c.1915-1916 — International Congress of Women

Women had reached the point of thinking that war was an exclusively masculine business. Things would have happened differently if they had thought that war concerns them as directly as it does men. Even the victories that their own country praises weight on them in deep suffering. What can we say about the women victims of the violence and of the brutality of men? What can we say about the children and about the terrible evils they suffer? The women who have become conscious of their mission in this world cannot reject the part of the responsibility which corresponds to them. They should not continue to accept that war depends only on men. If the crime must continue, women are obligated to establish a new social organization. If not, the depletion of the human race will overtake us. We need the vote not only to widen our field of action, but also to defend the human race. We must free the world of this cursed militarism! Men have understood how resolved women are to achieve their rights. When this spring the Danish Parliament voted into law giving women the right of suffrage, there was only one opponent to the adoption of this law. 

Source: Mestiza Rhetorics: An Anthology of Mexicana Activism in the Spanish-Language Press, 1887-1922, eds. Jessica Enoch and Christina Devereaux Ramirez (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019), p. 185.