Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/420

A very general comment on woman's desire for a share in municipal and national government is that the servant question is yet unsolved; that, since she has not succeeded in governing her own domain, she has no rights outside of it. By going outside of her home as an employe herself she is learning to deal with this problem. It has been necessary for women to have thorough business training in other directions before they could discover how unbusinesslike were the methods pursued in the average household. The more women have gone out of their homes into new occupations, the more they have realized that the home is dependent upon the same principles as the business world. The business woman understands human nature, and therefore can deal successfully with the butcher, the baker and other tradespeople. She has a power of adapting herself to new conditions which is impossible to her sister accustomed only to the narrow treadmill of housework.

Specialization is the tendency of the age, and by wise attention to this in the household, as elsewhere, enough time should be saved to each community for the world's work to be done in fewer hours, and for men and women to have time besides to be homemakers and good citizens. Little by little one art and craft after another has been evolved into the dignity of a profession, while housework as a whole has been left to untrained workers. Needle work, cookery and cleaning are dependent on the fundamental principles of all the natural sciences. ....There is need also of trained women to lead public sentiment to recognize the dignity of manual labor.

The statesmanlike paper of Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker (Conn.) on the Duty of Woman Citizens of the United States in the Present Political Crisis, was read by Mrs. Mary Seymour Howell (N. Y.), who enforced its sentiments by earnest and stirring remarks of her own. Mrs. Mary Church Terrell, A. M. of Oberlin College, president of the National Association of Colored Women and a member of the Washington School Board, considered the Justice of Woman Suffrage:

....To assign reasons in this day and time why it is unjust to 'deprive one-half of the human race of rights and privileges freely accorded to the other, which is neither more deserving nor more capable of exercising them, seems like a reflection upon the intelligence of the audience. As a nation we professed long ago to have abandoned the principle that might makes right. Before the world we pose to-day as a government whose citizens have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And yet, in spite of these lofty professions and noble sentiments, the present policy of this government is to hold one-half of its citizens in legal subjection to the other, without being able to assign good and sufficient reasons for such a flagrant violation of the very principles upon which it was founded.