Page:The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage.djvu/53

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THE CASE AGAINST WOMAN SUFFRAGE

ciple of domestic partnership, "All yours is mine, and all mine's my own."

Next to the plea of justice, the plea which is advanced most insistently by the woman who is contending for a vote is the plea of liberty.

We have here, again, a word which is a valuable asset to woman suffrage both in the respect that it brings moral pressure to bear, and in the respect that it is a word of ambiguous meaning.

In accordance with this we have John Stuart Mill making propaganda for woman suffrage in a tractate entitled the Subjection of Women; we have a Woman's Freedom League —"freedom" being a question-begging synonym for "parliamentary franchise"—and everywhere in the literature of woman's suffrage we have talk of woman's "emancipation"; and we have women characterised as serfs, or slaves—the terms serfs and slaves supplying, of course, effective rhetorical synonyms for non-voters.

When we have succeeded in getting through