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Copyright, 1918, by
THE CENTURY Co.

This book is sent forth to meet the evident desire of the American woman to know more about her government. Its purpose is not to satisfy that desire but to stimulate it. The facts which it contains about the government have been selected mainly from one of Dr. Forman's books, "The American Republic." The introduction for the woman voter has been written by one whose supreme gifts are helping to bring about world recognition of the relationship between woman and government, Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance and of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

MARJORIE SHULER.

INTRODUCTION

THE VOTE AND THE VOTER

By CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT

President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance

Or the 27,011,330 women of voting age in the United States, more than one-third are now enfranchised, either as voters for presidential electors, or as fully as our present national laws permit women to be enfranchised. No woman in the United States is yet enfranchised as is her husband or her father or her son or her brother, and will not be until woman suffrage is incorporated in the national constitution. Not even then, unless she can come to hold her naturalization in her own person instead of as a cloak to be put on and off as she marries, unmarries or is widowed.

Whatever the voting strength of these more than 9,000,000 women of voting age may be, the fact of

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practical value for such a book as the present one is that a large and ever increasing number of women citizens are avid for information on the new questions of local, State and national government which women and men must now decide together. They are coming up to these questions with a vivid new ⚫ personal interest that bids fair to lift "civil government" out of the cold aloofness of academic discussion on the one side, and the "mire of politics" on the other. To be bromidic, women are going to humanize questions of government. That will not be, I think, because only to woman is given the human outlook on life, but because the human is composite of men and women and the human in the outlook of both is stirred and developed through cooperative rather than segregated work.

As emergent voters the women of America are today facing the same fundamental questions as to the new responsibility as are the young American man of twenty-one and the immigrant. The enfranchisement of woman, the coming of age of the young man, and the naturalization of the immigrant-there you have the three agencies through which the electorate of America is to be kept in a state of inquiry and action instead of in a condition of acquiescence and being.

A prime difference in the three cases is that the

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