Calvin frowned. This bit about the old-guard felt like the sort of thing politicians said to make excuses for the fact that they weren't accomplishing any real change. Maybe Harry Berkwood had a future in politics after all, if he was already getting the rhetoric down.

"It feels like the smallest possible step you could take and still claim he followed through on his campaign promises," he pointed out. Dempsey had said he supported women's suffrage during the campaign, but he notably had not claimed he supported universal suffrage. This act was in some ways a step back for some groups — in a decade there might be a fair number of men who didn't have the vote, if they worked in off-the-record sorts of professions like street vendors or low-level craftsmen. Apprentices or those in service whose employers didn't think they'd really earned a say in how their world worked yet. It obviously didn't grant universal suffrage to women, either; they were more likely to be disfranchised across the bounds of class, rather than men who were primarily likely to get the shaft if they were poor. How had people like Laurel Potts, a married woman with a dozen daughters, signed off on a reform like this?

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