As there are women and women there are many kinds of adventuresses; not all
of them wicked and detestable. But, good or bad, the lot of the adventuress
is at best a hard lot. Be she a girl with a future or a woman with a past
she is still a woman, and the world can never be too kind to its women--the
child bearers, the home makers, the moral light of the universe as they
meet the purpose of God and Nature and seek not to thwart it by unsexing
themselves in order that they may keep step with man in ways of
self-indulgent dalliance. The adventuress of fiction always comes to grief.
But the adventuress in real life--the prudent adventuress who draws the
line at adultery--the would-be leader of society without the wealth--the
would-be political leader without the masculine fiber--is sure of
disappointment in the end.
Take the agitation over Suffragism. What is it that the woman suffragette
expects to get? No one of them can, or does, clearly tell us.
It is feminism, rather than suffragism, which is dangerous. Now that they
have it, my fear is that the leaders will not stop with the ballot for
women. They are too fond of the spotlight. It has become a necessity for
them. If all women should fall in with them there would be nothing of
womanhood left, and the world bereft of its women will become a masculine
harlotocracy.
Let me repeat that I have been fighting woman's battles in one way and
another all my life. I am not opposed to Votes for Women. But I would
discriminate and educate, and even at that rate I would limit the franchise
to actual taxpayers, and, outside of these, confine it to charities,
corrections and schools, keeping woman away from the dirt of politics. I do
not believe the ballot will benefit woman and cannot help thinking that in
seeking unlimited and precipitate suffrage the women who favor it are off
their reckoning! I doubt the performances got up to exploit it, though
somehow, when the hikers started from New York to Albany, and afterward
from New York to Washington, the inspiring thought of Bertha von Hillern
came back to me.
I am sure the reader never heard of her. As it makes a pretty story let me
tell it. Many years ago--don't ask me how many--there was a young woman,
Bertha von Hillern by name, a poor art student seeking money enough to take
her abroad, who engaged with the management of a hall in Louisville to walk
one hundred miles around a fixed track in twenty-four consecutive hours.
She did it. Her share of the gate money, I was told, amounted to three
thousand dollars.
I shall never forget the closing scenes of the wondrous test of courage and
endurance. She was a pretty, fair-haired thing, a trifle undersized, but
shapely and sinewy. The vast crowd that without much diminution, though
with intermittent changes, had watched her from start to finish, began to
grow tense with the approach to the end, and the last hour the enthusiasm
was overwhelming. Wave upon wave of cheering followed every footstep of the
plucky girl, rising to a storm of exultation as the final lap was reached.
More dead than alive, but game to the core, the little heroine was carried
off the field, a winner, every heart throbbing with human sympathy, every
eye wet with proud and happy tears. It is not possible adequately to
describe all that happened. One must have been there and seen it fully to
comprehend the glory of it.
Touching the recent Albany and Washington hikes and hikers let me say at
once that I cannot approve the cause of Votes for women as I had approved
the cause of Bertha von Hillern. Where she showed heroic, most of the
suffragettes appear to me grotesque. Where her aim was rational, their aim
has been visionary. To me the younger of them seem as children who need
to be spanked and kissed. There has been indeed about the whole Suffrage
business something pitiful and comic.
Often I have felt like swearing "You idiots!" and then like crying
"Poor dears!" But I have kept on with them, and had I been in Albany or
Washington I would have caught Rosalie Jones in my arms, and before she
could say "Jack Robinson" have exclaimed: "You ridiculous child, go and get
a bath and put on some pretty clothes and come and join us at dinner in
the State Banquet Hall, duly made and provided for you and the rest of you
delightful sillies."