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THE CASE FOR WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE

wide throughout the country? But in all these questions women are personally and intimately concerned. They are servants, and the immediate employers of servants; they live to be old in greater numbers than men; they suffer in their own persons, and vicariously in those of their children, from lack of employment, whether they be widows thrown into the overcrowded market of women's labour, or wives of men who can find no work. These problems of social reconstruction are not alien from women's lives, but closely and immediately connected therewith. Therefore many women feel—sometimes clearly and with comprehension, but more often half-unconsciously—that now, not after some indefinite time of waiting, must political rights be granted to them, a feeling expressed in that cry of the Women's Social and Political Union: "Rise up, women, now." A thoughtful person can indeed see that the economic disabilities of women, due in the past to a considerable extent to custom and not solely to law, may, if this reconstructive legislation be undertaken before women receive their enfranchisement, put them at fresh disadvantages. At present, for instance, attempts to find work for unemployed women are made with far less energy than in the case of men. And the problems dealing with women's place in the industrial world that are bound to present themselves in the future are of such complexity that women should insist on receiving the right to vote, and on being in a position to influence Parliament directly before other legislation on their behalf is undertaken. Otherwise, in the tangle of conflicting interests, their