between men and women, thus placing women, though not apparently, yet
relatively and actually upon a lower level.

Again, the status of woman has been crushingly affected by the
contemporaneous and parallel change which has passed over her special
occupations; so that the conditions under which she works today are
decidedly less than ever before by purely personal relationships and
more by such impersonal factors as the trade supply of labor, and
interstate and international competition. This change has affected
woman in an immeasurably greater degree than man. The conditions
of industrial life are in our day in some degree controllable by
political power so that at this point woman again finds herself
civilly and industrially at greater disadvantage than when her status
in all these respects depended principally upon her individual
capacity to handle efficiently problems arising within an area limited
by purely personal relationships. To alter so radically the conditions
of daily life and industry, and not merely to leave its control in the
hands of the old body of voters, but to give over into the hands of an
enlarged and fresh body of voters, and these voters inevitably the men
of her own class who are her industrial competitors, that degree of
control represented by the vote and to refuse it to women is to place
women (though not apparently, yet actually and relatively) upon a
distinctly lowered level.

So that what suffragists are asking for is in reality not so much
a novel power, as it is liberty to possess and use the same new
instrument of social control as has been already accorded to men.
Without that instrument it is no mere case of her standing still. She
is in very truth retrogressing, as far as effective control over the
conditions under which she lives her life, whether inside the home or