We were joined by a church society of hundreds of Lutheran women,
because Scandinavian women had exercised the municipal franchise
since the seventeenth century and had found American cities
strangely conservative; by organizations of working women who had
keenly felt the need of the municipal franchise in order to secure
for their workshops the most rudimentary sanitation and the
consideration which the vote alone obtains for workingmen; by
federations of mothers' meetings, who were interested in clean
milk and the extension of kindergartens; by property-owning women,
who had been powerless to protest against unjust taxation; by
organizations of professional women, of university students, and
of collegiate alumnae; and by women's clubs interested in municipal
reforms. There was a complete absence of the traditional women's
rights clamor, but much impressive testimony from busy and useful
women that they had reached the place where they needed the
franchise in order to carry on their own affairs. A striking
witness as to the need of the ballot, even for the women who are
restricted to the most primitive and traditional activities,
occurred when some Russian women waited upon me to ask whether
under the new charter they could vote for covered markets and so
get rid of the shocking Chicago grime upon all their food; and
when some neighboring Italian women sent me word that they would
certainly vote for public washhouses if they ever had the chance
to vote at all.
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