March 13, 1912 — Joint Committee of the US Senate Judiciary Committee and the Woman Suffrage Committee, Washington DC

Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee: Yes; I have outdone the lady who went to work at 18 by five years. I have been a wage earner since I was a little over 13. I, too, know whereof I speak; that is the reason I do not want to play a bluff game with you any longer. You can not or will not make laws for us; we must make laws for ourselves. We working women need the ballot for self-protection; that is all there is to it. We have got to have it.

We work long, long hours and we do not get half enough to live on. We have got to keep decent, and if we go “the easy way” you men make the laws that will let you go free and send us into the gutter.

We can not believe in man-made laws any longer. We have gone from one assembly to another, from one State senator to another, and we have heard the same old story. You think only of output; there is not a soul among you who cares to save human beings. We have grown rich, as a nation, but we have grown very rotten. As a people — gentlemen, I use the term “rotten” advisedly — for, as far as the working women are concerned, the foundation we are building on is rotten. To purify the life of the Nation we women know we have got to do our part, political as well as industrial duty. Government, as a whole, rests on industry. You men say to us: “Go back to the home. Your place is in the home,” yet as children we must come out of the home at 11, at 13, and at 15 years of age to earn a living; we have got to make good or starve.

“Pay your way” we are taught in school and in church — the greatest thing on earth is to be able to pay your way. Well, if any people on earth pay their way in life we working women do. The return we get is that most of us become physical wrecks along the roadside of life. When you gentlemen hear what it costs a working woman to “pay her way” in life, you sit back in your chairs, say “the story is terrible, but they manage to live somehow.” Somehow — that is it, gentlemen. I want to make you realize the somehow of life to the hundreds of girls I have seen go down in the struggle. You men do not care. You want this country to get rich, and you do not know the only riches of a nation are its people. 

We have gone before legislature after legislature making our pleas for justice. We have seen the game as you play it. What is it? We go there and we are told the same old tommyrot — let men do this for you. I tell you as a bit of business experience if you let anybody do a thing for you they will do you. That is business.

Now, while we have had the colleges opened to women, only one woman in a thousand goes to college, while modern industry claims one woman in every five to-day. It is industrial methods which are teaching the women the facts I am telling you. “Do the other fellow before he gets a chance to do you” — do him so hard that he can not stand up again; that is good business. We know that, and we women are sure that there must be some higher standard for life than business.

We are not getting a square deal; we go before legislature after legislature to tell our story, but they fail to help the women who are being speeded so high in the mills and in factories, from 54 hours to 72 hours in stores in New York, and 92 hours in one week in subcellar laundries. Who cares? Nobody! Nobody does; nobody cares about making laws so long as we get cheap and nasty things in the market. Working women come before you and tell you these tings and think you will do something for them. Every man listening is convinced that the girls are telling the truth. It is only when you think of them as your own girls that you have the right to make laws for them. Every man listening wants to do the fair thing, but just as soon as our backs are turned, up comes the representative of the big interest and says, “Lad, you are dead politically if you do what those women ask.” They know it is true, and we get nothing, because all the votes are owned.

Every vote you cast is owned, and it is the owned vote which has fought our women. Go before legislatures as you will, the only argument that you can bring in to the man in politics — he is there to go up the ladder, decently if he can, but he will go up anyhow, if he can – the only argument that you can bring to that man is the power of the ballot. When we can say to him, “Man, do this and we will return you so many million votes,” he will listen and act.

This is what we want, because it is for the good of the women, because it is for the good of the whole people. It is for the reason that the working woman, facing the hard facts of life and having to fight her way, has come to the conclusion that you men in politics — I am not going to give you any taffy — you men in politics are not leaders, you follow what you think is the next step on the ladder. We want you to understand that the next step in politics, the next step in democracy, is to give to the women of your Nation a ballot.

The working women send me to you with the plain, honest truth; because, working beside you in the same mill or factory, we know you with your evening suit off and your tall hat in the box, or wherever it belongs; you are just a competitor with us there; we tell you the truth there, as I have come to tell you the truth here. Let women have the ballot, in order that you may once more throw the burden which you have carried, or thought you carried, onto them; that is the thing you have done since the beginning of time; when the load was too heavy for you you piled it onto Eve’s back. You have got us in a devil of a mess, economic and political. It is so rank it smells to Heaven, but we will come in and help you clean house. We will start all over again, because we belong together shoulder to shoulder. We must get on to a better time. It is only because you will not, in your prejudice and your ignorance, let us into the political field with you that the situation is as bad as it is to-day.

We working women want the ballot, not as a privilege but as a right. You say you have only given the ballot as an expediency; you have never given it as a right; then we demand it as an expediency for the 8,000,000 working women. All other women ought to have it, but we working women must have it.

Source: Hearings Before a Joint Meeting of the Judiciary Committee and the Committee on Woman Suffrage, U.S. Senate, Woman Suffrage, 62nd Cong., 2nd sess., (13 March 1912), pp. 22–24.

Also: One Half the People: The Fight for Woman Suffrage, eds. Anne Firor Scott and Andrew M. Scott (New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1975), pp. 126-128.