Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/589

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persons convicted of crime, compulsory factory inspection, the making of fathers and mothers joint heirs of deceased children, a reform in the registration laws and passing of the referendum, initiative and recall, state traveling libraries and the local option laws, thus enabling many towns and counties to go dry. Instead of thinking less of their homes and children, women who vote consider them more, and work harder for them. Let us turn again to the question of education. The per capita for school expenditure in Massachusetts is $4.96; Pennsylvania, $3-52; Virginia, $1.07; North Carolina, sixty-six cents; Georgia, ninety-seven cents; Colorado, $5.08. Equal suffrage wherever tried has given the best laws for the protection and rescuing of young girls, boys and children. It has improved the legal condition of women, giving them just control over their property, and mothers equal rights over their children (in many states the mother is not regarded as the parent of the child, which can be willed away from her even before it is born.) The ballot has benefited the working women, cutting down their hours of hard, brutal labor and providing more sanitary surroundings in their places of employment. Women have wonderfully improved political life, which has become higher and cleaner because they vote. Women support reforms and candidates, and public officers are looking more carefully to their record and moral standing. The fate of the mayor and chief of police of Seattle is a fine instance of the way women will vote against moral and official corruption. We need not expect the millennium to come because of equal suffrage, but through it already changes for the better have been made in legislation and in public ideals, and the same subtle feminine influence that is felt in the home makes the home exert itself in the political life, rendering moral considerations superior to mere partisanship. 'The women of Denver have elected me, and made possible the juvenile court,’ said Judge Lindsay, and we know that Democrats and Republicans united in his cause—the cause of chil-