Thus there is not the slightest chance that the enfranchised women of
Protestantdom, once they become at ease in the use of the ballot, will
give any heed to the ex-suffragettes who now presume to lead and
instruct them in politics. Years ago I predicted that these
suffragettes, tried out by victory, would turn out to be idiots. They
are now hard at work proving it. Half of them devote themselves to
advocating reforms, chiefly of a sexual character, so utterly
preposterous that even male politicians and newspaper editors laugh at
them; the other half succumb absurdly to the blandishments of the
old-time male politicians, and so enroll themselves in the great
political parties. A woman who joins one of these parties simply
becomes an imitation man, which is to say, a donkey. Thereafter she is
nothing but an obscure cog in an ancient and creaking machine, the sole
intelligible purpose of which is to maintain a horde of scoundrels in
public office. Her vote is instantly set off by the vote of some sister
who joins the other camorra. Parenthetically, I may add that all of the
ladies to take to this political immolation seem to me to be
frightfully plain. I know those of England, Germany and Scandinavia
only by their portraits in the illustrated papers, but those of the
United States I have studied at close range at various large political
gatherings, including the two national conventions first following the
extension of the suffrage. I am surely no fastidious fellow—in fact, I
prefer a certain melancholy decay in women to the loud, circus-wagon
brilliance of youth—but I give you my word that there were not five
women at either national convention who could have embraced me in
camera without first giving me chloral. Some of the chief stateswomen
on show, in fact, were so downright hideous that I felt faint every
time I had to look at them.
The reform-monging suffragists seem to be equally devoid of the more
caressing gifts. They may be filled with altruistic passion, but they
certainly have bad complexions, and not many of them know how to dress
their hair. Nine-tenths of them advocate reforms aimed at the alleged
lubricity of the male-the single standard, medical certificates for
bridegrooms, birth-control, and so on. The motive here, I believe, is
mere rage and jealousy. The woman who is not pursued sets up the
doctrine that pursuit is offensive to her sex, and wants to make it a
felony. No genuinely attractive woman has any such desire. She likes
masculine admiration, however violently expressed, and is quite able to
take care of herself. More, she is well aware that very few men are
bold enough to offer it without a plain invitation, and this awareness
makes her extremely cynical of all women who complain of being
harassed, beset, storied, and seduced. All the more intelligent women
that I know, indeed, are unanimously of the opinion that no girl in her
right senses has ever been actually seduced since the world began;
whenever they hear of a case, they sympathize with the man. Yet more,
the normal woman of lively charms, roving about among men, always tries
to draw the admiration of those who have previously admired elsewhere;
she prefers the professional to the amateur, and estimates her skill by
the attractiveness of the huntresses who have hitherto stalked it. The
iron-faced suffragist propagandist, if she gets a man at all, must get
one wholly without sentimental experience. If he has any, her crude
manoeuvres make him laugh and he is repelled by her lack of pulchritude
and amiability. All such suffragists (save a few miraculous beauties)
marry ninth-rate men when they marry at all. They have to put up with
the sort of castoffs who are almost ready to fall in love with lady
physicists, embryologists, and embalmers.
Fortunately for the human race, the campaigns of these indignant
viragoes will come to naught. Men will keep on pursuing women until
hell freezes over, and women will keep luring them on. If the latter
enterprise were abandoned, in fact, the whole game of love would play
out, for not many men take any notice of women spontaneously. Nine men
out of ten would be quite happy, I believe, if there were no women in
the world, once they had grown accustomed to the quiet. Practically all
men are their happiest when they are engaged upon activities—for
example, drinking, gambling, hunting, business, adventure—to which
women are not ordinarily admitted. It is women who seduce them from
such celibate doings. The hare postures and gyrates in front of the
hound. The way to put an end to the gaudy crimes that the suffragist
alarmists talk about is to shave the heads of all the pretty girls in
the world, and pluck out their eyebrows, and pull their teeth, and put
them in khaki, and forbid them to wriggle on dance-floors, or to wear
scents, or to use lip-sticks, or to roll their eyes. Reform, as usual,
mistakes the fish for the fly.