsel and devise action for the happiness and virtue of the whole sex, and through this of humanity. This is the true womanhood suffrage; and the only assignable reason why it has not long ago been exercised by women is, that, isolated from each other as we have always been, our common interests have not been sufficiently important or apparent to us to make us combine for their guardianship.
When, however, co-operative housekeeping throws a large part, if not eventually the whole, of the retail trade into the hands of women, they will have many moneyed transactions among themselves, and extensive business relations among men, that will need the force of existing laws, and perhaps the enactment of new ones for their protection. Women will very soon then recognize the necessity for mutual consultation and unity of action on these matters at least. But these deliberations and decisions, since they are about laws, will partake of the nature of legislation, and the body of women to whom, as representing the rest, such deliberation and decision is intrusted, will constitute, so far as women are concerned, a feminine legislature. Then the organizing of a legislative department, as a step which will naturally follow upon the co-operative kitchens and clothing-houses, is not so laughable as at first appeared.
