Female Suffrage

S >> Susan Fenimore Cooper >> Female Suffrage{This e-text has been prepared from the original two-part magazine
article, "Female Suffrage: A Letter to the Christian Women of
America," by Susan Fenimore Cooper, which appeared in Harper's
New Weekly Magazine, Vol. XLI (June--November, 1870), pp. 438-
446, 594-600. The author is identified only in the Table of Contents,
p. v, where she is listed as "Susan F. Cooper."

Transcribed by Hugh C. MacDougall
jfcooper@wpe.com

{Because "vanilla text" does not permit of accents or italics, accents
have been ignored, and both all-capital and italicized words
transcribed as ALL CAPITALS. Paragraphs are separated by a blank
line, but not indented. Footnotes by Susan Fenimore Cooper are
inserted as paragraphs (duly identified) as indicated by her asterisks.
All insertions by the transcriber are enclosed in {brackets}. For
readers wishing to know the exact location of specific passages, the
page breaks from Harper's are identified by a blank line at the end of
each page, followed by the original page number at the beginning of
the next.

{A Brief Introduction to Susan Fenimore Cooper's article:

{The question of "female suffrage" has long been resolved in the
United States, and--though sometimes more recently--in other
democratic societies as well. For most people, certainly in the so-
called Western world, the right of women to vote on a basis of
equality with men seems obvious. A century ago this was not the
case, even in America, and it required a long, arduous, and
sometimes painful struggle before the Nineteenth Amendment to the
United States Constitution was ratified on August 18, 1920.