drawn the line on kissing babies, saying that they are too well versed
in hygiene to commit that crime. As has been remarked, women are
entirely too much given to sentiment to be allowed to vote.
* * * * *
Anti-suffrage literature declares that the enfranchisement of women will
“efface the natural differentiation of function between the two sexes.”
Oh, no, it won’t! Nature can’t be effaced and the differentiation will
go right on differentiating just the same.
* * * * *
What a queer way they have in Great Britain of encouraging matrimony!
There are about a million more women than men, but when the Canadian
government begged that some of the women might be sent over as wives for
the English immigrants, the authorities in England vetoed it because the
women were needed to work in the cotton mills.
* * * * *
Perhaps in the U.S. women should not vote because they cannot fight but
the man in England who said this would have to run to cover.
* * * * *
“We believe that political equality will deprive us of special
privileges hitherto accorded us by law,” cry the anti-suffragists. How
very sad! Will they please name one or two special privileges that the
women have lost in those States where they can vote?
* * * * *
The government is closing all the saloons on the reservations to protect
the Indians, and the Southern Legislatures are passing drastic
temperance laws to protect the negroes. It seems to be left to the women
to demand measures for the protection of the white men.
* * * * *
A Missouri legislator has introduced a bill that the buttons on the back
of a woman’s dress shall be as large as a silver quarter. Some time when
those women legislators out West cannot find anything else to do they
will introduce a bill that men shall cease wearing any buttons at all on
the back and cuffs of their coat.
* * * * *
The Anti-Suffrage Association is to be congratulated on the latest
contribution to its literature by Abdul Hamid, the deposed Sultan of
Turkey. There is such a similarity between his opinions on woman
suffrage and Mrs. Humphry Ward’s that it certainly is either a case of
plagiarism or two souls with but a single thought.
* * * * *
Harvard University has taken off the ban and allowed a speech on woman
suffrage within its sacred walls. If the ban had remained on a little
longer it would not have been necessary to take it off.
* * * * *
Almost the last words of Baroness von Suttner before she sailed for home
were that there never would be peace here until the women had a vote.
The men could have told her that as soon as she landed in the United
States.
* * * * *
For many days before Easter, the dispatches said, the Cleveland
suffragists trimmed hats to be sold for the “cause.” Go to! It would be
utterly impossible for a woman to believe in suffrage and know how to
trim a hat.
* * * * *
Kansas women say that they have long been accustomed to masculine
chivalry, as they have had the municipal vote for a quarter of a
century; but since they got the full suffrage they are so overwhelmed
with attentions from the men that they can hardly resist a political
flirtation.
* * * * *
Strange, isn’t it, how Government offices, public schools and the rest
penalize matrimony, and then when women ask for the suffrage the
opponents shriek aloud that it will destroy the desire for marriage?
Doesn’t it ever occur to them that the loss of all these business
opportunities might have this effect? Husbands are nice, but oh, you
salary!
* * * * *
Beatrice Harraden learned at a recent legislative hearing in Westminster
that “the women impressed the statesmen but the statesmen did not in the
least impress the women.” We have always seen this in our country but we
never let the “statesmen” know it.
* * * * *
The belated action of the New York anti-suffragists, in opening their
little headquarters on Fifth Avenue a few days before the big suffrage
parade “to offset any impression it might make,” recalls the careful
housewife, who exclaimed when she saw Niagara Falls, “Oh, that reminds
me—I left the kitchen faucet running!”
* * * * *
It is perfectly proper for mothers of wealth and social position to
employ nurses and governesses for their children; but when a business or
professional woman does the same, society at large goes into hysterics
over her poor, neglected offspring. If the mother is off playing bridge
and attending “teas,” it is all right; but if she is away earning a
salary it is all wrong.
* * * * *
When women wanted to be customs inspectors the authorities said they
could never, never climb the ladder on the side of a ship. Strange to
say the two women who demonstrated that it could easily be done were
both daughters of Presidents. It is odd how many obstacles can be placed
in the way when a woman wants a job with a salary attached!
* * * * *
Amherst College is to establish a chair of common sense. Great pity that
college isn’t co-educational!
* * * * *
“When women are elected to Congress, there will be no more secret
caucuses,” says a great daily. Since when have there been any of that
kind?
* * * * *
School inspectors in Russia have issued an order that no married woman
teacher can have more than two children. They have heard about the New
York board of education and gone them two better.
* * * * *
“Suffrage was begotten in Utah and Idaho by Mormonism,” says a syndicate
article sent forth by the Pennsylvania “anti” association. Oh, no; it
was “begotten” in Wyoming, when there wasn’t a Mormon in the Territory.
* * * * *
His name is Abnel—a German doctor who has made a discovery. “The world’s
well-being is threatened by the adoration of suffragists for dissolute
men. The clinging, domestic women are naturally attracted to strong
men.” Of course—the men would have to be strong to support their weight.
“But the women politicians have lost the selective instinct,” he says.
“They flutter toward the Don Juans like moths and are consumed before
they realize their own folly.” Yes, people notice this in those Western
States—a perfect holocaust as soon as women get the ballot. That is why
the Don Juans always vote against it—they would feel so dreadfully
helpless with all the women politicians fluttering toward them in order
to be consumed.
* * * * *
Which is likely to do more damage to the sweetly feminine character—to
stand at the polls all day and hand out coffee to voters, or to deposit
a ballot and then go home and attend to woman’s legitimate business?
* * * * *
A cardinal in Venice denounced the tight skirts women are wearing and
ordered them to do penance. They hastened to church the next day for the
purpose, but were obliged to perform their devotions standing!
* * * * *
The New Thought devotees have thought out a new kind of marriage—“a
mating of harmonious vibrations.” But that has been the trouble with
marriage in late years—the parties have vibrated among too many people.
* * * * *
A Chicago suffrage club has just been formed, to which only young,
unmarried women are eligible. It seems only yesterday that girls were
solemnly admonished that if they advocated woman suffrage no man would
marry them, but they can’t be scared that way now.
* * * * *
Richard Le Gallienne has gone Omar Khayyam’s “a loaf of bread, a jug of
wine and thou, singing in the wilderness underneath a bough,” one
better. He will be perfectly satisfied “if only she and I can go,
walking forever through the snow.” Maybe he would, but we think the lady
would want something warmer even than Richard’s poetry.
* * * * *
There was an increase of fifteen per cent. in marriages in Chicago the
first six months after the Legislature granted woman suffrage. That may
not have been the cause but if the figures had gone the other way there
would have had to be a special session to repeal it.
* * * * *
The New York _Times_ suggests that “the suffragists have the right of
petition and by exercising it in a proper manner they may advance their
cause.” They have been doing this for sixty-five years. If there is any
new style in petitions they will be very thankful for a diagram and a
paper pattern.
* * * * *
Anti-suffragists are protesting against having that vote for suffrage at
the biennial called unanimous. All right; say that twenty-one hundred
votes were cast, and seventy of them were negative—thirty in favor to
one opposed—and that is just about the way the woman’s vote would stand
throughout the country.
* * * * *
Pittsburgh is to have a saloon exclusively for women, as they have been
crowded out of the others by the men. Promoters of the new idea should
go to New York and inquire at the Hotel Vanderbilt, which started out
with a beautiful “bar” for women, but a month later it was closed for
lack of patronage and reopened as a much needed annex to the large and
flourishing bar for men.
* * * * *
Prof. Spencer Baldwin, of Boston University, is an anti-suffragist. He
doesn’t like the new woman—“androgynous hybrid,” that is what he calls
her. It’s up to the professor to find an anti-toxin.
* * * * *
In the United States the women say they won’t pay their taxes if they
can’t vote and in London they say they won’t pay their rent. Our
government can compromise with them by giving the suffrage but what is
their landlord to do?
* * * * *
The head of the “vocational bureau” in Boston thinks the time may come
when graduation certificates in fathercraft and mothercraft will be
issued by the public schools. But if the holders don’t get aboard the
matrimonial craft what good will these do?
* * * * *
Hampton Court has been closed to the public for a long time through fear
of the suffragettes; but the government has at last evolved a scheme—it
will open the palace and charge a shilling admission! How clever! But
suppose a suffragette should be able to borrow a shilling?
* * * * *
Woman suffragists campaigning in Wisconsin came across a man whose wife
has supported the family for years by walking the tight rope, and he
announced that he should vote against the suffrage amendment because a
woman’s place is at home. There are a vast number just like him there,
judging from the election returns.
* * * * *
Under a woman school superintendent in Rowan County, Kentucky, the
number of illiterates in two years has been reduced from 1,152 to 23,
and these are physically incompetent. One of the great dangers of equal
suffrage is that women might aspire to hold office!
* * * * *
The women of Nevada have been holding a “sacrifice week” to raise money
for their suffrage campaign, as also have women in the neighboring
States to help them. By the way, can anybody recall any special
sacrifice to earn the right that has been made by the men who are now
doing the voting in the United States?
* * * * *
A Johns Hopkins professor says that in twenty years’ experience with
over a thousand graduates of both sexes he has failed to discover the
inferior brains of women which he hears so much about. He should apply
to the anti-suffragists, who not only can tell him all about them but
can furnish him with plenty of specimens.
* * * * *
Secretary Daniels declares that “bachelors are encumberers of the earth”
and offers the use of the United States navy to scatter their ranks. As
the most of them are land animals the services of the War Department
would be more effective. Meanwhile it is safe to say that few bachelors
pass the age of fifty without the inner consciousness that they ought to
be blown up or sent to the bottom of the sea.
* * * * *
At the next election after California women were enfranchised, the vote
of the State increased 313,883. As has often been remarked, women
wouldn’t use the suffrage if they had it.
* * * * *
“The men are to put on their clothes with a shoe horn,” is the latest
fashion edict. We shall not believe it till we see it, and even then we
shall look the other way.
* * * * *
Some “bootleggers” who are to be tried before a jury of women in
Colorado are said to be feeling very anxious. Why so? The objection to
women as judges and jurors has always been that they are too sentimental
and emotional to mete out justice.
* * * * *
The illogical minds of women cannot comprehend why it is, when a
congressman’s constituents indicate that they don’t want him to
represent them in the government any longer, that same government
immediately puts him on the pay roll in another place.
* * * * *
The male editors of the two leading fashion magazines are using columns
of space in argument whether the women of this country shall adopt
American or French styles. The National Association of Master Bakers, at
their recent convention, adopted a resolution in favor of woman
suffrage, giving as a reason that if women go into politics they won’t
have time to stay at home and bake bread. It is really outrageous the
way women are crowding into the fields of labor that belong to men!
* * * * *
“It is a wise child that knows its own father,” but in France they have
just passed a law which will permit the mother to make some inquiries.
* * * * *
The new invention of making rubber tires out of a substance extracted
from whiskey suggests that it would be an excellent thing on most of the
“joy” rides if the whiskey was in the tires instead of the automobile.
* * * * *
The public-school teachers who want the suffrage have raised the cry,
“Can disfranchised teachers train citizens?” Of course they can, so long
as they can be had for half the price that a man would charge for the
job.
* * * * *
A Democratic candidate for congressman-at-large in Illinois, who is an
anti-suffragist, is making his canvass on the platform: “A husband and a
home for every woman.” As over twenty-five hundred husbands in Chicago
alone last year abandoned their wives, he should add another plank that
if he is elected all husbands will stick to home and family.
* * * * *
Just as the Anti-Suffrage Association issued its bulletin announcing
that there was no favorable movement in the South, the Georgia
Federation of Labor strongly indorsed the suffragists and the Atlanta
_Constitution_ declared editorially, “Success seems about to crown their
efforts.” The antis are playing in hard luck; no sooner do they get
their type all nicely set up than the other side does something or other
that knocks it into “pi.”
* * * * *
One of those gifted male lecturers who know everything says, “We have
new models of automobiles every year; we should work out new models of
the antiquated family machine.” Go ahead; women have no objection as
long as they are permitted to sit at the steering wheel.
* * * * *
“Marse Henry” Watterson says he has found only three classes of women
who want the suffrage: “Those who wish to exploit their own interests,
those who are soured on life and the brainless sheep who think it is
fashionable.” Maybe it is like that in Kentucky, but the men in some
States have found several other kinds.
* * * * *
The “bachelor tax” which the Montana legislators want to impose varies
from $2.50 to $100 per annum, but the majority think $5 would be about
right. It seems like cruelty to animals to put on any tax at all when
there are more than twice as many men as women over twenty-one years old
in the State and those across the border are in just as bad a fix.
* * * * *
Emile Deschamps tells us in his new book that the American woman cannot
keep her husband’s love because she does not return it. But if she
returned it of course she couldn’t keep it. Funny how many things these
foreigners find out about American women never discovered by American
men, who seem to be well enough satisfied not to go wife hunting in any
other country.
* * * * *
Almost every organization in the “campaign” States which stands for
anything that ought to be stood for has indorsed the suffrage amendment.
Will the antis name one which has declared against it—that is, has
declared publicly?
* * * * *
It’s funny how every woman who does anything nowadays, from climbing a
steeple to taking the prize at a beauty show, is described as “a leading
suffragist.” Don’t the “antis” ever get married or die or have triplets
or do anything worth notice?
* * * * *
One striking difference between the United States Senate and the British
House of Commons is that when a deputation of women suffragists make a
call the Senators receive them with open arms and the Commoners shout
for the police.
* * * * *
The nurses who cared for Mr. Roosevelt in the Chicago hospital have been
so deluged with offers of marriage they have had to go into seclusion.
It’s such a very funny way men have of showing their appreciation of a
woman by offering to marry her!
* * * * *
The women in China, it is said, have now advanced so far that they are
held accountable for their crimes instead of their male relatives. Here,
too. It used to be the law in many of our States that a wife could not
be punished for a crime committed in the presence of her husband. Having
a husband was considered sufficient punishment for her—or at least that
seemed to be just as good a reason as any for the law.
* * * * *
Captain Amundson, the antarctic discoverer, who comes from Norway where
women vote, says of the English suffragettes: “They are quite right, and
I’d like to help them in their fight for freedom.” The captain had
better confine himself to easy jobs like finding the South Pole.
* * * * *
The anti-suffrage headquarters in Trenton, N. J., have a big placard in
the window, asking, “Why the Increase in Juvenile Crime in Denver?”
Because, according to the chief of police, “juvenile crime in Denver has
decreased nearly two hundred per cent. in the last ten years”—that’s
why. It is amazing how the anti-suffragists manage to acquire so much
misinformation.
* * * * *
In Colonel Roosevelt’s latest pronunciamento on the question of
suffrage, he says that he “always believed it exactly as much the right
of women as men, but he only favored it ‘tepidly’ until his association
with such women as Jane Addams,” etc. Is the colonel quite sure that he
was not slightly influenced by those 2,000,000 women out West with the
vote already in their hands?
* * * * *
At the recent suffrage debate in Congress a great deal was said about
women “trailing their skirts in the mire of politics” by some of the
befo’-the-wah members. Evidently the old gentlemen hadn’t learned that
trailing skirts went out of fashion years ago and now the men can’t make
the political mud deep enough to touch the hem of the up-to-date
dresses.
* * * * *
The “antis” appeal to the legislators to “listen to logic instead of the
dropping of ballots.” Impossible! Compared with the thud of those
ballots all other noises sound like utter silence.
* * * * *
Grand opera was sung to fourteen lions at the zoo in Berlin and they
didn’t do any violence to the singers. Audiences in many countries have
been just as forbearing.
* * * * *
A society has been organized in New York to arouse in fathers more
interest in their children. Perhaps they have already sufficient
interest but in many cases it has to be spread out over such a large
surface.
* * * * *
Miss Dora Keen, the Pennsylvania woman who recently climbed to the top
of Harvard Glacier in Alaska believes that she has the physical strength
to cast a ballot, but the men of her State insist that she must stay at
home and let them protect her from being jostled at the polls.
* * * * *
All sorts of explanations have been made as to why those Kansas women,
when they found they had won the suffrage, built a bonfire and threw
their old hats in it. Perhaps they concluded that, now they were voters,
they must act as silly as men. Maybe they had such swelled heads that
the hats wouldn’t fit. Possibly they thought they could get new ones on
election bets. But most likely they only wanted to show that now their
hats are in the ring and they are ready for the fray.
* * * * *
The _Woman’s Journal_ says the devil and the anti-suffragists will be
busy all summer. Why both?
* * * * *
Now 12,000 bakers are going on a strike. It didn’t used to be that way
when the nation’s wives and mothers baked the bread.
* * * * *
A National Desertion Bureau has been incorporated to try to settle all
the domestic quarrels in the country. There won’t be enough of that
bureau left to kindle a fire on a marriage altar.
* * * * *
“Women must not have the suffrage,” says an authorized document of the
antis, “because Max Eastman’s wife goes by her maiden name.” Where does
she “go?” That is much more to the point, if she is to decide the
question.
* * * * *
“On one side,” says a Pennsylvania official in the Anti-Suffrage
Association, “are the mother and the home; on the other the woman
seeking the place man occupies as the framer of constitutions and the
administrator of civil-government.” Seems as if we know of several men
who don’t frame constitutions or administer any kind of government, and
a good many women who can’t stay on the side of the home because they
have to go out and earn the money to have a home. Men and women can’t be
divided like goats and sheep, and if they could, there is no valid
reason why the voting booths should all be on one side of the line.
* * * * *
There is a great cry in Washington about retiring the superannuated
clerks for the good of the service. What is impairing the service is the
large number of inefficient chiefs of departments who are drawing big
salaries while their poorly paid women assistants do the work.
* * * * *
For the second time a Radcliffe girl has won the $100 prize open to
students of all colleges for the best essay on municipal government. Oh,
yes, women may be very good on the theory, but only men have the
practical knowledge. Just observe what a shining success they have made
of city governments!
* * * * *
The way women will lose the respect of men when they get a vote was
illustrated in Arizona, where as soon as women were enfranchised the men
nominated the president of the Suffrage Association for State senator,
and she received six hundred more votes than any other candidate on the
ticket.
* * * * *
_Votes for Women_ says that the Peers, when they argued against woman
suffrage, should have been clothed in skins with feathers in their hair,
and Lord Curzon, when he moved the rejection of the bill, should have
begun by dancing around the woolsack and singing an incantation. We must
protest against this libel on the American Indian; he would scorn to
take an Englishman’s attitude against the rights of women.
* * * * *
The State of Washington has the lowest death rate of any in the country;
New Hampshire the highest. Moral—Go West, where women vote.
* * * * *
There have been but four “champion” typewriters, and three of these were
women. As soon as the machine was invented women were at the keyboard,
and yet you hear men operators complaining that women have “usurped”
their positions!
* * * * *
When that International Congress of Women Voters meets in San Francisco
next summer, there will be a fine chance to observe how the suffrage has
unsexed women and destroyed the feminine instincts in at least nine
countries.
* * * * *
Whenever anybody issues the edict that women have not the physical
strength to vote some of them immediately shin up a flagpole on a
fifty-story building and take a header off the Brooklyn Bridge for a
moving-picture show, loop the loop in an airship and climb the highest
mountain in the world.
* * * * *
Civil Service Commissioner McIlhenny says the women government employes
may march in the suffrage parade as individuals but not as clerks.
Thanks Mr. Commissioner! That is what the suffragists are asking for—to
be considered as individuals instead of belonging to somebody or
something. But they can’t join a suffrage club, he says. As the man in
prison answered his lawyer who said, “They can’t put you in jail for
that”—“They already hev.”
* * * * *
An anti-Tammany bureau of a thousand speakers is being organized in New
York to talk the “tiger” to death. Right there is where they need the
help of women.
* * * * *
Medical statistics from Paris announce that men show most brilliancy
from forty to fifty-six. This holds out a great deal of hope for a lot
of men we know who are under forty.
* * * * *
“There is no reform legislation in any suffrage State which is not
duplicated in those where women cannot vote,” says the “antis.” If that
is so they will have to find some other excuse for beating the
suffragists to the polls as soon as they get a chance.
* * * * *
The United States Senate has made an appropriation to erect a splendid
memorial in Washington in recognition of the service rendered by women
during the Civil War. By all means; and then don’t deny the franchise to
women because they cannot serve their country in time of war.
* * * * *