Era:
Year Created: 1874
Collection this Document is Affiliated with:
The theory of woman’s rights meets with much opposition, but the broadest and most catholic latitude is allowed it in practice. Three ladies are practicing medicine here, one of whom has a surgical reputation, and all are prosperous, proving that California flesh is, after all, heir to disease, in spite of the climate. Ladies engage in money making and business pursuits without attracting the envy or opposition or contempt of the weak-minded of both sexes. If woman will but earnestly walk onward in the path of rectitude and duty, success will surely sooner or later crown her efforts.
A regular live Woman Suffrage Association is organized here, and is in good running and working order. Though women by no means yet enjoy equal rights they hope to do so by-and-by.
A lady applied for a vacant postoffice clerkship, but was told that she could not serve Uncle Sam in that capacity, for she was not a citizen. When she replied that as she was born in the United States, she would really like to be informed whose citizen she was if not Uncle Sam’s, the laughing rejoinder came, “Well, well, you’re a non-voting citizen, and it don’t pay to give clerkships to sich like.”
Another lady, a teacher, eminently qualified, and endorsed by many influential citizens, applied for the position of school superintendent. The position was almost awarded to
her, when, lo! the reigning powers pronounced her inelligible, because she was a “non-voting citizen.”
Non-voting citizens are permitted to pay taxes, to give birth to and rear voters, aided or unaided, as the case may be; to wash, to sew, to teach and to scrub; to be tried by a jury of voting citizens, to be imprisoned, and to be responsible as voting citizens in every responsible way, and yet enjoy only the political privileges of serfs and aliens, idiots, criminals and lunatics.