WENDELL PHILLIPS ON SUFFRAGE

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXVI, Issue 8264, 29 October 1912, Page 4

WENDELL PHILLIPS ON SUFFRAGE

Wealth, comfort and ease say, “i have rights enough.” Nobody doubted it, madam 1 But the question is not of you; the question is of some houseless wife of a drunkard; the question is of some ground-down daughter of toil. Give men honest wages and ninetynine out of a hundred will disdain to steal. Give a woman the same labor gives to man, and ninety-nine out ot on© hundred will disdain to purchase it by vice. That hideous problem or modem civilised life—prostitution—is born ot orthodox scruples and autocratic fastidiousness; bom of fthat fastidious denial of the right of woman to choose her own work, and, like her brother, to satisfy her ambition, her love of luxury, her love of material gratification, by fair wages fhr fair work. As long as you deny it, as long as the pulpit covers with its fastidious orthodoxy this question from the consid- f eration of the public, it is hut a concealed brothel, although it calls itself an orthodox pulpit. Mftp say, * ‘Woman b is so different from man that God did not mean she should vote.” Is she? Then I do not know how to vote for her. , . • None know what it is to live till (they redeem life from ii» seeming monotony by laying it a sacrifice on the altar of some great cause.