PREPARING WOMEN HELEN RING ROBINSON ileto Jiorfe fetate College of Agriculture at Cornell ttnttjera'tp 3tbaca, JJ. $. Hforarp Cornell University Library JK 1770.R6 Preparng women for citizenship 3 1924 014 107 399 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014107399 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS ATLANTA ■ SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY - CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP BY HELEN RING ROBINSON jfteto ^orfe THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1918 All rights reserved Copyright, 1918, br The Pictorial Review Compakt COPYRIGHT, 1918 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1918. TO THE MEMORY OP B. J. R. NOTE Four chapters in this book and a few pas- sages in other chapters appeared originally in The Pictorial Review. TABLE OF CONTENTS Getting in Step for the Ballot Box Her Country Bounded by a Wedding Ring Women as Wholesale Housekeepers The State — It Is We . Choosing Her Party Women as Office Holders . Women and the Three D's . A National Program for Women Women and the Democratic Idea "Safe in the Wide, Wide World" Men and Women ..... .., PAGE 1 11 20 29 40 51 63 72 86 100 110 121 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP CHAPTER I WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? The Great War is doing more to teach women citizenship and give them a national outlook than ten thousand writers could ac- complish with typewriters eternally unleashed. I have watched women's minds, so sealed it seemed only can-openers could unclose them, opening everywhere under that War's impact. The same thing is true of men's minds. Women who never thought before, since thinking is very hard work, are now really thinking. Men are thinking, too. Moreover, many Americans who only thought by ma- chinery four years ago are now using hand- made thoughts. Women are acquiring less of a mere sex and 2 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP more of a human attitude toward public af- fairs. Women whose chief concern once was with kalsomining their faces and wearing eyebrows in the latest fashion are now canteeners in France, their fingers growing stubby with hard work. Everywhere American women are showing, no matter how personal their outlook used to be, that their hearts are big enough to hold their country. The only question is, are their minds stable enough to weigh and consider the ideals for to-morrow that are shaping amid the tumult and the push of circumstances in our world to- day? It is by such weighing and considering, not by primers of citizenship and ballot-box schools, though the primers and schools serve their purpose, that women can best prepare themselves for the duties of their citizenship. Once the new voter was advised to fit herself for citizenship by an earnest study of the Con- stitution. But what now is the Constitution among friends who are fighting with bared WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? 3 souls for the common rights of mankind? Once we used to hear that the test of good citizenship was independence ; and some women took that lesson so to heart that they even split their vote for Presidential electors. But now we are realizing there is no such thing as in- dependence — that only through interdepend- ence comes strength. What does all this mean for the two million women, more or less, who, on the fifth of next November, 1918, will cast their first vote for United States Senators and Congressmen in what may be the most solemn and momentous election of our history? An election that will ask, not "Is he a Republican? Is she a Demo- crat?" but, "Where do we go from here?" It means that the vote itself will be quite overshadowed by the idea back of the vote. If the voting woman is inspired by the right idea, her vote is a cheer for to-morrow, what- ever that morrow may hold. If she is not so inspired, that vote is merely a plugged nickel dropped into the slot-machine of politics. It is plain the world will need more than a coat of fresh paint after the War is over. 4 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP Every one is saying, "Nothing will be the same after the War," saying it often with a glibness that serves as a counterfeit for thought. (Glibness, to-day, is so unseemly that men who persist in it should be con- scripted to serve as deckhands on submarines.) There is no doubt many things will be dif- ferent. The question is, how will they be dif- ferent? It should be a tremendous thought to women, trained as they have been for un- counted generations toward purely private ends and away from any understanding of financial and political processes, that they are assured of a hand in the remaking of a world. Indeed it is not impossible that the very fact their sense of duty has for ages been focused on the individual, on the family, may have pre- pared them for a special part in the re-making. May Sinclair, in her "Tree of Heaven," helps me to an illustration. As she tells the story, it is Springtime of the fateful year, 1914, when the Irish situation has grown very tense. Mr. Carson is drilling his Ulstermen, and the German Kaiser — WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? 5 though that is beside the mark — is watching af- fairs across seas that look the color of blood. Frances, the mother of the family drinking its tea under the soft English shade of a "tree of Heaven," watches her eldest son, Michael, and is worried, not over the Irish situation but over the fact that he is taking the situation so se- riously. "I wish that Carson man would mind his own business!" she exclaims. "This excite- ment is very bad for Michael." And the critic looks up from the page to remark, "How psychological!" Or perhaps he mutters, "Now isn't that just like a woman!" Just like a woman — and highly absurd — to look upon a political movement only as it af- fects the individual happiness of her family. Yet if we broaden somewhat the meaning of the word "family," isn't that really the true way of looking at it? Here is the place for doing a little thinking. What should political achievements be measured by if not by terms of human well- being? What is government for except to promote the security and education and hap- 6 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP piness of the units that compose it — of all the Michaels and Michaelinas? American men have been saying since ever our Government was founded that the family is the unit of the State. If women prove themselves equal to their opening opportuni- ties we may eventually run the nation on that basis. That will mean putting the family in the center of politics, rather than the boss or the political office or the dollar mark. It is bad for the family, bad for the Mi- chaels and Michaelinas, that the feeding of that family should be the least socialized of all our American industries ; that grain eleva- tors and cold-storage plants should so often be what good deacons might call "gambling dens." And the Government, with its present efforts to put food profiteers, food gamblers out of business, shows it recognizes this fact — in war time. The housewife who is a good citizen should do her utmost to force that rec- ognition on her Government in peace time, also, by making the retail price of household commodities a practical political question. WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? 7 It is bad for the family, it is very bad for the Michaels and Michaelinas that some min- imum measure of health and leisure and em- ployment and subsistence should fail them be- cause we have never brought about a proper organization of industry, because we never as- sociated patriotism with industrial affairs un- til a monstrous war phrased that association for us. The woman who is a good citizen, a good American, should do her part, after the War, in seeing that patriotism and industry, patriot- ism and production, patriotism and consump- tion, are always so connected in the new Amer- ica. She should, in other words, do her part in organizing politics into the service of the real interests of the family and so the real in- terests of the nation — health and education and sufficient leisure and security and opportunity for all the children of all the people. That is not Socialism. That is not paternal- ism. That is democracy. If we have not gen- erally recognized the fact, it is because to most of us, men and women alike, democracy has been merely a phrase, lolling around on clouds 8 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP of language. War is making it a principle of life. But as I write these words about democracy, a startling thought comes to me. In order to remake our world along the lines I have been indicating, many of us will have to remake our- selves. After we women have organized to remake ourselves and have succeeded in the undertak- ing, the task of remaking the world will be comparatively easy! Who are we — we women — that we should talk about enlarging the frontiers of democ- racy with our votes while we encourage that puddle of patter, that clutter of snobbery, the "society column" of the daily press? Who are we that we should boast of the salary laws we mean to enact after the war, so the woman in industry may get what she is worth, so long as we exalt, so long as we tolerate, the idle woman, the parasite woman, who in her home is not worth what she gets? Who are we that we should complain about people sneezing when we go round scattering snuff? WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? 9 Fortunately, we are not all of that sort. Fortunately there is the Other Woman who does not cheat at sex. It is for this Other Woman, freed at once from sex-servility and sex-glorification, that I have written this book. She will understand that if I say very lit- tle about the ballot it is because I have learned the vote is merely a condition for getting other things that are more fundamental. If I barely touch upon election machinery, it is because I wish to emphasize the fact that it is what we do between elections that really counts. If I give much space to social ideals and little to political movements it is because every one but the man who eats his political food with a knife realizes that to-day a political movement means nothing unless it is inter- woven with a social idea. If I do not choose to discuss present party policies for the edification of the new voter, it is because, frankly, I do not know what they are. I think, however, I may understand those policies later, when the party re-alignment 10 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP that is about due takes place. And the party I shall then advise women voters to join will have as the first plank in its platform, so well understood that it need not be written, "Thou shalt not take the name of democracy in vain." CHAPTER II GETTING IN STEP FOR THE BALLOT BOX No American, not even one left over from yesterday, can any longer find it stimulating to argue that women should — or should not — vote. The only practical question is — what will women do with the vote, now so many of them have it? A living question for these molten hours. With two million women voting for the first time in New York; with five million other American women who have attained full or partial enfranchisement ; and with the suffrage door ajar to millions on millions of other women in Massachusetts and Georgia, in Minnesota and Florida. Through that open- ing door we may hear those other women get- ting in step for the ballot box. And be as- sured the draft from that opening door is striking the politicians full in their faces. ii 12 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP Here is the place for nudging at a fact or two. First — Though woman, as well as God, was left out of the Constitution of the United States, the Fourteenth Amendment gives her, by indirection, the status of an Associate Citi- zen: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the States where they reside." Giving women the vote transfers them from the Associate to the Active Citizenship list. Second — For the past severity years dis- franchised American women have everywhere been preparing themselves for full citizenship. They began preparing themselves when they took active part in the club movement — that great widener of the world for women. What matter if those early groups of neighborhood women were organized merely to study "Much Ado about Nothing"? At least they meant cooperation for a definite purpose. They meant for women the beginning of thinking together and working together. A newly en- franchised woman with club training knows GETTING IN STEP 13 better than to clasp her hard-won ballot to her bosom and gloat over it in a rocking-chair. She begins to look about for her team. Practice in team-work is practice in citizen- ship. Women began training themselves inten- sively for citizenship when they enlisted for active service in the suffrage cause. Here was training not only in thinking together and feel- ing together but in fighting together. The same thing was true with the valiant forces of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Practice in fighting for something bigger than ourselves is practice in citizenship. But, granting these things, the fact remains that many newly enfranchised women — as well as some to whom the vote is no novelty — have a great deal to learn about the significance of citizenship and the new duties and opportuni- ties opening for them with the opening of the poll-books to women. "Do you mean that the average woman is more unprepared for citizenship than the aver- age man who votes for the first time?" I seem to hear a gallant young suffrage captain ask- 14 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP ing me across the distance in a voice with a "New England accent" — and a slight edge. My answer is "Yes!" Now I do not for a moment mean — though you will find droll men who really seem to think so — that political understanding is a bio- logical inheritance in the male line. All I am pointing at is the undoubted fact that, while men in America have never been given the universal training for citizenship that is far more necessary in a Republic than any universal military training, women have actu- ally been trained away from a sense of respon- sibility for civic and state and national affairs. For generations they were trained to think it "womanly" to be ignorant of political needs and processes — as it was "womanly" to faint — and a little drilling goes a long way when it is merely drilling in ignorance or indiffer- ence or in swooning all over a landscape. A high stone wall was built between women and political endeavor — a very expensive stone wall which has added materially to the high cost of un preparedness. Some fifty years ago a few men and women GETTING IN STEP 15 began to make chinks in the wall, sometimes with bleeding fingers. Then the chinks were made cracks and the cracks were widened to gaps, till now the wall is crumbling away everywhere with its own weight. As soon as we get round to it we shall pull it down en- tirely and clear up the rubbish. In the mean- time, even where those bungling old stones and mortar still hold together — there are plenty of ladde] And now to return to the subject of train- ing for citizenship the woman who has gone through the gap in the wall — or is watching affairs from the top of the ladder. Her course in good citizenship includes two subjects, a "major" and a "minor." The first of these subjects should drill her in the fundamental fact that citizenship, whether for men or for women, is not a pe- riodic spasm at election time, but a daily chore, and that ignorance of its duties can only be cured by study and reflection and experience. It should train her in the spirit and quality of our American democracy and in the mean- 16 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP ing of the great issues of the past that now are reshaping themselves amid the welter of war. The second or "minor" subject deals with what may be called the mechanics of govern- ment, the technique of voting, the ways of doing things politically. Women, at least in cities, will have little difficulty in securing the necessary instruction in such political details, in what I have called the mechanics of government. Male politicians everywhere are offering themselves as teachers and, indeed, are show- ing a willingness to supervise the political in- struction and the political activities of women that is most engaging and not at all surprising, since to direct the energies of women in other matters has been an immemorial male perqui- site. Now I am not deprecating the obligingness of male politicians and I have freely granted that the emergent woman voter needs training in the technique of citizenship. It is good that the New York State Woman Suffrage Party, after its 1917 triumph, main- tained its organization in every county in the GETTING IN STEP 17 State for the purpose of teaching the newly enfranchised New York women how to attain an efficient attitude toward their community, their city and the nation. It is good that the Antis and the ladies who used to say, "I haven't made up my mind on the subject Of suffrage, thank you," have joined classes in "Voting Essentials"; that Women's Clubs and "New Voters' Forums" are studying about "Registration" and the "Primary Law" and the "Departments of City Government." It is rather unfortunate, however, that so many good citizens, who are earnestly striving to give women the knowledge to meet the du- ties of the new day, seem at present more con- cerned with ways of doing things than with the things to be done. There is some danger that the new voter may thus confuse the "minor" with the "major" of her course in citizenship. It is unfortunate but it is not strange. For our inheritance of political methods has al- ways been through the male line — and the male method, since the very beginning of our polit- 18 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP ical history, has been to put the stress on po- litical machinery rather than on public needs. Always — except on a few naming occasions when the soul of the nation has swept like a flood over petty barriers of ways and means. That is why, when a department of our gov- ernment creaks and squeaks, We try to mend matters by folding our ballots on the bias in- stead of straight. That is why, if we fail in our obligations as citizens, we build a new city charter. That is the reason our democracy has at times appeared merely a sort of divine mud- dleheadedness. President after president has recognized the inefficiencies of the departments in Washing- ton, and infants in arms have been on the way to recognize the inefficiencies of Congress, but presidents and infants have been equally pow- erless to change conditions, so obsessed, so snarled and tangled were the departments and Congress with the round-a-bouts of the "ways- of -doing- th ings. ' ' And if matters are going better now it is merely because we have come to a "flaming GETTING IN STEP 19 moment" to burn up the round-a-bouts and the tangles. World wars are very effective in starting such conflagrations, but they are too expensive a kindling. The political energies of women, however, have been so long shut away behind those stone walls that they have not developed a talent for political "ways-of-doing-things." They have dwelt rather on the things to be done. They have, naturally, been more interested in polit- ical ideals than political machinery. They should, therefore, bring a fresh ele- ment to public life. And they will bring it if, with all their gettings about the elements of government and the machinery of government, they still keep the assurance that these are not the important things, after all. The impor- tant thing is the vision as they saw it behind the wall where there was no machinery to get in the way. The vision of tall white public service. CHAPTER III HER COUNTRY BOUNDED BY A WEDDING RING A young Neapolitan friend of mine, whom I call Tony Felucci because that is not his name, came from Italy to Denver with his twin sister shortly after the outbreak of the Great War. Tony was eager to become an American citizen and made early inquiries at the Federal naturalization office, to receive the discouraging information that he could attain his ambition only after living five years in this country. When the brother and sister had been over here about a year, the sister married a young American and forthwith, an election being im- minent, she was taken by her husband to reg- ister for it and found herself a full American citizen — by marriage — while her brother re- mained a mere voteless "Dago." 20 BOUNDED BY A WEDDING RING 21 Perhaps she bragged unduly about that vote. Anyway, Tony Felucci was roused. His sister had shown him a better way than the naturalization office. He married an American girl — in such haste that her sister- in-law assured me poor Tony had no time to notice she had no more shape or color than a stick of macaroni. The morning after the wedding the enter- prising bridegroom presented himself before the Denver Elections Commission for regis- tration. One or two questions and his smile faded. No matrimonial short cuts to voting for him! He learned, further, that there wasn't even one vote in his family, as his wife had lost hers by marrying him. No wonder, when he talked it over with me, Tony declared, "When my wife, thata 'Meri- can lady, tell me here in Colorado a woman is all the same as good as a man, I say to her 'Nottings doing.' " A State in granting the ballot to women grants it subject to the Federal naturalization laws. According to these laws, a married woman 22 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP merely reflects the citizenship — or lack of citi- zenship — of her husband. If, like Tony's sister, an alien woman mar- ries an American citizen she becomes automat- ically, by her marriage, an American citizen, though the recently adopted New York suf- frage amendment wisely provides that she cannot vote in that State until she has lived in the United States for five years. If, on the other hand, an American woman marries an alien — Tony, for example — she be- comes forthwith an alien. Only the naturalization of her husband can give her back her country, or his death — or a divorce. An alien spinster or widow or divorcee can become a citizen on the same terms as an alien man. Any time after her arrival in this coun- try she can take our her "first papers." At the end of two years she may take out her "second papers" if she has been a resident of the United States for at least five years and can answer to the other requirements of nat- uralization, which include some writing and speaking knowledge of English. BOUNDED BY A WEDDING RING 28 This "disability" of the married woman un- der our citizenship laws was once natural enough. At the time these laws debarring married women from citizenship rights were passed, married women were almost univer- sally debarred from property rights, also. In a very real sense they were barred from a personality — and if a woman hadn't a per- sonality why should she need citizenship? But to-day, with our statutes recognizing that woman is no longer a chattel, with a per- sonality allowed her by law, and in many states a vote, this whole situation, which makes of the married woman at best a shadow citizen, is resented by all American women whose minds have come of age. A bill giving American women the right of "self-determination" in citizenship, permitting them to retain their American citizenship on their marriage to foreigners, if they should so desire, was introduced in the House of Repre- sentatives of the Sixty-fifth Congress by the Honorable Jeannette Rankin of Montana. The justice of such a bill seemed plain enough and the measure was carefully and conserva- 24 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP tively drawn, but a majority of the members of the Immigration Committee of the House, to which it was referred, after a hearing at which they got pathetically snarled up with the "ways-of-doing-things" voted to "lay the bill on the table." It still lies there and married women must, therefore, wait at least till another Congress before they can hope to secure a country out- side the bounds of a wedding ring. In contrast with this unsuccessful effort to keep American women in the Constitution of the United States — or, at least, in its Four- teenth Amendment — many women are noting with natural disapproval that several states welcome foreign men into their constitution with very careless hospitality. Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan with certain restrictions, Missouri, Nebraska and South Dakota do not require citizenship from men voters but invite them to the ballot box if they have taken out their "first papers" declaring their intention of be- coming citizens some time — an "intention" they are never called on to redeem. Many BOUNDED BY A WEDDING RING 25 such alien enemy voters are now under strict surveillance by the Federal authorities. They are not allowed to go near munition plants — but they have free right-of-way to the ballot box. Some of them, to be sure, will not be able to vote at the next election since they have been imprisoned, under the espionage act, for treasonable practices — among them a certain German merchant, a voter for thirty years but never an American citizen, who was generally "credited" with the defeat of the equal suf- frage referenda in his State in 1916. These are some of the matters that women getting in step for the ballot-box should weigh and consider. The Great War, it must be granted, has changed the color of the prob- lems. Some of them have turned red under the acid of war. A few years ago the fact of a woman being a citizen by marriage, putting on or taking off nationality with a wedding ceremony, was of little moment except to occasional feminists and American women in equal suffrage states who were thus deprived of a vote. No doubt many a woman has celebrated her Golden 26 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP Wedding with a husband of a different na- tionality without once realizing that she had lost her own. But in the glare of burning cities the sinister aspect of this "chattel nationality" was dis- closed. Two years ago I met a young woman in Holland, a mere wraith of a woman who seemed to make my own wedding ring blister my finger as I heard her story. An English girl, married to a German offi- cer, she had gone to Berlin as a bride only a year before her husband marched into Bel- gium in the mad, swirling month of August, 1914. By both English and German law she had put on her husband's nationality with her wedding ring, but with England and Germany at war she could find no haven in that nation- ality. Hate and suspicion and poisoned glances met her everywhere in Berlin. Her days were intolerable. So she determined to go "home" — to England — and succeeded finally, after stabbing difficulties, only to find she might not claim England as "home." She was married to a German officer. The two BOUNDED BY A WEDDING RING 27 were one — and he was that one. "One flesh" — German flesh! She was an "enemy alien" — under the "authority" of a German husband. So why not a spy? Police espionage tight- ened. The hurt of it all bled inwardly. Only in a neutral nation could she find peace — and an identity. So finally she was able to make her way to Holland, a tragic silhouette, a woman without a country, whose story made Edward Everett Hale's tale of "A Man With- out a Country" seem cheerful reading. "A country bounded by a wedding ring." That country is not wide enough for Amer- ican women of to-day. The assumption that it can be or should be is built on a double standard of fair play for men and women. Canada has shown the way to enlarge such narrow boundaries in her recently enacted Equal Suffrage law, which decrees that a woman is considered British, if born British, whether married or single. Good citizenship should decree thai a woman, born American, may, if she desires, retain her American nationality whether mar- 28 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP ried to a Frenchman or a Hottentot and good citizenship should make its decree heard at Washington, even by Congressmen absorbed in "Here We Go Round the Barberry Bush." For that is only fair play — and fair play is the soul of a Democracy. CHAPTER IV WOMEN AS WHOLESALE HOUSEKEEPERS Three things the new woman voter must do if she wishes to be helpful in what has been aptly called the "wholesale housekeeping" of her community, whether that community is a little wind-swept village of the plains or a big smoky city. First : She must open her eyes — and then, it may be, get eyeglasses. Second: She must become unanimous with herself. Third: She must become a stockholder in a Power Company. She cannot become a good citizen till, open- ing her eyes — and, perhaps, getting a pair of eyeglasses properly fitted — she sees the grimy huddle of shacks over in Jumbletown, beyond the railroad tracks, as well as the beauti- 29 80 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP ful parkings of the new boulevard and the statue of Shakespeare in front of the public library. She cannot be a good citizen till she becomes unanimous with herself, not on every civic question, it may be — since even the latest en- franchised woman is only human, after all — but at least upon some such matters as the purity of the city milk supply or the difference between charity and justice. Some people express that phrase "getting unanimous with oneself" differently. They call it knowing what one wants when one wants it, which is quite another matter from wanting what the last speaker wants at a club meeting. However the idea is phrased, the fact remains that no woman can register her opinion at the polls till she has an opinion to register. And there is that matter of acquiring stock in a Power Company — by which, of course, I mean that the woman who wishes to be an effi- cient citizen should associate herself with one of those civic organizations whose special ob- ject is to see straight and to understand and WHOLESALE HOUSEKEEPERS SI then to get things done by accelerating and directing public opinion. Civic Associations and Municipal Leagues and City Clubs, formed for the purpose of in- fluencing public opinion and pushing public policies — and so Joint Stock Power Com- panies, every one of them — are perhaps the most striking feature of our present day civic development. Such Associations have sometimes been used by commercial and other organizations for thoroughly selfish purposes, opposed to the general public welfare, but by far the greater number of them have urged the communities they served forward, not backward. About fifteen years ago I lived for a time in a typical American city of the Middle West where, by the way, women did not vote. The citizenry of nearly two hundred thou- sand divided itself easily into three classes. One group consisted of men, called "Reform- ers" in those days, who were always keen about making other people good. Around electior 82 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP times they used to scurry about, as H. G. Wells somewhere describes similar folk, shouting "For Gawd's sake let us do something now." Then after election they fell asleep. The sec- ond group, made up of political bosses and "higher ups," never shouted. They used to whisper behind their hands, "Huh I Let us do somebody now!" They never fell asleep, either. They had insomnia. Between these two groups was the great mass of citizens who could never tell until after election, and often not then, whether they had done well or been well done. Occasionally they had a good city administration, but generally it was just chills and fever. Yet the voters had quite as efficient an ad- ministration as they deserved. Last Summer I re- visited the town. Every- thing was astonishingly different. What used to be the "Bad Lands" were now brilliantly lighted — and so, of course, they were no longer "bad lands" — and the Tramway Company even provided seats for the weary throng of workers who had to go home during "rush hours." WHOLESALE HOUSEKEEPERS 33 That last most remarkable fact, with some others, made me ask "Why?" The answer was that about eight years ago, when conditions in the town had become so bad there seemed to be no cure for them — ex- cept, perhaps, capital punishment — a strong, democratic Civic Association was formed. Its members undertook to do the very things I am now recommending to new women voters — they opened their eyes, they trained them- selves in thinking straight until gradually they became unanimous with themselves and, in es- sentials, with each other. So in very truth they became a Power Company for their com- munity, driving — to lapse still further into metaphors — a light plant as well as a heat plant. They came to realize, and they brought thou- sands outside their membership to realize also, that what their city needed was not poster poli- tics, but intelligent citizenship — a sense of in- dividual responsibility on the part of the citi- zen every day in the year for the conduct of city government. 84 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP That special civic club was an organization of men only. A few weeks later I visited a small Ar- kansas city of about three thousand people where a civic club of women only was giving relatively quite as valuable service, though their work, on the face of it, was chiefly con- cerned with securing a proper sewerage sys- tem and — since it was a garden city — with forcing the comely internment of hens. The ideal civic organization undoubtedly consists of men and women working together. But some men do not like to work with women in equal partnership and many women still prefer to do their civic work with women alone. So, since millenniums cannot be secured off- hand but must be purchased at a-little-at-a- time stores, women may well have their sepa- rate "Power Companies." If it has not seemed worth while to take space here for describing the machinery of city government, with its departments and scope, and the duties of municipal officers, that is be- WHOLESALE HOUSEKEEPERS 35 cause, valuable as such information is, nobody has ever received a diploma for good citizen- ship because she could tell which is "best" for a city, the "mayor" or "commission" or "city manager" form of government, and could name over the dates of city elections, the terms of office and salaries of officials — with her private opinion of the mayor, who goes to her church. When I seek to persuade the new woman voter that, no matter how many handbooks on City Government she may possess, she should also open her eyes, become unanimous with herself, and join with other citizens in some sort of Civic Association — or Power Company — I know that a good many readers are going to look up from my page right here and exclaim, "Well, I certainly have no time to join any new club! Why, with my Red Cross work and all the other war work I'm doing, I'm out of breath all the time as it is !" Yes, I know. But just do a little deep breathing while I explain. In the first place, civic work is war work. 36 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP There can be no national preparedness and efficiency without community preparedness and efficiency. Unless we women do our full share, now, in guarding the inner defenses of the na- tion in our own homes and our own home towns, all our Red Cross work and our other war work will be worth little more than a game of mum- blety-peg in a graveyard. Moreover, I have never meant that a brand- new club is necessary for civic undertakings. Some of us have turned our Bridge Clubs into Surgical Dressings Groups and many old- established Women's Clubs are wisely taking over the work of leadership in wholesale house- keeping. This has not been accomplished without oc- casional protest from club members with sed- entary minds who have objected that this un- dertaking or that sounds like politics to them — "and we've always kept politics out of our club." From a long list of the achievements of Women's Clubs in several of the equal-suf- WHOLESALE HOUSEKEEPERS S7 frage states here are a few items chosen al- most at random : Raising money for a survey of the city by experts — an eye-opener. Tackling housing problems and in several instances getting loathly rabbit-warrens for humans torn down and replaced by seemly dwellings. Securing juvenile and women's courts. Building municipal markets. Securing municipal control of the milk sup- ply with the establishment of public milk sta- tions. Providing city playgrounds. This list might have been greatly length- ened. And if it is shown, as it may be, that all these civic improvements have been attained also in states where women are only "associate citizens" — that fact is quite beside the mark, since the whole point of the argument is that, even in equal-suffrage states, they were made possible, not by casual flurries of votes, but by the push of public opinion directed from Women's Clubs — or Power Companies. 38 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP If work like this can be barred from Wom- en's Clubs by any murmur of "politics," then the Sermon on the Mount and the Ten Com- mandments and the Golden Rule should be barred also. Give a dog a bad name — and then hang him ! The same thing is true of a dogma. And there is no doubt that the confusion of politics with jack-in-the-box partisanship, bob- bing up to cheer candidates on signal, has crys- tallized into a dogma with many otherwise in- telligent American women. By all means hang that dogma. Whatever tawdry truth there may once have been in this conception of politics is disappear- ing now churches are declaring that political responsibilities are moral responsibilities, and women voters like Jane Addams and Lillian Wald are, in effect, defining politics as the art of relating people justly to each other. Jack-in-the-box partisanship still exists, to be sure, and has its points of contact with politics. But we should learn in our conver- sation to distinguish between the two — just as WHOLESALE HOUSEKEEPERS 39 we are able to distinguish between doughnuts and halos even though they have much the same general shape. CHAPTER V THE STATE IT IS "we" The greatest value of equal suffrage is that it is teaching men and women to say "We" in the affairs of their State — that State which in our country is the half-way house between their school district and the Nation, and touches all the affairs of life from its first breath to its last. The lap-dog sort of woman does not want to say "We." She says "I" as she nuzzles down among her cushions and nibbles at chocolates and steam-heated notions. The man with a mind as hard-creased as his trousers, the man who can think of women only in terms of one syllable, does not want to say "We" either. He says "You Women!" When men and women can say we in the affairs of their State as in the government of their city they have inched a little nearer the 40 THE STATE— IT IS "WE" '4>1 goal toward which society is slowly tending — the equal comradeship of men and women. Just a little nearer! Sometimes I meet a new woman voter with an ultra-enfranchised look who thinks that equality at the ballot-box implies sex-equality. She will know better when she learns by ex- perience the things that the vote will not do as well as the things it will do. Political organization is only one phase, one manifestation, of social organization, as indus- trial organization is another, and economic or- ganization, and educational, and religious. The big word "social" includes all those other words. Society itself advances only as its po- litical and industrial and educational and eco- nomic institutions advance — not in a free-for- all race, but as a team ; a team that travels, not tandem, but four-in-hand or six-in-hand or however the number is counted. Now read the word "woman" in place of "society," and the story repeats itself. Since woman emerged from the Camp of Silence, with her plea, however dimly ex- pressed, for the right of free human develop- 42 PBEPARING WOMEN FOE CITIZENSHIP ment, that plea has had various phases. There was her plea to the Church for a soul, which was grudgingly granted; her plea to the schools for a mind, permitted, finally, also; her plea for a place in the professions and the shop which she was winning, reluctantly, from cus- tom and tradition when the Great War came to overthrow for a time all customs and tradi- tions; and her plea to the law for a place in the state, which she is now steadily winning. Yet not one of these various phases of develop- ment, however appearances may deceive, has traveled toward the still distant goal of equal- ity alone. They are all harnessed together. Saying "We" in our State affairs means say- ing "We" in regard to schools, for, though cities and rural communities have their own school boards, the State makes the school laws and often distributes the school funds. It means that men and women are saying "We" in matters of public health and the protection of children. It means saying "We" about the handling of the insane and the criminal; about who shall marry and who shall be divorced. THE STATE— IT IS "WE" 43 It means saying "We" about the building and repairing of roads, about public employment bureaus and social insurance, and mothers' pensions. It means saying "We" about taxa- tion and the control of electric lighting com- panies and State railroads and telephone com- panies and labor unions. Moreover, since as citizens of our respective States we elect Presidents and United States Senators and members of the National House of Representatives to make our will known at Washington, equal suffrage means men and women saying "We" about the tariff and the conservation of water power, and the Chil- dren's Bureau, and bond issues and conscrip- tion and peace and war. It is easy to point out that the state govern- ment, following the model of the federal con- stitution, consists of three departments, the executive, legislative and judicial — a system of "checks and balances," so called, that has become at the present time rather a mode of pull and haul. It is interesting also to note how the original purely representative form of state government has in many of the states 44 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP been modified in recent years by a measure of direct democratic control given the voters through the initiative, referendum and recall, offering, each of them, an egress from misrep- resentation. But however wide the woman voter's knowl- edge may be of the framework of government — or however narrow — the truth remains that in her state as in her city the three essentials of good citizenship for her are: To open her eyes; to become unanimous with herself; and to acquire stock in a Power Company. Legislative Committees of women are doing for many States what Civic Clubs are doing for cities — that is, they are proving Power Companies. Like such Civic Clubs, also, these Legisla- tive Committees train their members in open- ing their eyes and becoming unanimous with themselves on questions of desirable or unde- sirable legislation. Such organizations now exist in many of the male-suffrage states, though they origi- nated in the equal-suffrage states, and are most effective there, since experience shows that THE STATE— IT IS "WE' 45 only officials responsible to women give real consideration to what women want. The methods of the Legislative Council of the Colorado Federation of Women's Clubs, an organization dating back to the days when equal suffrage was marooned in four pioneer states up on the Highlands of the Nation, have been followed in a general way by all later legislative committees. Since the last session of the Colorado legis- lature ended this Legislative Council has been holding regular meetings in the room set aside for their use in the State Capitol, its members making a study of certain laws already on the statute books in preparation for changes they think desirable. Thus, as the Council is de- termined that the present child labor laws, which have proved inadequate under changing industrial conditions, shall be amended by the next Legislature, many of their meetings have dealt with the whole broad subject of legisla- tion affecting children industrially and educa- tionally in Colorado and in other states. When the Legislature is in session the Council hold weekly meetings, listen to arguments for 46 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP and against pending measures, and often exert a controlling influence in favor of bills they "mother." A mistake most such Legislative Com- mittees have made in different states in the past has been in "mothering" too many bills; and in legislative matters, my friend the Dean of the Colorado Senate used to assure me, a mistake is worse than a sin — since there are no compensations. I always feel like commending the example of Moses to such Legislative Committees. Now Moses possessed absolute power. He was the only voter. Moreover, as some com- mentator has pointed out, he could substantiate his views with the assertion, "And the Lord said unto Moses" — which must have been very nice for a legislator. Yet with all these ad- vantages, he never thought of enacting more than ten laws on a certain memorable occa- sion — while I have watched Legislative Com- mittees trying to "pass" thirty. Such committees of women had better fol- low the recent example of the California Leg- THE STATE— IT IS "WE" 47 islative Committee and, choosing only three or four bills, of direct and pressing concern, pro- ceed to Fletcherize them thoroughly and then lobby for their passage — or use influence shaped like a knife against them. We need more Fletcherizing in our legisla- tion, anyway. There is too much bolted legis- lation on our statute books. Too many laws transforming mere individual notions of right and wrong into statutes; laws that from the very nature of the case are unenforced and unenforceable; cuticle laws, toothless laws, mumbling away on useless pages — laws, in- deed, that couldn't cut teeth if they had a rub- ber ring as big as the equator to cut them on. It does not appear, for all the sad sayings of the Antis, that women are any more respon- sible than are men for such skin-deep legisla- tion. I have found, however, while watching the course of legislation in equal-suffrage states, that men are more likely to think in terms of human profit when they get behind legislation, while women are more likely to think in terms of human needs. 48 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP So much the more reason then — since all ma- terial human needs must be satisfied through human profits — why men and women should say "We" in law-making as in all other affairs of the State. Now that everybody is talking about econ- omy, and some are practicing it, women citi- zens should turn their attention to the willful extravagance of their State government. They have done most of the saving in fam- ilies; it is high time they urged saving in the State. They have no business to sit staring with strained eyes at their own home spigot while the State bunghole, which is their bunghole also, goes splash! splash! splash! One of my gayest remembrances is of hear- ing a woman legislator take to task her male colleagues — men from the haystack and the dry-goods counter and the law-office — for the reckless way in which they were appropriat- ing State money. "If your wives ran your homes," she said, "the way you are running this legislature, if THE STATE— IT IS "WE" 49 they spent the family money as you are spend- ing the State money, every mother's son of you would land at the Poor Farm." Let the woman citizen do a little sleuthing in the sub-basement of her State Capitol and form some estimate of the value of the pub- lishers' junk stored away there in old extrava- gantly printed and expensively bound reports ordered without any attention to needs. Thousands of dollars are wasted every year on such reports. Let her find her way into the anterooms and committee rooms of her legislature in session. Let her count the unnecessary clerks dawdling about — all in the interest of legislative "pat- ronage." Let her make her way through the various executive departments and watch the idle women clerks polishing their nails while idle^ men clerks polish office chairs — all in the in- terest of party "patronage." Let her observe the lack of correlation in the work of the dif- ferent State departments and the unnecessary expense resulting from that lack — then let her do some straight thinking. 50 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP A few states with a budget system run their affairs in a businesslike way, but most of them in fixing appropriations and expenditures em- ploy only a "system" of legislative craps-shoot- ing. There are states which waste enough public money to build good roads past every farm and leading to every school house. There are states that out of wasted money alone might have established old age pensions. These are some of the responsibilities of women voters. Old King Louis saw France only as the background for his splendor and his mistresses and his foreign wars and his glory. And he said, "The State— it is I." But American women, possessed of the steady mood of good citizenship see their State as a place of homes and factories and sunrises and sky-scrapers and cloud shadows and men, women and children and, realizing that they must work with other women and men to build that state round all of us for all of us, they say — or should say — "The State — it is We." CHAPTER VI CHOOSING HER PARTY Women who have a special aptitude for politics — as it will be remembered Queen Eliza- beth had and Catherine of Russia and the late Dowager Empress of China — and women who have an eye on political plum trees will nat- urally align themselves with one of the po- litical parties which — unofficially — govern in the United States behind the official govern- ment. To many a new woman voter, however, it will seem difficult, or even unpatriotic, to re- duce her shades of opinion to the artificial sim- plicity of the American party system and de- clare herself a Democrat or a Republican or a Socialist or a Prohibitionist. "I mean to keep my vote inviolate!" a grave young woman assured me the morning after her state enfranchised women. "I shall al- ways remain independent in politics." 51 52 PREPARING WOMEN FOB CITIZENSHIP "But then you will not be able to vote in the primaries," I objected. "You know that here in your New York, as in many other states, you have to register yourselves as be- longing to this party or that in order to vote at the primary election." "Yes, I know," she answered, "but, even for that, I will not wear a party tag. Don't you agree with me that an unpartisan state of mind points one to a higher patriotism than any par- tisan guide-posts?" "Maybe," I granted. "But it isn't merely a question of pointing out the direction. Be- fore we can get anywhere we have to be on the way; so there comes the question of shoes or trains or automobiles for the journey. "In other words, there comes the question of the party which will best help you to get your opinions where they want to go." It is at primary elections that all questions of party candidates are settled, all members of party committees are named, and, directly or indirectly, qi ions of party policy are set- tled. The voter who lets her opportunities for CHOOSING HER PARTY 53 influence at the primaries pass and keeps her "vote inviolate" for use at the general election may find herself in the situation of those who go into battle with only one weapon and no plan of campaign. Moreover, there are compensations for the woman who aligns herself with this party or that. Her choice is not irrevocable. If she chooses her party without due consideration, merely for family reasons, and finds herself dissatisfied, she can blame her mistake on the pull of heredity or environment — heredity in this case signifying her father's party and en- vironment her husband's — and choose again at the next election. In any case party enlistment does not imply "My party, right or wrong." It should not mean a voter is pigeon-holed. In states where women have been voting for decades, the aver- age woman takes her party far more platon- ically than does the average man. She knows that it is no more necessary for her to "tag" herself as an "Independent" in order to vote independently on occasions than it is for her to drink her tea out of a saucer in order to 54 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP keep the teaspoon from hitting her in the eye. It must in any case be insisted — now I want my words to look like a shout — that partisan- ship has no place in local elections, in city gov- ernment, in matters of community welfare. A woman who permits her garbage-can to be- come either Democratic or Republican has a long, long way to go to good citizenship. A political party is an organization of indi- viduals or groups of individuals, more or less durable as an organization but constantly vary- ing in membership, united by common princi- ples and a common policy. The purpose of the party is to make its pol- icy the government policy — to become, in other words, the unofficial government behind the official government. In order to do this it must elect its candidates for office, pledged to carry out the party policy. On this fact is built all the elaborate ma- chinery of the American party system. It is an organization for warfare. Its strategy is directed to mobilizing a majority — or plurality CHOOSING HER PARTY 55 — of all voters under its banners and so to carrying the election. The principles and policy for which the fight is — at least theoretically — fought are set forth in the party "platform," made up of a series of "planks," each a statement of a party principle or a living issue. Now a plank, as any small boy will tell you, makes an excellent see-saw and it must be granted that the real "living issue" of many a party plank is to attract as many voters as possible on it — no matter how diverse their opinions. Then, Ho for the merry see-saw ! It will be granted, too, that there have been periods in our history when, with all their "planks" and "platforms," the two leading parties have opposed each other only on the difference between Tweedledum and Tweedle- dee — although no parties have ever been es- tablished on that difference. Yet, though political leaders often spell party principles j-o-b-s and to many men and women their party is merely a family heirloom, the fact remains that to the mass of Americans 56 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP the party they choose really represents the gen- eral direction of their thoughts, and through parties only can our government follow this general direction of American thought and fit itself to changing social needs. In some of the equal suffrage states women hold a well established place in party organ- ization and party management — while in others they merely carry on the idea of a La- dies' Aid Society. The unit of party organization is the "pre- cinct," which according to its location may contain a dozen voters or several hundred. AH the full suffrage states except Colorado and New York provide in their party rules for one precinct committeeman in each precinct — who may be a woman if she can get the votes. She has not been very successful thus far — or else she has not sought the honor — for only 1 per cent, of the precinct "managers" in Utah are women while Washington with the highest per- centage shows only 5 per cent, of precinct "committeemen" who are women. Colorado early established her party organization on a CHOOSING HER PARTY 57 "fifty-fifty" basis, each political sub-division having a committeeman and a committee- woman. New York is adopting the Colorado plan. So the party organization is built up, the precinct committee men and women being the building blocks of the system. There are also ward or district committees, city committees, county committees, a state central committee with its executive committee for managing po- litical campaigns, and at the head of the sys- tem the National Committee of the party with one Committeeman from each state. Women are generally credited by party managers with being more successful than men in "getting out the votes" at elections, which is the special office of precinct committees and other "workers." That is perhaps because women are more neighborly than men — and "getting out the votes" is peculiarly a neigh- borhood business. But men have had so many years the advantage of women in party con- trol that except for an occasional rare woman with a flare for politics — an American "Dow- 58 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP ager Empress of China" — women have never been much consulted in the higher councils of the major parties. The National Committees of the different parties have as yet no provision for the elec- tion of national committeewomen but, at the time this is written, the Democratic National Committee, to be forehanded, have appointed an "Advisory Committee" consisting of one woman from each of the forty-eight States, se- lected each by the National Committeeman. I find myself smiling a hard-boiled smile every time I think of a committee of women, nearly three-fourths of whom have no vote, "advising" a committee of well-seasoned male politicians. But I fear, with all my smiling, that the naming of the committee of the flat- tering title is a matter of the wisdom of ser- pents — if the astute gentlemen will pardon the comparison — toward those who are expected to be harmless as doves. Such Ladies' Aid Societies have no place at all in party systems. Women can well afford to wait till all American women are enfran- CHOOSING HER PARTY 59 chised before demanding that party rules be amended to provide for the election of a na- tional committeewoman from each state, but they cannot afford, with the melancholy exam- ple of the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense before them, to be "com- plimented" into "Complementary" or Advis- ory Committees. By consenting to become pseudo-advisers those forty-eight members of the "Democratic Woman's Advisory Committee" may have postponed the day when women will be recog- nized on National Committees as equal part- ners. For male politicians really prefer women in an "advisory" capacity, there being no party rule to the effect that an adviser's ad- vice must be taken — and it will be much harder to part with such a "complementary commit- tee" — after the party leaders have become at- tached to it — than it was to create it. Women of the other parties would better wait till, their party rules amended, they can be given equal rights and responsibilities in their national council. 60 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP "But why not a new party, a Woman's Party?" some eager emergent women are ask- ing. "Women think more quickly than do men in terms of human needs. Why not join together as women and write those human needs at once into laws?" Why not? If a Woman's Party were formed it would have to declare its opposition to the funda- mental principle for which suffragists have for seventy years been battling. "No sex-line at the ballot box," cried blessed old Susan B. Anthony. The work of a Woman's Party would be to reestablish a sex-line at the ballot box. There are several other reasons to be urged against the formation of such a party, one of them being — it is impossible, as various experi- ments in the past have shown. Women are no more like-minded than are men. They differ in ideals and opinions and policies, just as men differ. They want no "Woman's Party" with its corollary— why not? — of a "Man's Party"! There have been in the past, however, sev- CHOOSING HER PARTY 61 eral occasions, the most notable one some years ago in California, where women of a city or state have been fused together in some special election by a purpose that made them forget all class or party or personal prejudices. That electric fusing force will make itself felt, no doubt, on great occasions in the future as in the past. Thus, for example, when the days of peace come again to America if it shall become plain to the mass of women that "The Business Interests" are once more trying to make themselves a fetish — as they have often done in the past — branding the dollar-mark into both political parties, joining with party bosses to dirty our very homes with the dirt of their dealings, then, I believe, women voters will indeed join together, obliterating for the time all party differences, and, with the ringing cry, "The most important business in America to-day is the raising of thirty million children!" they will win against the dark forces. They will win — not because all women will join in the movement, for all will not. They will win because to a goodly majority of women there 62 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP will be added a goodly minority of men, hating the greedy forces as avidly as any woman can hate them and quite as determined that "They shall not passl" CHAPTER VII "WOMEN AS OFFICE HOLDERS With Montana electing a woman to Con- gress, while Massachusetts and some other states refuse women the privilege of acting as notary publics, it is plain that public opinion regarding the woman office-holder is not stand- ardized. It is, however, generally agreed that a woman office-holder has to be better than a man in order to be as good. During the suffrage debate in Congress not long ago I heard a Southern member plead with his peers to protect "lovely woman" from the mud and mire of politics in which Congress- men were happily wallowing. Voting, he de- clared, would lead inevitably to office-holding, and his voice trembled at the very thought that woman should not be protected from heavy burdens like that. 63 64. PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP A good many male politicians in equal- suffrage States have the same desire to "pro- tect" women from office-holding — not because of "sex prejudice," as some women say, but because of a feeling of tenderness for them- selves. There have never yet been offices enough to supply the regular male demand. So it happens that, though municipal serv- ice should appeal especially to women, there have been relatively very few women elected to city offices. A woman councilman in Los Angeles, a city recorder in Denver, an occasional city clerk or auditor or treasurer for small cities, the tra- dition of an alderman or two somewhere "out West" or the rare mayor of some "city by cour- tesy" who is acclaimed the country over as a prodigious person — though every woman knows that to manage a "city" like that is not half so hard as to run a boarding house — this practically completes the list of women in elec- tive city offices. The list is longer of women holding appoin- tive city offices. There are women juvenile judges and women have won distinction for WOMEN AS OFFICE HOLDERS 65 their service on state as well as on city penal and charity commissions as on library, welfare and recreation boards, but, none the less, women still find their sex a handicap in secur- ing appointment to inspectorships and other well-paid offices. Yet young college women may well lengthen their course with a year or two of special train- ing for civic service in one of the institutions or universities offering such training. There are signs that such well-equipped women will be increasingly in demand for municipal offices and that in due time women will fill a fair pro- portion of city posts — from mayor to the head of the department of street-cleaning. Yes. Street cleaning! Rebuilding the roads and bridges of a shat- tered planet will occupy the best energies of many men long after the war is ended. Rebuilding broken lives and keeping city streets clean may well engage some of the ener- gies of women. Chicago has a woman at the head of one of the street-cleaning divisions. She does not sweep, she bosses sweepers. 66 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP The other day, as I traveled from Washing- ton to Denver, I watched women, at railroad- stations and sidings, sweeping railroad tracks half-way across the continent. They were not bossing; they were sweeping. A society that does not protect women from such sweeping should not he awake nights plan- ning how to protect them from bossing sweep- ers. One reason for welcoming women office- holders is that, as the tribe increases, we may in time get over our doll baby fashion of flut- tering over "the only woman alderman" or the "only woman State senator," or the "only woman congressman" who, naturally, with all that fluttering, takes herself too seriously. I have seen male legislators who, in action, impressed me as being entirely too hysterical and emotional to meddle with politics, and I have seen masculine tears splash on senatorial desks at the "killing" of a favorite bill. But while such men are only a matter of course, the woman who matches them is a newspaper headline. WOMEN AS OFFICE HOLDERS 67 It would be a good thing for her and for all other aspiring women if every woman office- holder could be twins, or better still, triplets. So she — or they — would have some chance of becoming "a matter of course," too. It is only as women become "a matter of course" that they have any chance of testing that beautiful word — equality. There should never be an "only woman State senator" in New York! When the vot- ers of the Empire State are ready to elect a woman to that office they should face the actual meaning of equal-suffrage and elect at least a dozen, who, assured that the color of their hair — through force of being not "only" but a dozen — is a matter of no great national con- cern, can devote their energies to team work in legislation. And may they not be too disappointed if, for all their team work, they do not bring June in Midwinter! Almost all the equal suffrage states have elected women to the lower house of their state legislature and in four of them, Arizona, Colo- 68 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP rado, Utah and Washington, women have been elected state senators. Yet, since the largest number of women that have ever worked to- gether in a legislative body is four — those four women having served in the Lower House of the Colorado General Assembly some eight years ago — it is plain there have never at any time been enough women in a state legislature to achieve group results along the lines of law- making in which women are peculiarly inter- ested. In discussing, then, the record of women legislators along those distinctive lines, we are likely to label the work as "woman's work," group work, when it is rather the achievement of a peculiarly vivid personality. In such cases it is very difficult to tell the truth without lying. That is the case with the story of a woman legislator who pushed through the Legislature some important school bills that the educational forces of the state had been vainly trying for a dozen years to secure. She succeeded, not because women are peculiarly fitted for push- ing school legislation, though that is probably WOMEN AS OFFICE HOLDERS 69 true, but because she herself was a white flame. Doubtless there is a similar explanation in the story of the woman senator who saved from mutilation a bill fixing an eight hour day for women workers. According to the story a senator from the canning district of the state moved an amendment exempting canneries from the operation of the law, and the senti- ment of the body was evidently with him as he pleaded with emotion the need of saving per- ishable fruit; but the woman senator turned the tide by appealing to her colleagues to think first of perishable girls, and the senate voted almost unanimously for the girls instead of the tomatoes. However such stories may resolve themselves into the matter of personality, I yet believe women have shown a special talent for legisla- tion and in the days of reconstruction, after the war, women who are good citizens, who are fitted for the task and free to undertake it, should consider it a matter of public duty to offer themselves as candidates for their state legislature. The greatest reserve force in America for such work in those great days will 70 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP be found in large groups of American women with trained minds and human understanding and social vision and public spirit, women, moreover, who have the leisure their husbands and sons and brothers will lack. If enough of such women can be persuaded into this line of public service we shall, in time, recover from the current American opinion that being a legislator is being a disease. The difficulty in securing such candidates m the past has been that in America "running for office" seems to have borrowed many of its de- tails from that practice of the aborigines called "running the gauntlet." Office seeking is warfare — perhaps the most furious form of battle experienced by Americans until we en- tered the Great War. The fighting instinct must be highly developed in successful office seekers and it is an established fact that women have not developed the fighting instinct as freely as have men, which is, after all, the chief reason why so few women have been candi- dates for elective offices. Even to men, it should be added, this peculiar form of warfare is often repugnant and its necessity has kept WOMEN AS OFFICE HOLDERS 71 many American men of the highest ideals from seeking public office, as it has held back nearly all women. When we have succeeded in making the world safe for democracy, it will be well if the combined intelligence of American men and women can eliminate the poisoned gas and other of the more violent methods from our electoral system, thus making the business of office seeking more appealing to our "best" Americans — both men and women — and so making our democracy safer for the world. CHAPTER VIII WOMEN AND THE THEEE D'S Some years before the German Kaiser set about changing the name of tortured Europe to "Hell's Own" he used to declare that Ger- man women should be limited to one letter of the alphabet — the letter K, which he granted to them three times over in Kirche, Kinder, and Kuche. The Three K's, which we trans- late into the Three C's, Church, Children and Cooking. He isn't saying anything about that to-day, however — the German Kaiser. He is allow- ing the women of Germany to ramp through all the letters of the alphabet, from A for Ammu- nition to Z for Zeppelins. Even in those earlier days German wom- en's energies were not so limited. They used to be harnessed to the plow. They used to lift and carry very heavy loads as porters. And if, as sometimes happened, an American 72 WOMEN AND THE THREE D'S 73 traveler protested at seeing an old woman un- loading a heavy truck while her son lolled about with a pipe, the visitor would be told, curtly, "The strength of our men is precious. They must be saved for the army." Evidently the Kaiser merely meant his three K's as the high water mark of endeavor for German women — and the world will not forget that a nation where women were har- nessed to the plow and the cook-stove and kept as rigorously as possible from other forms of expression is the nation which must bear to all times the stark blame for the most monstrous war of the ages. But all that is only by the way. It is a good many years since "Woman" has been thus alphabetically card-catalogued in America. Though undoubtedly there have been many hampering conditions outside her- self to limit her activities, it did not need a war to give her practically the entire range of the alphabet. American women who are housewives and homemakers — it is wise to remember that not all women are in this class though some high 74 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP placed American officials constantly forget it — are as faithful as any German House-frau to the Three C's, while for many years past American women, many of them trained in the Three C's, have given an increasing amount of time and study and effort to their work with the Three D's — the work which has im- memorially been the task of women since ever society, in its sympathetic sense, originated in the relations of the child and the mother. This work which they once carried on as individuals or through the church or associated in private agencies, they are now undertaking as one of the duties of their citizenship on city, county and state boards and commissions. The Three D's: The Dependents — orphaned little children and children worse than orphaned, needy moth- ers, the aged poor, the human wastings of our wasteful industrial system. The Defectives — God's poor souls in insti- tutions for the feeble-minded, the afflicted crea- tures who once were men and women in hos- pitals for the insane. The Delinquents — some of them children in WOMEN AND THE THREE D'S 75 detention schools and reformatories, men and women in prison, the criminals toward whom society has often been as criminal as they have been toward society. And now I turn from my desk to take up a copy of the Journal of the Colorado Senate for the session of 1915. I. turn over the pages. Here! I have found what I sought — the re- port of a joint committee of the Senate and House of Representatives appointed to in- spect "ad interim" the various institutions of the state sheltering the Dependent and De- fectives and guarding the Delinquents. Near the close of the voluminous report I come upon this paragraph: "Your Committee would here draw atten- tion to the fact that the two institutions of the state whose boards are composed chiefly of women — the State Industrial School for Girls and the State Home for Dependent Children — show an efficiency and economy in their man- agement surpassing that of all other state in- stitutions !" Did the five senators and representatives composing the joint committee drop that ex- 76 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP clamation point loose in the air to express ad- miration and wonder or did the printer merely put it in to finish out the sentence? Certainly there was no occasion for won- der. On the contrary, there is every reason why state institutions "whose boards are com- posed chiefly of women" should show more effi- cient and economical and whole-hearted and devoted management than the other sort of boards, still prevailing in this country, that are "composed chiefly" or wholly of men. When a mayor or governor or board of county commissioners appoints a woman on one of these boards he is simply calling her to her old historic work in a new form. He is calling upon one who, if it is an un- paid board, has probably more leisure to give to the work than the average man is able to spare from his business. And, as one of the fruits of that greater leisure, she is more likely than the business man to find time to study the problems of her work in their larger social aspects, time for social observation, time for cultivating social understanding. Women's talent for orderliness, their habit WOMEN AND THE THREE D'S 77 of keeping round after things, their instinc- tive desire to respond to human needs, their understanding of the domestic problems that are an important part of the conduct of such institutions, all supply additional reasons why every county and city and state board dealing in any manner with the Three D's should have a woman — or better, women — on it. I am only convinced that, outside their homes and apart from the stage (a great ac- tress is always greater than a great actor), there is one occupation, one form of service in which women surpass men — and that is the service I have been describing for women on state and city boards and commissions or as executive secretaries and administrative heads for all state and municipal charities, so-called. There is a Western city of some three hun- dred thousand inhabitants where four years ago, by something of an accident, a finely trained woman was thus made the executive head of all the relief work of the city. A few months ago she resigned to undertake work in France and immediately the male politicians began to urge a male candidate or two for the 78 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP position, which was quite desirable financially. But the mayor, although a politician of the old school who in the past has often voiced his objections to having women "come meddling round City Hall," would have none of their suggestions. "I tell you," he said, "that's a woman's job. When it comes to that sort of work I've found out a woman can see farther with her eyes shut than I can with my eyes open — and I don't wear any glass eye, either. No, I won't have any of your professors or your parsons or your politicians monkeying and dabbling round on that job" — and he appointed another woman who was highly recommended by the retiring director. The profession of the prophet is a very dan- gerous one. Insurance companies, so far as I can learn, do not take risks on it. But I dare assume the role long enough to prophesy that in ten years all mayors will be saying the same thing as this Western mayor — who has kept his eyesight. Here is a direct, practical use for women citizens to make of their citizenship. Let them WOMEN AND THE THREE D*S 79 get the latest state reports dealing with penal and semi-penal institutions, with institutions for defectives and for dependents. It does not matter, for this purpose, whether there is a single governing board, as in some states, or several boards, as in others ; neither does it mat- ter whether board members are paid or un- paid. The thing to do, in any case, is to check up the names of the members of such board carefully and see if a fair proportion of them are women. If not, the next step should be to bring proper influence to bear on the gov- ernor or the candidates for governor, and reach an understanding which will assure that the next vacancies shall be filled with well equipped women, — all this not as a part of the "woman movement" but of the human movement. There is not a state in the Union, with two or three exceptions, where searchers will find anything like that "fair proportion." I have in mind now a "school," so-called, for the feeble-minded in a full suffrage state, an institution for both boys and girls, with only men on its governing board — a fact that is a disgrace to the governor and should be a cause 80 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP of humiliation to every woman in the state. If the institution is a penitentiary or a re- formatory where only men or boys are con- fined, what then? Just this — when women are no longer urged by the clergy and other moralists to use re- formatory influences on their husbands, and when broken, discouraged, helpless men and boys no longer want women to help them in their homes, then it will.be time enough to de- cide that women have no place on the boards of such institutions. Does all this sound very easy — this looking over the lists of governing boards of state insti- tutions and then' persuading a governor to do his duty? It will not prove easy, even in the case of unpaid boards. Such appointments are fre- quently used as cheap payment for political debts, bestowed upon men who are quite un- fitted for the task but who get some prestige from the appointment, or, perhaps in indirect ways, some more material advantage. "Power Companies" will undoubtedly have to supply their force in many cases. And al- WOMEN AND THE THREE D'S 81 ways there comes testimony from the stricken fields of France of the work women are doing in rebuilding shattered lives, — work that should show their special fitness for the home tasks I have been describing even to governors with glass eyes. Those who truly believe that "The State— It is We" and that it is the duty of good citizen- ship to build the state round all of us for all of us know that "all of us" means the men, women and children in state institutions, too. This understanding which gradually changed old fashioned charity to organized social serv- ice is now rapidly replacing "social service" with organized public service. "The welfare of all the people of a state or community is the business of all good citizens, whether those people are set in homes or placed in state institutions," good citizenship declares. With this changing ideal of the state and this developing idea of public service there is, naturally, a corresponding change in women's attitude toward the old fashioned task of car- ing for the Three D's which they are under- taking now in the new fashioned way. 82 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP The Three D's. The Dependents — suffering from the dis- ease called poverty. But why not inoculate against poverty, as physicians inoculate against small-pox and typhoid fever? Why not get at the cause of poverty — which we can no longer smugly call a dispensation of Provi- dence since we know it is in great measure due to economic maladjustments. When the proper readjustments come we shall doubtless outgrow poverty as we have outgrown canni- balism and slavery. In the meantime, men and women charged with the care of Depend- ents understand how many of them are the sorry fruit of Defectives and Delinquents. So comes the need of safeguarding defec- tives from transmitting life. So comes an- other question of poignant interest to all who work with hopeless defectives, the distressful creatures in institutions for the feeble-minded, with no control over their bodies, incapable of mental pain, the helplessly idiotic, most un- fortunate of all creatures. What are we going to do about them? Shall we continue to pay nurses and doctors WOMEN AND THE THREE D'S 83 to care for them in expensively equipped wards, prolonging a life that is only a torture, a monstrosity? Or shall we say, "If a man is suffering from hunger, we give him bread, if he is suffering from thirst we give him drink, and when a hopeless idiot is suffering from life we give him death"? This is a path where women, guardians of the gates of the body, guardians of the gates of life, must point the way. So for the last of the Three D's — the De- linquents. I know of a prison commission in a Western state composed of two men and a woman. The Warden, who has a genius for making men out of convicts, was anxious to put some of his trusties into the hog raising business. But the men on the board who had been appointed, one because he was a defeated candidate for governor and the other just "be- cause," opposed the plan. "Shutting 'em up in jail was good enough for my father and his father before him, and it's good enough for me," the "because" man declared. The woman member saw the value of the plan; she urged the experiment upon the commissioners 84 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP and finally persuaded them to consent. So a little group of "trusties" were given each a chance to put his whole soul into hogs — and with the sun and the air and the hogs those souls came out clean. So with other delinquents, with boys and girls in Industrial Schools, and with women in penitentiaries. No woman has yet solved the problems of the prevention of delinquency or of the restoration of delinquents, as no man has solved them, yet increasingly women are show- ing their ability and their readiness to be co- partners with men in the endeavor. They have learned from their labors this, at least, that to attempt to prevent crime by punish- ment is to put oneself in the class with those savages who try to frighten away an eclipse of the sun by making ugly faces and beating tom-toms. They have learned that human reclamation is wrought out primarily through the right sort of work and the right training for that work. Therefore women on all the Boards that deal with the Three D's, women everywhere en- gaged in this form of public service, are train-* WOMEN AND THE THREE D'S 85 ing themselves and must train themselves to be — not "philanthropists" — but Social Engi- neers. CHAPTER IX A NATIONAL PEOGEAM FOE WOMEN In an earlier chapter I wrote of what the War is doing to give women a national out- look. Some interesting illustrations of that widen- ing outlook have been shown during their ex- perience in different Liberty Loan campaigns. The Woman's Liberty Loan Committee, created during the progress of the First Loan Drive, with all its officers women, has been made a definite part of the Federal Treasury machinery and, for the first time in history, women are taking an active and directing part in financing a great war. Now to men of large affairs women have al- ways been the sex that cheers but does not finance. Many male leaders in Liberty Loan work, therefore scoffed at the idea of a Wom- an's Liberty Loan Committee, just as their 86 A NATIONAL PROGRAM FOR WOMEN 87 grandfathers might have scoffed at the idea of a Woman's College. Sometimes when they were asked to "cooperate" with the local rep- resentatives of the Woman's Committee they did not understand the difference between co- operation and deglutination. But the Com- mittee went right on working and as a conse- quence of its activity practically a third of the sums realized in the different campaigns was secured through the Woman's Committee, and — an even more important result — women were brought to think of government for the first time in terms of finance. For the first time, also, they saw the close relation between family finance and national. Thus a county chairman of the Woman's Committee was recounting with some pride the fact that her county organization in a poor county had, during the Third Drive, sold $40,000 of bonds. "We women worked mighty hard," she said. "Why, during the last two weeks I never could get a minute to cook dinner. We had to eat at the hotel and I just felt that I was offering my husband's digestion on the altar of my country. And 88 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP Mrs. Roberts, our vice-chairman, she wrote to our congressman telling him they hadn't had any pork in her family since the war broke out and she didn't want any of the money we'd worked so hard to get spent for what the pa- pers call congressional 'pork' either." There will doubtless be other Loan cam- paigns, and more women to whom the pur- chase of a hundred dollar Liberty Bond has meant real sacrifice will be thinking of gov- ernment in terms of money. Then it may be the new woman voter, with the freshness of thought that comes from fresh- ness of experience, will say, "Since the Gov- ernment is telling us to save in our homes, why don't we tell it to save in governing — provided only that saving in no way affects the brave lads who are holding their rendezvous with death amid the grisly desolations of No Man's Land." It was the late Senator Aldrich who said that a capable business man, by eliminating use- less office-holders and duplicating offices and running the Government on a budget system, could run it on $50,000,000 less annually than A NATIONAL PROGRAM FOR WOMEN 89 it was then costing. And that was before the War, in those comparatively penurious days when the Government was spending only about a billion dollars a year. Since the outbreak of the War, American housewives have received tons of literature urg- ing them to put their households on a budget basis in the interest of domestic economy. Many of them have done so and have found it good. Perhaps they may yet join with their men folk in instructing their representatives to put our Government on a budget basis, too. This is perhaps the simplest illustration of the financial connection- between quiet Amer- ican homes and the government of a great Federal Republic. The connection between family spending and national spending. When all American women are admitted to full citizenship, when equal suffrage has be- come not a news item but a state of mind, I cherish a lively hope that they will see more plainly than they have thus far done other fundamental economic relations between house- keeping and the national government. It is no cause for surprise or disappointment 90 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP that they have thus far seen those relations only dimly, that they have used their votes merely to make wall paper improvements in their House of Life. Even if Western women, who until a year ago were the only women voters in the coun- try, had been wise enough to understand clearly how many household problems are really matters for political action, they could hardly have been expected to accomplish, over night and single-handed, what, during these past four years, it has taken the voice of the earthquake and the voice of famine and the voice of a world on fire to set our thoughts toward accomplishing — sometime. Manufacturers are already setting forth a National Program for After the War The Labor Party of England published, months ago, its National Labor Program for After the War. Educators are discussing an Educational Program for After the War. And though I do not believe that the inter- ests of women are segregated from the inter- ests of men, at least a Woman's Program for A NATIONAL PROGRAM FOR WOMEN 91 After the War gives a ladder for an outlook. This Program might, perhaps, have two parts : Part I : For women who work inside their homes. Part II: For women who work outside them. "Mad! Quite Mad!" The Fathers of the Republic and many later statesmen in frock coats would pronounce the items in Part I, as when that Program might read : "Housewives shall no longer potter around, like Cinderellas, among the ashes of their own individual cook-stoves and family furnaces, when electric companies, whether private cor- porations controlled by the state or as a depart- ment of the state itself, can readily rid our homes of the wastefulness and dirt and drudg- ery and excessive cost of private fuel supplies — if only they have a mind to." I know of two cities only thirty-five miles apart in the same state. In one of them the Electric Company has "had a mind to" spe- cialize in the use of electricity for cooking pur- poses. The rates for electricity as fuel are 92 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP reasonable — though not nearly so low as they could be — and the housewife can put her din- ner on to cook, set some ingenious clockwork attachments to the stove, and then go off to the Red Cross Rooms to work for two or three hours with the certainty that dinner will be ready, warm and waiting, on her return home. In the other city an allied Electric Company "has a mind to" force the sale of gas for fuel, and electricity for that purpose is held so high, the obstacles to its use are so great, that only wealthy housewives, who don't have to do cook- ing and Red Cross work at the same time, can afford to use it. Yet both those electric companies are under the control of the Public Utilities Commission of the state and all the housewives are voters. Moreover the state law already gives that Commission power enough to force the Elec- tric Companies to fix "reasonable rates" for the commodities it sells — and, without any fur- ther authority, it could direct the Company of the second city to supply electricity for fuel at the same rate as it is supplied in the first city — if only it "had a mind to." A NATIONAL PROGRAM FOR WOMEN 93 And if the problem of heating our homes becomes, as it yet may, a national matter — in- deed it was made a national matter during the winter of 1917-1918 and will undoubtedly re- main one as long as the war continues — Amer- ican housewives should realize that when har- nessed to first-class brains there is enough "white coal" under the jurisdiction of the na- tional government, enough power hidden in all our mountain streams, in all our rivers run- ning to the seas, to drive our industries and at the same time make the individual family fur- nace as extinct in cities as is the family well with its old oaken bucket. And then there is the question of the retail price of other household commodities, a polit- ical question, too, now we all recognize that the venerable old doctrine called the "law of supply and demand" is dead — stone dead — killed by a complication of disorders combined with an overdose of cold-storage. Every voting housewife ought to under- stand, in simple terms, the need of a scientific readjustment of the production, distribution and consumption of foodstuffs — since such 94 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP knowledge is plainly shown to be necessary in woman's age-long business of feeding the hu- man race. Is the demand for that readjustment to be incorporated in the Woman's Program, Part I, for After the War? It should be, though all the shades of the Fathers of the Republic and all the ghosts of later statesmen in frock coats moan "Mad! Quite Mad!" So, in preparation for the working out of that program, women citizens, as one of the duties of good citizenship, should watch care- fully the results of war-time price fixing and the present measure of federal control over sugar profiteers and beef buccaneers and corn privateers — to give them the unpleasant names some students of the dinner table have fixed upon them. What about abattoirs and packing-houses? Shall they remain in their present hands or shall they be owned directly by the state or national government — or by the producers? What about municipal cold-storage plants? A NATIONAL PEOGRAM FOR WOMEN 95 Where they have been tried they have un- doubtedly reduced the cost of living, and the public has as good a right to demand them as it has to ask for public libraries — which may, indeed, in some cases be only another form of "cold-storage plants." One thing at least this war has made plain to every housewife who, though she may have mere domestic brains, is not a lunkhead, and that is she must not permit her kitchen to be tossed back again into the swirl and muddle and mess of the competitive food system after the war. The war has stabbed men and women alike into an understanding of the frenzied waste- fulness of that food system outside our homes — though some men did not come to under- stand it until they had got quite out of breath scolding women for their wastefulness inside THE HOME. (Here I recall a memory of the early days of our part in the War when, in Washington, I heard a high placed public official reprimand women for "starching their petticoats" in war- 96 PREPAEING WOMEN FOB CITIZENSHIP time, while his collar and cuffs and a glimpse of his shirt front showed the high gloss of reg- ular three-decker starching.) That wastefulness of consumption, inside the home, was often evident enough in the old days but even in its worst manifestations it was stark economy when compared with the waste- fulness of production and distribution outside the home. And now the housewife is coming to under- stand that the problems of production and dis- tribution have become, all of them, a part of the problem of consumption, which she has often been told is her "peculiar problem." Under the widening opportunities of citizen- ship and out of the experiences of war-time control of this production and distribution she is learning that the questions of her kitchen have become, or are becoming, practical polit- ical questions. Perhaps, until some of the processes that are now being tested have proved themselves, or been discredited, the Woman's Program for After the War may be content to borrow from the Program of the British Labor Party and A NATIONAL PROGRAM FOR WOMEN 97 declare that the American food system shall be built, under government control, "on care- fully planned cooperation in production and distribution for the benefit of all who partici- pate in it by hand or brain" — and for the bene- fit of the American dinner table, no less. These are only a few of the items in the Woman's Program for After the War, Part I. As for Part II, which concerns women who work outside of the home, that is not waiting until after the war for action. The demand of that Program is that, espe- cially during the war, the government must recognize the industrial citizenship of women however old "statesmen" — not yet resolved to ghosts — may delay their full political citizen- ship. That is a need which has become poignant with the great influx of women into war in- dustries and the delay and difficulty of organ- izing many of those industries. So the program asks the government when it has dealings with labor, by whatever boards or commissions or through whatever labor pol- 98 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP icies, to make no invidious distinctions between men and women workers as it has generally done in the past — recognizing the men as "workers" but the women as "sex" — but to treat both alike as industrial citizens with equal rights and equal responsibilities. This program, it may be granted, will need to be urged upon many women workers with even greater insistence than upon the govern- ment. For all the efforts that have been put forth by women's organizations and labor organiza- tions to prevent the wrecking of labor stand- ards by manufacturers who practice the higher cannibalism on women workers, there is a great deal of "patrioteering" going on in every part of the country to-day, with the "consent" of women workers who, perhaps, see no reason why they should have equal pay with men for equal work when they have been told by tra- dition and conventions and laws that they are quite unequal to men. The Woman's Program, Part II, sees this difficulty for, whatever its shortcomings, it is not an ostrich. A NATIONAL PROGRAM FOR WOMEN 99 It knows the way may be long and hard to the general acceptance of the democratic equal- ity of women in industry as in the state. But, it knows, also, though program writing is often merely a waste of good white paper, that in the case of this item of the program the thing that is written is the thing that is to be. CHAPTER X WOMEN AND THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA A distinguished statesman once went to a dealer in birds to buy a canary for his wife. "I want a good singer," he explained, "and I am credibly informed that only the male canary sings. None of your birds are sing- ing now and how do I know that this bird you are recommending is masculine?" "Oh, that's easy," answered the honest dealer. "I will send out to my back yard and get a nice fresh fat worm. See, here is the worm. Now you must hold it up to the cage — so. If it's a he-bird he'll take it. See! He took it." So the statesman paid for the bird and went away well pleased with his purchase. But when he got home and told the story to his wife she asked, "What would the she-bird have done?" Then he began to wonder. IOO WOMEN AND THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA 101 When I read in books — in this one, for in- stance^ — that certain characteristics are mascu- line and certain others are feminine, that men do a thing so and women thus, I always want to get my hands on a brother and sister with the same ancestors and the same traditions, grown up with the same circle of friends and, so far as possible, the same education, and hold up the same test before them. If he "takes it," what will she do? Suppose the test is labeled "The Democratic Idea"? If the man "takes it" what will the woman do? Of course, in such a case, any talk about women is complicated by the fact that you never know when you will run into a Lady. The Lady has no comprehension of democ- racy. She is the product of privilege and sex specialization and the feudal idea. She has no place in American life, but she once flour- ished here abundantly, representing in her per- fumed and silken person the anti-social, un- democratic forces of our social life. She is supported by the labor of others. Her only 102 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP use is her uselessness. Her only duty, as she sees it, is to be luxurious — for the sake of the poor. The Lady is not nearly so much in evidence as she was a few years ago. She is relapsing into the woman, the process of reversion being accelerated by the war. But some still remain who, if they were offered the opportunity of becoming real human beings on condition of giving up all claim to special consideration, still would choose the sweetness of having doors opened for them by inferior creatures. (It is the Lady who still heads Anti-Suf- frage Societies, her mental processes on the subject being perfectly logical. Why should she want a vote when at the polls she would count for no more than her cook?) When she thinks of the people — to adapt President Wilson to the occasion — she does not include herself. But to return to the test I proposed for the brother and sister with the democratic idea. I am assuming that the sister is a real woman. WOMEN AND THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA 108 If the democracy with which the two are tested is canned, the woman will probably "take it" quite as readily as the man. In other words, she is quite as likely to understand the theory of democracy as her brother. If, however, the democracy is fresh, if it is a matter not of theory but of contact, then, perhaps — The real test of democracy is not one's theory of government but one's attitude toward work and toward people. Here comes the difficulty in giving that test to the brother and sister. Its fairness, as I have said, must be based on their having prac- tically the same education. But that is impossible; so the test is off. The brother and sister may have studied philosophy together and chemistry and geom- etry and history; but it is life that educates us, not books. Now life in America, for all its snobberies and its soft shell "aristocracies" of wealth, does educate the average boy demo- cratically while, at least until very lately, it has educated the average girl away from de- mocracy. 104 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP Even from books — the same books — a boy and girl have learned different lessons. As little children they read the same fairy stories with their princes and princesses. The prince was a prince, to be sure, but' he had to be some- thing more. He had to kill an ogre or liber- ate a princess. He had to do something, while the princess had nothing in the world to do except to be more beautiful than the morning. So as they grew up the brother learned that in America a man has to do something in order to be somebody — which is a tolerable primary lesson in democracy. The sister learned, with life for her teacher — or, at least, she did learn till the war smashed all conventions — that an American woman who worked was considered by that very fact to belong to an inferior order. She found one class of women protected and another class preyed upon, society consenting. Very naturally, then, she acquired an in- verted democracy. All about her she saw men either kneeling to women or pulling them round by the hair. She heard men calling women angels — and locking them up. Women were "queens" — WOMEN AND THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA 105 but they had to eat out of the hands of men. No wonder her idea of democracy was often addled. She heard men declaiming that "woman is infinitely better than man" and then she found those same men unwilling to treat women as if they were as good, barring them away from the democracy of the vote. Then, perhaps, if she stayed around and lis- tened, as I have done, she would hear some Mr. Doddy declaring "women are by their very nature undemocratic." (God made such Mr. Doddys — but you will nowhere read that He pronounced them good.) So it was only fair for me to call off the testing of that brother and sister with the idea of democracy. It might be expected that while he "took it" she would hide her head under her hat. But wait a bit ! Perhaps I am all wrong about that sister. Perhaps she has been a captain or a private in the suffrage cause. In that case I would will- ingly risk the test of the democratic idea, know- 106 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP ing she would "take it" quite as readily as he would. It was the suffrage cause that gave many thousands of American women their first prac- tical understanding of the meaning of democ- racy. Their struggle for the vote was far more than a struggle for a vote ; it was a strug- gle for the soul of democracy. The equal suf- frage movement is the most democratic move- ment that has ever swept over America, sur- passing the labor movement because it knows no class boundaries. The women who marched in suffrage pa- rades learned that in such marching women and democracy must keep step. It was the marching woman who decreed "Stop cosseting The Lady and give the woman who works fair play." "That's one of our ideas about democracy," said the marching women. Oh, but it was a glory, that marching to- gether! It takes a biped to march. Wax- work figures are barred from parades. "We've come to the place where we can take WOMEN AND THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA 107 democracy for granted and stop talking about it," said the marching women. And in those luminous words they "took it" — the democratic idea. The test of good citi- zenship in a democracy. The test for men. The test for women. To stop talking about democracy and busy ourselves with its details. To stop talking about democracy and think about making life more just. To stop talking about democracy and get schools opened as social centers. To stop talking about democracy and set about securing women workers a living wage. To stop talking about democracy and work for a United States Supreme Court that is not the slave of phrases. To stop talking about democracy and so find time to bestow a little tolerance — even on pacifists. To stop talking about democracy and de- termine that the female prostitute shall have as fair treatment as the male prostitute. To stop talking about democracy and say "We," not "They." So, in stopping our talk about democracy 108 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP and busying ourselves with the details of de- mocracy, the qualities of democracy, we learn that democracy is of a piece with all its quali- ties. We learn to live democracy. We make it a gospel and not merely large language. We make it worthy of the definition once given of democracy by a Polish Jew. I had been trying to teach this young man, an eager immigrant, something of the mean- ing of democracy, the meaning of America. My lesson had been faltering enough, for my words seemed always stumbling against circumstances. At last I took my stand on Lincoln's bulwark words, "A government of the people, for the people and by the people. Then, wishing to know if my words had made any impact, I said to the young Jew, "Now tell me, what is democracy?" And the wanderer from a far land made an- swer, "Democracy is the practice of righteous- ness." A dream. A vision. The sum of all the dreams of marching women and of men who also see the vision. WOMEN AND THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA 109 Some day, it may be, if enough of us stop talking about democracy and practice it, we may, as Jean Paul puts it, "waken from our lofty dream to find that the dream is still there, and that nothing is gone from us but our sleep." America will be a great country in that day for she will be living up to the phrases we are now all using. She will be a just country for what some of us now dare to dream of she will dare to do. CHAPTER XI SAFE IN THE WIDE, WIDE WORLD "Oh, I didn't know they sang that now!" The gates of the evening were open on beauty. The clustered college buildings, rather commonplace by day, took on some of the dim beauty of storied Camelot. There was beauty to the brim in the sunset's after- glow, in the flash of the college lake through the woodsy vista, in the soft wind through the trees and the cluster of white lilies that gleamed like a hush from a dim thicket. Beauty with an exquisite distilled wistfulness. Then, out of the shadows, around the path by the lake there came, that early June eve- ning, the chorus of young voices : "Where, oh where, are the good old Seniors? Safe now in the wide, wide world." "Oh, I didn't know they sang that now!" no SAFE IN THE WIDE, WIDE WORLD 111 And the woman who spoke, returned after many years for Commencement at her Alma Mater, felt a catch at her throat as she heard those words she used to sing herself on the commencement evenings of her college days, dim and sweet as the dimming shadows around her — "Safe now in the wide, wide world." It is not easy to say just what meaning we gave to those words in the old college days. Very possibly "the wide, wide world" did hold in it the thought of a trip to Europe, or maybe even to Egypt. But "the wide, wide world" was merely a phrase in most of our minds, no doubt, and the "safety" was snug — including safety from further examinations. American women, with occasional rare ex- ceptions, have never cultivated an international comprehension or, for that matter, an interna- tional interest — outside of routes where one used to buy lace and go through picture gal- leries. Paris, of course, and London and Venice — but the Kiel Canal, and the Czecho- slovaks— "Dear! Dear! Little Old Amer- ica's a wide enough world for me." 112 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP And when I say "woman" I twist precedent a little and make the feminine word include the masculine also. "Another mix-up in the Balkans, did you say? Huh! Who do you think we'd better run for mayor? I tell you we've got to have a new chief -of -police. The town's full of sec- ond-story men and I wouldn't choose Brown for watchman of my hen-house!" Then something happened. One summer evening Mrs. Lafferty told the Judge, her husband, that she was "dread- fully worried" about Jack. He'd been grow- ing so fast and studying so hard and now he'd got through with those dreadful examinations for Yale wouldn't it be a good thing for him to go up with the Smith boys to their camp in Maine? And the Judge answered, "Mighty good idea. Keep him out of mischief." The next morning, when the Judge had gone to Court, Mrs. Lafferty opened the paper and saw something about a prince being shot while making a visit to an Austrian province in the Balkans, but she hadn't time to read it through, SAFE IN THE WIDE, WIDE WORLD 11$ there was so much to be done getting Jack safely off — Jack is now fighting in Champagne — un- less he has finished his fight and lies under the tortured earth of France with a wooden cross above him. Mrs. Lafferty and millions of other Amer- ican women, the Judge and millions of other American men, have learned that "little old America" is not safe enough for them or their boys or their daughters in nurses' uniform, so long as Belgium is not safe, or Armenia or Alsace-Lorraine or Palestine. They have learned that a thief on a throne in Austria is a greater menace to their homes than "a town full of second-story men"; that a Berlin-Bagdad railroad is costing them bil- lions in taxes; that machine guns must lap up American blood by cisternfuls until little chil- dren in Poland can sleep in peace. So, for the first time in our history, Amer- ican women, as well as men, are beginning to think international thoughts however falter- ingly. The wide, wide world can never be a safe 114 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP place so long as the morality between nations is the morality of the wolf pack. That is clear enough. We may call it Les- son One in Internationalism — and use that word "Belgium" as a marker. The wide, wide world can never be safe so long as kings are permitted to make monkey- shines before God with their soul-insulting non- sense about ruling by divine right. Kings themselves may be harmless enough, no doubt, if people know what to do with them, and they obey the laws. But the Kings who are God- paranoiacs, the kings possessed of such power that with a penstroke of their fingers they can turn a world into a slaughter-house — No! The safety of Boston and the safety of Omaha and the safety of the sheep man in Australia demands that they go. No wonder such kings are whistling through a gravevard to keep their courage up. So Lesson Two in Internationalism commits itself to memory. Men, women and children can never be safe SAFE IN THE WIDE, WIDE WORLD 115 in the wide, wide world while the state exists in the minds of people — so far, at least, as its foreign relations are concerned — as an entity quite apart from the people who compose it. Germany has led in this posturing before the "State," but Germany is only the chief among sinners. The state is made up of men, women and children, it has no existence without them, and the government of the state should be merely an instrument for attaining the well- being of those men, women and children. But gather a few muddling, bald-headed men together, call them "the chancelleries of Eu- rope," and immediately they begin to talk about "empire" and "necessary expansion" and "power" and "manifest destiny" till those abstract words seize them by the throat and before they are done with it the earth is churned with cannon, the skies are dropping poison, and men are dying for words, just words, that have no contact with their real interests. Lesson Three in Internationalism, then, nat- urally reads: States are not idols for burnt offerings and blood offering; states are people — and the decencies the law exacts from peo- 116 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP pie composing a state it must also exact from the states composed of People. Does all this seem a large subject, outside the range of women untrained even in the local demands of good citizenship? If it does, that is because we are still ob- sessed with the sound of that swelling phrase, "The chancelleries of Europe." (The power of sound is generally greater than the power of sense.) The Lessons in Internationalism, thus far, are simple, practical instructions for making the world safe for Michael and Michaelina. And if the Third Lesson has brought us plump into the words "International Law," which most American women — and men — used to regard as something or other that other na- tions ought to respect, all we have to do is to pull the phrase down from its perch among the "chancelleries," look it over, and observe that, for all its mouthings, International Law is merely an ordered system of decencies be- tween nations. Then a review of Lesson. Third in Internationalism helps us to bring SAFE IN THE WIDE, WIDE WORLD 117 into relief the fact that "decencies between nations," composed as they are of individual citizens, have actually to do, not with lines on a map or the glory of chancelleries, but with the welfare of those individual citizens. When a woman gets down to personalizing International Law she forthwith proceeds to make an honest man of it — no matter how many international railroads and canals and coaling stations and harbors there are to mud- dle the "chancelleries." So Lesson Four in Internationalism writes itself: Call in the police to guard the de- cencies. With that word "police" comes the idea of that much discussed League of'Nations whose primary purpose is to keep peace between na- tions. Here many questions about how to make the League a workable organization will naturally thrust themselves upon women who wish to go beyond the outlines of the Four Elementary Lessons in Internationalism. Questions about the manner in which the work of the League 118 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP is to be administered, about an International Council, and an International Court to decide disputes between the nations, and the ways for enforcing those decisions. These are important questions, going to the very roots of the serviceableness of such a League; but they all resolve themselves ulti- mately into the practical matters that every woman who has had any personal experience in our courts, whether as plaintiff or defendant, is quite able to recognize with the naked eye, — matters of judges and juries and police. And the reason for them all — women can- not stress this fact too strongly — is not that the "chancelleries" may play, as in the past, a solemn game of hop-scotch at The Hague, but that the world mav be made safe for Michael and Michaelina. This fact being definitely understood, the duty of American women, zealous to do their duty as citizens, is plainly not so much with the ways of doing things as in rousing pub- lic opinion to a desire for the things to be done. If that desire for permanent peace is strong SAFE IN THE WIDE, WIDE WORLD 119 enough in the souls of people the Ways of Doing Things will reveal themselves out of the stir and passion and stabbings and long- ings and experiences of the days that are over. In truth, their foundations are already laid, there where the tide of battle has for four years been swaying back and forth among the Rivers of France. It is only a question of more blocks of stone and more mortar — and more, always more, of the driving force of public opinion. So, to sum it all up, the humblest little woman in the narrowest little home may have her share in building this League of the Na- tions on the Good Will of the Nations. Even the humblest woman, I repeat, is doing her share in this building when she stops asking "Why don't they do something?" and says "We must do something." For so she be- comes a part of that driving force of public opinion. So she proves her good citizenship. So she helps to assure, adding her weight of opinion to the driving mass, that at the close of the war, as during the war, America will cast her gigantic weight into the scales for 120 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP building up an international court with its judges and juries and police force. She helps to assure that every American life lost in this war pledges this country to insist with all its might that the nations of the earth shall henceforth obey the law so that rivalry over trade routes or over domination in the Balkans shall never again drag the peoples of the earth into the red dance of death. CHAPTER XII MEN AND WOMEN Some things are so obvious there is no need of putting them in a book. One of them is that women have been in ex- istence for some time. Another is that they cast a shadow, just as men do. Still another is that in politics, as in the home and in industry and in the professions, women may well aspire to be the allies and the equals of man — but nothing more ! Eager young suffrage campaigners, to be sure, have promised more, dwelling fondly on the fact that woman with the ballot in her hand will forthwith regenerate politics and the na- tion. The Blessed Young Ones have meant it, too — that is one reason why they have been able to fight so gloriously. A certain form of self-hypnosis is ever present with leaders in great reforms. Without it they could hardly "go over the top." 121 122 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP It should be remembered, moreover, that the "Outs" have always promised redemption when they should become the "Ins." Suffra- gists who make large promises merely show they are possessed of the characteristics most human in human nature. Women citizens have brought a new impulse into political life. They have shown they will cultivate fields that men alone might never think of cultivating — but even those fields they can cultivate to better advantage if they work side by side with men. When the ballot was granted to women for the first time under modern conditions, in Wyoming, fifty years ago, it was not given in order that the Higher Life might come down to cure the Lower. It was given because men and women out in those harsh lands were part- ners, in the truest sense, and the men saw no reason why that partnership should end at the ballot-box. Even before the vote was officially granted to the women of Wyoming, so Colorado "Fifty-Niners" assure me, pioneer women of MEN AND WOMEN 123 Colorado voted beside their men, though the men didn't take the trouble to make a law on the subject. There have been a good many books written about the development of equal suffrage, but the story has been told more adequately in bronze than by any written words. On a circular plot of ground fronting the State Capitol in Denver, where busy traffic meets and crosses from streets to the North and streets to the East and the West and the South, there stands a memorial to those rugged days called the Pioneer Monument. Three bronze groups surround a central granite plinth, with another figure a-top. Art critics, I understand, have had things to say about the "composition" of the monument and have pointed out a defect in this group or the other one — just like that! But not even the youngest critic of them all has had anything but praise for the group called "The Pioneer Mother." It represents a woman, strong and fine in 124 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP figure, noble in countenance, holding in her left arm, as in a cradle, a little child, while her right hand grasps a musket. There is the whole story of pioneering days in the Great West. There, too, is the story of equal suffrage. For that simple bronze figure tells how when the pioneer man traveled across the desert and across the distance to hew a state out of the wil- derness the pioneer woman traveled with him. She went with him up into the mountain vastnesses, when, as in Colorado, the pioneer was a gold seeker. She helped him as he placed the logs for their first rude cabin. She helped him, I have seen the places where she stood and helped him, as he sifted the gold from the sands of the mountain streams, up among the crags, up among the peaks, up by the eagle's nest. That valiant pioneer woman, facing hardships with a song, facing the dark with a smile, as she bore her children amid the wide silences of lonely lands. And then, as the months and the years passed by and some occasion took the Pioneer Father away from his home, perhaps to take MEN AND WOMEN 125 his gold dust, for exchange, down to the hud- dle of shacks that now is Denver, the Pioneer Mother was left alone. No! No! Not alone; for her children were with her. And she could not be afraid. She dared not be — for they must be protected. Her musket was always ready. Day and night it was ready — for prowling mountain wolves or for the lurk- ing Redman. Very early in those pioneer days the men of the solitary camps and the ragged settle- ments would come together much as some of them used to gather in the old town meetings in New England, to decide on any matters of government they thought necessary and elect a few officials — sheriffs, most frequently, as sheriffs did not last long in those days. And — here is the point of the story — in those earliest days the pioneer women used to go to the meetings with their men folks and they used to vote with their men folks, too, when occasions came for voting. There were never any speeches about woman's rights, no banners with "Votes for Women." Somebody asked, just casually, at the first of these meetings, 126 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP "Can the women vote, too?" And somebody answered, "Good Lord! Why not?" And that ended the matter. They just voted. There was no click-clack about this being "woman's sphere" and that being man's. Their "sphere" was one — a sphere of equal hardships and equal comradeships. And when it came to a question of equal interest in the affairs of their camps and hamlets and an equal right to have a say-so about them — "Good Lord! Why not?" This, I repeat, was in the very earliest days. To be sure, when a formal government was established with the sophistications men had been accustomed to in their homes in the East or South the "makers of the state" got care- less about women and forgot they were mak- ers of the state, too. So women were left out of the constitution of Colorado, for a few years, till the women themselves of the pioneer days began saying to their husbands and sons, "We used a musket, all right, so I guess our hands are strong enough to hold a ballot!" And the men could only answer, "Good Lord! Why not?" MEN AND WOMEN 127 So the vote was given to western women, merely as a little piece of unfinished business left over from pioneer day There are two recurring periods in modern history where women are never crowded out of their half share in humanity. No gibber- ing about women being mysterious creatures, "sphinxes." No sex mincings. The days may be dirty and the days may be mad, but at least they are not filled with fiddlings about women as frail, sheltered, useless creatures, with twangings of ridicule and contempt for — "lovely woman." With all their essential dif- ferences they have at least that one good thing in common. The two periods are pioneer times and war times. Pioneer days brought the ballot to groups of western women — in sunbonnets. War brought the ballot to New York women — just as some of them were putting on over- alls. The days of war are still with us. And every war is a woman's war quite as truly as 128 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP it is a man's war. Men and women must work and suffer — together — in war time. And the pioneer days — are they over? Pioneer days are over if by pioneering we mean, only, hewing a way through forests of trees, planting a wilderness. There is no longer any geographical fron- tier in our country. But how about the pioneer land of the spirit — the frontier land of Democracy? When we talk about Reconstruction Days that are coming we are talking about Pioneer Land. Great Days, it may be — but days set about with the wilderness. Days of lurking social problems no nation has ever solved but which in those coming days will demand a solution. A solution that must come, in most cases, through political action. The problems of the wage earner and the profiteer. There will be no more insistent one in the wilderness. The problem of the conservation of child- hood, of womanhood, too, and of manhood. The race problem — it gibbers in the wilder- MEN AND WOMEN 129 ness and it can never be settled by lynchings. The problem of poverty — it stings and poi- sons our social life. The problem of prosti- tution. The problem of the greedy forces and combinations that gormandize on' the Amer- ican family. The great overmastering problem of our democracy itself — how to keep it, indeed, a principle of life. This is the Pioneer Land of to-day, this is the Frontier Land of Reconstruction Days to- morrow. And through it, as in those earlier pioneer days, the pioneer women are traveling, and will travel, beside the men, across the desert and across the distance, valiantly meet- ing the problems, seeking ever to hew a way to a better country for all the children of all the people. Some people might put the problem of the relations, political and social and industrial, of men and women themselves as one of the great- est problems of Reconstruction Days. Yes. But they will hardly seem like problems if men and women solve them — together. Men, however, must rid themselves of sex 130 PREPARING WOMEN FOR CITIZENSHIP arrogance, the lurking feeling of sex-superi- ority so exasperating to all upstanding women ; and some women, it may be, must cure them- selves of the habit of looking down upon men as really belonging to a lower order of beings. For no man stands very well having news of that sort broken to him. Men and women, together, find their social values increase. Men and women together enact better laws than either can do apart. Men and women together bring a signifi- cance to citizenship that neither can bring alone. Together! That's the great word. THE END PRINTED IN TITE UNITED STATES OF AMERIOA The Eve of Election By JOHN B. HOWE Cloth, i2tno, $1.25 In preparing this volume, the writer has been inspired by a desire to be helpful to new and old voters alike, but especially to such of the enfranchised citizens of the gentler sex as may feel inclined to exam- ine its pages. Long a close student of politics, and serving for more than thirty-iive years in an edi- torial capacity in three of the large cities of the east, he is well qualified to write on this subject discrimin- atingly and helpfully. What he has witnessed and learned have given him an insight into old political methods and abuses, some of which he recalls for their instructive and monitory values. It has been his pur- pose to emphasize the moral and civic influence of every ballot rightly cast and of the opportunity the polling booth opens to the humblest citizen. American Cities: Their Methods of Business By ARTHUR BENSON GILBERT Cloth, i2mo, $1.25 Mr. Gilbert considers in this volume the economic advantages which are derived from the promotion of efficient and prosperous city government. It is a vol- ume that will appeal strongly to all students of municipal problems and one which citizens will find of distinct help in understanding the organization and working of the modern city. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York The City Worker's World in America By MARY KINGSBURY SIMKHOVITCH An unusually wide experience in Settlement and Friendly Visiting work attests Mrs. Simkhovitch's al- most unique qualifications for speaking with authority on the phases of city life covered by her book. Our industrial population is grouped almost entirely in urban communities. This class furnishes by far the largest element in every American city. The condi- tions under which the city workers live are a matter of vital concern to the nation's welfare. A comprehensive and vivid picture of these condi- tions is given in " The City Worker's World in Amer- ica." Among the topics covered are The Industrial Family, Dwellings, Standard of Living, Education, At Work, Leisure, Health, Poverty, Politics, etc. The book abounds in suggestions of the most practical kind, while the information it affords is of great value to every social worker. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York Cooperation: The Hope of the Consumer By EMERSON P. HARRIS, President of the Montclair Cooperative Society. With an Introduction by John Graham Brooks. Cloth, i2tno, $2.00 The failure of Our Middlemanism, Reasons and the Remedy, Practical Cooperation, Background and Out- look, are the titles of the four parts into which this work is divided. The author's purpose has been to discuss cooperative purchasing, to show why it is de- sirable, to indicate the evils which it reforms, to pre- sent the operation of a cooperative store and to con- sider the difficulties which must be overcome. " Mr. Harris could have chosen no happier moment for his message than the present," says John Graham Brooks, in his Foreword. " The consumer has been the ' forgotten man.' From big business down to ob- scure quackeries he has been fleeced almost without protest. Into this conspiracy of ignorance, wasteful- ness and sharp practices the shock of war has come. The awakening is rude but the consumer has got the stage. Already millions of us are looking back won- dering at the slavish acquiescence with which we took our punishment. We are most amazed, perhaps, that we should have submitted to methods of secrecy which have been as mischievous in business as in diplomacy." THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York BOOKS BY JANE ADDAMS The Newer Ideals of Peace i2tno, Cloth, Leather Back, $1.25 "A clean and consistent setting forth of the utility of labor as against the waste of war, and an exposition of the altera- tion of standards that must ensue when labor and the spirit of militarism are relegated to their right places in the minds of men." — Chicago Tribune. Democracy and Social Ethics izmo, Cloth, Leather Back, $1^5 "Its pages are remarkably — we were about to say refresh- ingly — free from the customary academic limitations . . . ; in fact, are the result of actual experience in hand to hand con- tact with social problems." — Review of Reviews. The Spirit of Youth in the City Streets i2mo, Cloth, $1^5 A protest against the practice of every large city of turn- ing over to commercialism practically all the provisions for public recreation, leaving it possible for private greed to starve or demoralize the nature of youth. Twenty Years at Hull-House Illustrated, Decorated Cloth, 8vo, $2.00 Jane Addams's work at Hull-House is known throughout the civilized world. In the present volume she tells of her endeavors and of their success — of the beginning of Hull- House, of its growth and its present influence. For every one at all interested in the improvement of our cities in the moral education of those who are forced to spend much of their time on the streets or in cheap places of amusement "Twenty Years at Hull-House" is a volume of more than ordinary interest and value. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York