[Illustration:  SUFFRAGE DEMONSTRATION IN UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK]

However long-deferred Woman Suffrage may prove to be, it is pretty generally conceded that women will inevitably vote some day.  The evolution of society will bring them into political equality with men just as it has brought them into intellectual and industrial equality.  The first woman who followed her spinning-wheel out of her home into the factory was the natural ancestress of the first woman who demanded the ballot.

The application of steam to machinery took women’s trades out of the home and placed them in the factory.  The effect of this was that men were confronted with a singular dilemma.  They had to choose between two courses; they had to support their women in idleness, or else they had to allow them to leave the home and go where their trades had gone.  The first course involving the intolerable burden of doing their own and their women’s work, they were obliged to choose the second.  The jealously-guarded doors of the home were opened, and little by little, grudgingly, the men admitted women to full industrial freedom.

Women’s housekeeping, or most of it, has gradually been withdrawn from the home and transferred to the municipality.  There was a time when women could ensure their families pure food, good milk, clean ice, proper sanitation.  They cannot do that now.  The City Hall governs all such matters.  Again the men find themselves facing the old dilemma.  They must either support their women in idleness—­do all their own as well as the women’s housekeeping—­or they must allow their women to leave the home and follow their housekeeping to the place where it is now being done,—­the polls.

Women are beginning to understand the situation.  They are even beginning to understand how badly the men are providing for the municipal family.  They are demanding their old housekeeping tasks back again.  To this point has the Suffrage movement, begun in 1848 by a band of women called fanatics, arrived.

CHAPTER XI

IN CONCLUSION

I have tried to set down in these pages the collective opinion of women, as far as it has expressed itself through deeds.  I have not succeeded if any reader lays down the book with the impression that he has merely been reading the story of the American club woman.  I have not succeeded at all if my readers imagine that I have been writing only about a selected group of women.  What I have meant to do is to show the instinctive bent of the universal woman mind in all ages, reflected in the actions of the freest group of women the world has ever seen.