interests in real estate the same as other persons; and by the Code of 1873 the power to control property and wages and to will the same was granted to women."

It is true that married women in Iowa have usually aided their husbands in saving a part of the family income. This surplus the husband could invest as he chose. If he invested it in property the wife was entitled to onethird thereof at his death, if there were children, and onehalf of it if there were no children. The other half went to his heirs. It is apparent that this rule of law worked a real hardship upon the widow where the estate when divided was insufficient to support her in comfort. And so, the injustice of this provision, which was equally hard upon the husband in case of the death of the wife, was remedied by an act of the Thirty-fifth General Assembly of Iowa which provides that when a person dies intestate without issue "the whole of the estate to the amount of seven thousand five hundred dollars ($7,500.00), after the payment of the debts and expenses of administration, and one-half (2) of all the estate in excess of said seven thousand five hundred dollars ($7,500.00) shall go to the surviving spouse and the other one-half (2) of said excess shall go to the parents. If no spouse, the whole shall go to the parents. ''8

III

THE STRUGGLE FOR UNIVERSAL MANHOOD SUFFRAGE

PRECEDING the agitation for equal suffrage, and paralleling the woman's rights movement, was the long struggle for universal manhood suffrage. In England the extension of the right to vote was stoutly opposed at every turn and only after many years was the goal of universal manhood suffrage attained the most notable reform acts affecting the right to vote being those of 1832, 1867, and 1884, with an act to abolish plural voting still (in 1914) pending.

In America manhood suffrage was very much limited during the colonial period by property and religious qualifications. Nor did the Revolution, with its endorsement of the doctrines of natural equality, natural rights, and the consent of the governed as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, materially extend the suffrage. Indeed, the belief seemed everywhere to prevail that the possession of property was essential to the right to vote — as if government was only an agent to protect property rights. Moreover, religious and other tests were also required of the voter-Jews and Catholics usually being disfranchised. Thus, only a small part of the adult male population had the right to vote under the first State constitutions. At the same time the property qualifications for holding office were so high as to exclude all but the well-to-do."

After the adoption of the Federal Constitution in 1789 a powerful movement for the extension of political rights to the masses (of the male population) was inaugurated under the influence of Thomas Jefferson and his followers. One by one the States abolished property and religious qualifications for voting. This was not accomplished, however, without the powerful opposition of the propertied classes. It is a notable fact that Chancellor Kent and Daniel Webster were strongly opposed to the removal of the property qualification.

Moreover, the growth and development of political parties encouraged the movement for a wider suffrage, since each party invited popular support by advocating the extension of the electorate, just as to-day rival party organizations are usually ready to adopt generous resolutions in behalf of equal suffrage with a view to gaining popular support. As new western Territories and States were established, the older restrictions on the suffrage were abolished citizenship, residence, age, and sex being the only qualifications retained. But in some of the older eastern States the property qualifications continued down to the time of the Civil War.

Universal white manhood suffrage having been accomplished by the middle of the nineteenth century, the next movement for the extension of the electorate arose out of the emancipation of the negroes as a result of the Civil War. Prior to 1865 negroes were not allowed to vote except in five of the New England States; but soon after the war this discrimination against men of color began to disappear in the northern States. In Iowa the right to vote was extended to them in 1868;10 but not until 1880 were they permitted to hold public office in this State.11

In the southern States to-day negroes do not as a matter of fact enjoy the right of suffrage which is guaranteed to them by the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States the effect of that amendment having nearly everywhere been nullified by a body of educational and property qualifications and "grandfather clauses" adopted by the several States. The white men of the South justify the disfranchisement of the colored men on the grounds of social and political expediency.

IV

THE MOVEMENT FOR EQUAL SUFFRAGE THE movement for equal suffrage may be said to have begun in England toward the close of the eighteenth century. In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft published a book on the Vindication of the Rights of Women which, though greeted with a storm of ridicule and abuse, “gave the first considerable impulse to a discussion on the subject." In 1797 Charles Fox is quoted as saying "that all the superior classes of the female sex in England must be more capable of exercising the elective suffrage with deliberation and propriety than the uninformed individuals of the lowest class of men to whom the advocates of universal suffrage would extend it." Bentham likewise remarked upon the injustice of refusing women the right to vote. In 1835 Bailey strongly advocated the extension of the suffrage to women in his treatise entitled The Rationale of Political Representation.12 Likewise Benjamin Disraeli in 1848 declared in the House of Commons that he saw no reason for denying women the right to vote. But the most influential advocate of equal suffrage in England was John Stuart Mill, who espoused the cause with great power in his book on The Subjugation of Women published in 1869. Moreover, in 1867 Mill championed the cause of equal suffrage in the House of Commons by proposing it as an amendment to the Reform Bill then pending.13

The results of the movement were that through a