What Is This Government?By Mrs. Belle Case La Follette(American contemporary. Wife of the United States Senator, Robert La Follette. The following is from a speech on suffrage, given in Boston.)
By Mrs. Belle Case La Follette
(American contemporary. Wife of the United States Senator, Robert La Follette. The following is from a speech on suffrage, given in Boston.)
What is this government that we women have been taught to think of as something so remote from our interests, so unrelated to the immediate personal preoccupations of our daily lives? There are three great matters in which we are all concerned: religion, education and government. In religion men and women share equally (indeed, men sometimes are content that women should do more than their share). In education it has come to pass that both men and women participate equally, though that was not always so. It is less than two generations that our universities and even our high schools have been open to women upon the same terms as to men.
But government is considered as man’s exclusive province—a limitation that has narrowed the lives of the women, that has robbed the children, and that has reacted most injuriously upon the State. For with what matters does government concern itself? Why, with matters that touch intimately home happinessand home prosperity, with laws and regulations that guard and further human lives.