of a cultural, sectarian, economic, or political class. We must guarantee the fundamental rights of every individual; and the fundamental rights are human, democratic rights — general, comprehensive, complete.
livelihood and living. Her language has more often than not been foreign and strange, and so too her inclinations, her hopes, her thoughts, her feelings, and her impulses. The want she feels in her ranks and in her life — whether emotional or economic or social — does not correspond to the milieu of the mass from which she came, nor does it agree with the want the poor woman feels... The mentality of the first differs from the mentality of the second, and her mental and emotional makeup differs from that of the other.
That is one side; on the other side, we observe that corruption among people is more widespread among men than among women, especially in a country morally conservative — in the way we know it among us — like ours. If we permit man — every man — to express his opinion by means of the vote at least, regardless of his morals, his culture, and his conduct, then we are opening the field wide to a great number of people who are unfit for it; and then at the very same time we withhold such powers from the ignorant woman, though for all her ignorance she is fitter than the man, sounder in intention, truer in voice... and more honorable... I heard someone comment on this new system by saying: "Is it reasonable that we should allow a low fellow who roams the alleys the whole day long, without work and without purpose, to vote because he is a man and nothing more, and then deny it to a woman who keeps to her house, washes for people, and stays up nights rearing her children and preparing them?... And that because she is uneducated?!.."
— 2 —
The truth is that we are all mistaken... The question, as I understand it, is not a question of man and woman, nor a question
of educated and illiterate; it is a question of the individual and the community... What I mean by that is that it is necessary that we find another measure by which to measure rights and powers, other than the measure of custom, sect, sex, and class. This measure must be a measure stripped of all these incidental considerations, and must spring from the individual's relation to the community, thereby guaranteeing rights and duties together. This, as I see it, is the essence of social life and the secret of its soundness. If woman obtains the right to vote — and the other rights — simply because she is an individual, she becomes equal in that with the other individuals, women and men, and she will thereby have reached with them the rank of the citizen who enjoys all that the other citizen enjoys and bears all that he bears... This means that equality is general for all people, and this is the aim toward which every movement, whatever its kind, must be directed. And if the aim of the state is not such equality, then there is no justification
whatever for the state's existence.
We must believe that man's right, insofar as he is a human being, and his duty as well, form an indivisible unity. The human element in the individual is more important than the secondary attributes — of sex, class, sect, and culture alike. And woman must not struggle for the things she believes to be women's merely because they are women's and nothing more; she is, like man, a citizen and a human being before all else, and she must build her social and political struggle on this real truth... Everything besides that, of the matters she considers purely women's, are matters private to her, which must not enter the sphere of the general community or the arena of politics. And when woman struggles on the basis of the individual and his relation to the state and the community, she will meet man on one human ground that makes her struggle and his more useful, more profitable, and further-reaching.
Woman wants to be emancipated, but she forgets that man among us is still an abject slave, fettered socially and intellectually at the
