AP Success - AP US History: Women's Rights in the Gilded Age

We, the women of this country, have no ballot even if we wished to use it, and the only way that we can be represented is to take a man to represent us. You men have made such a mess of it in representing us that we have not much confidence in asking you; and I for one feel very backward in asking the men to represent me...Bebel says that men have been slaves throughout all the ages, but that woman’s condition has been worse, for she has been the slave of a slave. There was never a greater truth uttered. We are the slaves of the slaves. We are exploited more ruthlessly than men. Wherever wages are to be reduced the capitalist class use women to reduce them … It is a bread and butter question, an economic issue, upon which the fight must be made...We mean that the land shall belong to the landless, the tools to the toiler, and the products to the producers...They are owned by the capitalist class. Do you believe they will allow you to go into the halls of the legislature and simply say, “Be it enacted that on and after a certain day the capitalist shall no longer own the tools and the factories and the places of industry, the ships that plow the ocean and our lakes?”