Page:The case for women's suffrage.djvu/109

This page has been validated.
THE CIVIC RIGHTS OF THE MARRIED WOMAN
105

or intellectually, but they do not want them to be worth much. Only then one remembers man's reverence for womanhood and his ideal of a noble, altruistic, ministering angel!

Men must admit they are almost bafflingly inconsistent. They have a habit nowadays of decrying education and the consequently intellectual woman as the cause of racial suicide. Can men not see that irresponsibility in all the nation's affairs must have a bad effect; and that now woman's gain of freedom gives her a wider scope for amusement and a consequent greater love of change and excitement, her moral development must be encouraged by a fair share of moral and social responsibilities.

When her children grow up, go to school, marry, a woman's life is apt to become empty. Better surely that she seeks to help in the bettering of the conditions of society, than to waste her days in party-giving and frittering of her time in vapid "calls” or purposeless shopping.

The modern woman has lost her sense of duty, so they say; rather has she lost the sense of blind obedience to the will of man. In the struggle to throw off the yoke, she only thought of being free. Now that she is comparatively free, her inherent sense of duty is welling up within her. So also is her sense of pity, of compassion and self-sacrifice. Wives and mothers want to help the State in its growth, in its happiness, in the opportunities it gives its citizens for their development.

Why does man seek to check the help of which the nation stands in such sore need?