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Title: Anti-Suffrage Essays
Author: Various
Language: English
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ANTI-SUFFRAGE
ESSAYS.
ANTI-SUFFRAGE ESSAYS
BY
MASSACHUSETTS WOMEN
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY
ERNEST BERNBAUM, Ph.D.
(Harvard University)
THE FORUM PUBLICATIONS
OF BOSTON
1916
Copyright, 1916, by
J. A. HAIEN
_All Rights Reserved_
_Gratefully Dedicated
to the 295,939 Massachusetts Men
Who, on Election Day, 1915
Endorsed the Anti-Suffrage Sentiments
of the Women of Massachusetts_
INTRODUCTION
THE ANTI-SUFFRAGE VICTORY IN MASSACHUSETTS
The essays in this little book are by anti-suffrage women who were
prominent speakers, writers, and organizers, in the campaign of 1915.
They voice sentiments which gained the largest measure of popular
support ever accorded in the history of Massachusetts politics.
The largest number of votes any political party polled in Massachusetts
before 1915 was 278,976. The anti-suffragists polled 295,939. Since 1896
there has been but one instance in which the voters gained a plurality
amounting to 110,000 votes. The anti-suffragists won by 133,447 votes.
Alton B. Parker's defeat by Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 is commonly
regarded as typifying political annihilation; but the suffragists in
1915 did not poll as many votes as Mr. Parker, and the anti-suffragists
polled 38,000 more than President Roosevelt at the height of his
popularity. Such outworn words as "overwhelming" and "landslide," which
have been regularly used to describe victories not half so great as
this, understate the actual extent of the anti-suffrage triumph. The
pronounced aversion which Massachusetts showed towards Horace Greeley in
the presidential campaign of 1872, and towards William J. Bryan in that
of 1896, scarcely exceeded that which she feels towards the suffragists
today.
The grounds of this aversion are so numerous that it is difficult to
determine which of the many causes of the anti-suffrage victory were the
most powerful. In my opinion, however, Massachusetts men defeated woman
suffrage chiefly because (1) they discovered that nine women out of ten
did not want to vote; (2) they knew that the creation of a large body of
stay-at-home voters would result in bad government; and (3) they grew
disgusted with the temperament, the notions, and the methods typical of
the few women who clamored for the vote.
For at least two generations suffragists have been spending a huge
amount of energy and money in spreading their doctrine. Contributions,
mainly drawn from a few rich women, have enabled them to send
professional speakers into every district of the state, to distribute
tons of "literature," to supply the press with a constant stream of
"news" written from their point of view, and in general to advertise
their claims in the most lavish way. A propaganda so subsidized would
have been successful decades ago if sound principles and common sense
were on its side. But to their consternation the suffragists found that
the vast majority of Massachusetts women turned a deaf ear to their
plausible appeals, and that their strongest opponents were those of
their own sex.
Suffragists continued to talk about what "we women" want. But men
presently began to see that these women had no right to pretend to
represent their sex. Even their own claims as to the number of women
supporting them showed that they represented only between 5% and 10% of
the women of Massachusetts. At least 90% of the women--either by open
opposition, or by a marked indifference to the subject--showed that they
did not believe in woman suffrage. It became obvious that no general
statement could be more emphatically true than that Massachusetts women
did not want to vote.
When this truth was insistently pressed upon the suffragists, they were
apt to call the indifferent women "unenlightened." This was felt to be
an insult rather than an explanation. The average Massachusetts man does
not think his mother, wife, and sister "unenlightened"--certainly not on
the suffrage question. She has heard and read the suffrage notions again
and again. He knows that if she felt that man was her oppressor, or that
the welfare of herself or her family would be increased by her
enfranchisement, she would say so. She is a sensible, observant woman,
who knows what she wants, does not hesitate to ask for it, and usually
gets it. But she was not asking for the ballot. It did not take her long
to see through the suffrage fallacy that "only those women would need to
vote who want to." She realized that the vote would mean an obligation
as well as a privilege, and that she could not honorably accept the
privilege without undertaking the obligation. Her life being already
crowded with duties that only she could discharge, she would not add to
them one that her husband, brother, or son can discharge at least as
well.
If any man wondered whether his personal inquiries among the women of
his acquaintance gave a sufficiently broad basis for the belief that
women did not want to vote, he became convinced of the fact when he
learned about the Drury bill of 1913. This bill would have given
Massachusetts women a chance to vote "Yes" or "No" on woman suffrage.
The proposal resulted in the amazing revelation that the suffragists
were afraid to let women vote on the question. They worked against the
bill because they knew that an official count would disclose how
pitiably small a fraction of women were on their side. They thought that
their little group, by noisy publicity, could be made to appear a
considerable number. But the men, when they discovered who opposed the
Drury bill, were not deceived. They saw that a small minority of women
was trying to induce them to coerce the great majority. They awoke to
the fact that the suffragist's demand was not that men should grant
women an expressed desire, but that men, contemptuously disregarding the
evident wishes of women, should force upon them a heavy responsibility.
The nature of that responsibility brings us to what seems to me the
second important cause for the suffrage defeat. Men--more than
politically inexperienced women,--know that good government depends upon
the willingness of the electorate to do its duty vigilantly and
regularly. The greatest good of the greatest number of classes
(including the women and children in each class) can be secured only
when a large proportion of the eligible voters vote. Those voters who
are led by bosses, or by selfish interests, go to the polls steadily.
Their influence can be offset only when the rest of the electorate goes
likewise. The results of elections in which a small proportion of the
eligible voters take part, are poor laws and incompetent or corrupt
government. The leading political issues--the tariff, trusts,
transportation, military and police force, taxation, finance, etc.--bear
directly upon the work of men in their trades and business, and under
male suffrage a fairly large proportion of the vote is cast. The
life-work of women removes them from contact with these political
questions, and the nature of most women is not attracted by the
contentious spirit in which political warfare is conducted. As long as
no more than 10% of the women took an interest in the woman suffrage
question itself, no man could reasonably expect them to be otherwise
than indifferent to the regular subjects of political conflict. To
impose political duties upon the sex against its will was simply to
create conditions that encouraged corrupt and feeble government. The
soundness of this principle was, furthermore, being demonstrated in
woman-suffrage territory, such cities as Seattle and such states as
Colorado showing that sooner or later a neglectful electorate leads to
the downfall of good government.
The third cause for the defeat of woman suffrage was the disgust which
the manners, methods, and unethical sentiments of the suffragists
aroused. This is not pleasant to dwell upon, but was too important an
influence in the campaign to leave unmentioned. The suffragists
professed to "occupy higher moral ground," to uplift politics, and to
elevate womanhood. The longer one observed their deeds and words, the
surer one became that they were not uplifting politics and that they
tended to disgrace women in men's eyes. The tone of politics can be
improved if the contestants will avoid false assertions and unnecessary
personal attacks. The suffragists said and did things which were, like
militancy, excusable only on the immoral ground that the end justifies
the means.
As an example of their disingenuous statements, the following may serve.
The National Woman Suffrage Association circulated a flyer entitled
"Twenty Facts About Woman Suffrage." "Fact No. 15," under the heading,
"How Women Vote," read: "Arizona, California, Colorado and Washington
are the only states in the Union which have eight-hour laws for working
women." Any unsuspecting reader would infer just what he was intended to
infer--namely, that it was woman suffrage that brought about all these
eight-hour laws, and that male suffrage had not brought about any of
them. A more nearly truthful heading for this "fact" would have been
"How Men Vote." The credit for passing the eight-hour law in California
and in Washington (also in Arizona so far as laundry workers are
concerned) belongs to legislatures elected by men alone. False
suggestions of this type no doubt gained many proselytes in parlor
meetings; but when they were made in the open forum of a public
campaign, their untruth was exposed, and the voters grew indignant that
women should thus have tried to mislead them. The suffragists only made
a bad matter worse by alleging that their anti-suffrage sisters were
given to misrepresentations and to every other crime in the political
calendar; for men thereupon concluded that if this initial participation
in politics had such a demoralizing effect on the women of each side, it
was best to keep both parties out of the arena altogether.
The suffragists' tendencies to make bitter personal attacks was
repeatedly shown. Not wishing to resurrect some of the venemous charges
brought against anti-suffrage women, I take leave to illustrate the
baseless characters of such attacks by one made against myself. In the
spring of 1915, I gave a series of lectures on the fundamental
principles of anti-suffrage. The audiences were gratifyingly large;
there was a demand for several repetitions of the lectures; and,
apparently, the suffragists felt that something must be done to destroy
my pernicious influence. Instead of answering my arguments, the
President of the Massachusetts Suffrage Association, Miss Alice Stone
Blackwell, wrote an editorial in her "Woman's Journal," saying:
"This young gentleman is a Dane, and he has been very fluent and
somewhat contemptuous in giving reasons why American women should not be
allowed to vote."
The statement was, as usual, spread broadcast through the suffrage
columns of the Massachusetts newspapers; and doubtless my opponents
indulged the hope that in the wave of national feeling which was then
beginning to rise, anybody thus branded as a foreigner would be badly
discredited. As a matter of fact, I was born in Brooklyn, N. Y. (If I
had chosen to imitate Miss Blackwell's method of controversy, I might
have retorted that my father, who was born in Denmark, but who came to
America in 1855, fought as a volunteer officer in the Navy of the United
States in the Civil War, at a time when Miss Blackwell's father was
engaged in a safer occupation.)
The repellant impression made upon men by the suffragists' misstatements
and personal abusiveness was deepened by their support of militancy and
feminism. As to the unethical character of the latter, Mrs. Foxcroft's
essay in this book presents startling and irrefutable testimony. As to
militancy, it may be said that this furnished the most glaring (though
not the only) evidence of the evil effect of political activity on
women. Much is usually made of the fact that Mrs. Pankhurst and her
accomplices in crime destroyed a large amount of valuable property.
But the greatest injury she and her American idolizers did was to lower
man's ideal of woman. They tried to make the virago a heroine. They did
not succeed; but the more Mrs. Pankhurst's apologists glorified her, the
more men were determined not to endorse a party that tempted women to
abandon real womanliness for mock masculinity.
ERNEST BERNBAUM
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
_February, 1916_
N. B.--
To prevent misunderstanding, it should be said that though the following
essays represent in general the views of Massachusetts anti-suffragists,
the responsibility for the facts and opinions given in the various
essays rests with the individual writers alone.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION--ERNEST BERNBAUM ix
WHO THE MASSACHUSETTS ANTI-SUFFRAGISTS ARE 21
MRS. JOHN BALCH
ESSAY
I SUFFRAGE FALLACIES 24
MRS. A. J. GEORGE
II THE BALLOT AND THE WOMAN IN INDUSTRY 31
MRS. HENRY PRESTON WHITE
III A BUSINESS WOMAN'S VIEW OF SUFFRAGE 38
EDITH MELVIN
IV SOME PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF THE QUESTION 43
ELLEN MUDGE BURRILL
V HOW MASSACHUSETTS FOSTERS PUBLIC WELFARE 53
MONICA FOLEY
VI MASSACHUSETTS COMPARED WITH SUFFRAGE STATES 62
CATHERINE ROBINSON
VII WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND WAR 67
MRS. CHARLES P. STRONG
VIII WOMAN SUFFRAGE VS. WOMANLINESS 77
MRS. THOMAS ALLEN
IX ARE SUFFRAGISTS SINCERE REFORMERS 81
MRS. AUGUSTIN H. PARKER
X SUFFRAGE AND THE SCHOOL TEACHER 85
ELIZABETH JACKSON
XI SUFFRAGE AND THE SOCIAL WORKER 90
DOROTHY GODFREY WAYMAN
XII WOMAN SUFFRAGE A MENACE TO SOCIAL REFORM 98
MARGARET C. ROBINSON
XIII THE ANTI-SUFFRAGE IDEAL 118
MRS. HERBERT LYMAN
XIV THE TRUE FUNCTION OF THE NORMAL WOMAN 123
MRS. HORACE A. DAVIS
XV THE IMPERATIVE DEMAND UPON WOMEN IN THE HOME 128
MRS. CHARLES BURTON GULICK
XVI SUFFRAGE AND THE SEX PROBLEM 135
MRS. WILLIAM LOWELL PUTNAM
XVII SUFFRAGE A STEP TOWARD FEMINISM 141
LILY RICE FOXCROFT
IMPORTANT ANTI-SUFFRAGE PUBLICATIONS 153
ANTI-SUFFRAGE ESSAYS
WHO THE MASSACHUSETTS ANTI-SUFFRAGISTS ARE
MRS. JOHN BALCH
_Katharine Torbert Balch, wife of John Balch; Treasurer of the
Summer Industrial School of Milton; member of the Executive
Committee of the Milton Branch of the Civil Service Reform
Association; director of the Ely Club of New York City; member
of the Executive Committee of the special Preparedness Committee
appointed by Governor Walsh; President of the Massachusetts
Women's Anti-Suffrage Association._
_J. A. H._
In reply to oft-repeated calumnies about the membership and affiliations
of the Anti-Suffrage Association, I offer a plain statement of facts
which can be verified.
36,761 Massachusetts women, twenty-one years of age or over, are to-day
registered members of the Massachusetts Women's Anti-Suffrage
Association. They are not confined to one section of the state, but are
found distributed among no less than 443 cities, towns, and villages.
Each year the organization increases; and each year the members of the
137 state branches draw closer together in their opposition to suffrage
and their striving for the true progress of woman and of civilization.
These women are not of only one class or type. An examination of our
enrollment reveals among our members not only the very large group of
homemakers, but also authors, doctors, lawyers, teachers, librarians,
newspaper-writers, stenographers, social service workers, cooks,
housemaids, nurses, milliners, insurance agents, restaurant-keepers,
clerks, shopkeepers, private secretaries, dressmakers, seamstresses,
etc., etc. During the recent campaign, the co-operation, devotion, and
self-sacrifice of this body of women was inspiring. From the wage-earner
who endured systematic nagging, if not persecution, from suffragists, to
the woman of wealth who gave of her vitality to the breaking point,
daily came the evidences of immovable faith in the righteousness of
their cause.
Many of our leaders are prominent in public welfare activities. The late
Mrs. Charles D. Homans, one of the founders of our organization, was an
active and important member of the Massachusetts Prison Commission. Mrs.
James M. Codman, our beloved ex-President, has served twenty years on
the State Board of Charities, was one of the first women overseers of
the poor ever elected in this state, and has long been one of the
managers of a large private hospital. Miss Mary S. Ames, a former
President, is a member of the Executive Council (New England section) of
the National Civic Federation, Chairman of the Committee on Practical
Training for Girls, a Trustee of the Boston Home for Incurables, one of
the managers of the Women's Free Hospital, a director of the Brook House
Home for Working Girls, a member of the Easton Agricultural Vocational
Training Committee, a Trustee of Unity Church (Easton), and a member of
the Advisory Board of the Belgian Relief Committee. Mrs. Henry P.
Kidder, of our Executive Board, is President of the Woman's Educational
Association. Mrs. Robert S. Bradley, also of our Executive Board, is
Chairman of the Sanitation Department of the Women's Municipal League,
and has led in the fight for exterminating the typhoid fly. Were I to
continue to enumerate the characteristic activities of our anti-suffrage
women, I could fill pages with the record of their participation in
philanthropy, education, and all good works. The brief notes prefixed to
the essays in this book give additional evidence to the same effect.
I
SUFFRAGE FALLACIES
MRS. A. J. GEORGE
_Alice N. George, widow of Dr. Andrew J. George; graduated from
Wellesley in 1887; is President of the Brookline Branch of the
Ramabai Association; American Representative of the National Trust
(English) for the Preservation of Historic Places; a director
of the College Club; a member of the Research Committee of the
Educational and Industrial Union, of the Welfare Department of
the National Civic Federation of the Woman's Trade Union League,
of the American Society for Labor Legislation, etc., etc._
_J. A. H._
Woman suffrage must ultimately fail. It is based upon a fallacy, and no
fallacy has ever made a permanent conquest over mankind.
The fallacy of woman suffrage lies in the belief that there is in our
social order a definite sex division of interests, and that the security
of woman's interests depends upon her possession of the elective
franchise.
"The history of mankind," declared the founders of the suffrage
movement, "is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part
of man toward woman, having as the indirect object the establishment of
an absolute tyranny over her." "Man has endeavored in every way he
could," continues this arraignment of the fathers, husbands, and sons of
these self-styled _Mothers of the Revolution_, "to destroy her
confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect and to make her
willing to lead a dependent and abject life."
On this false foundation was built the votes-for-women temple. How shall
it endure? The sexes do not stand in the position of master and slave,
of tyrant and victim. In a healthy state of society there is no rivalry
between men and women; they were created different, and in the economy
of life have different duties, but their interests are the common
interests of humanity. Women are not a class, they are a sex; and the
women of every social group are represented in a well-ordered
government, automatically and inevitably, by the men of that group. It
would be a fatal day for the race when women could obtain their rights
only by a victory wrested at the polls from reluctant men. These truths
are elementary and self-evident, yet all are negatived by the
votes-for-women movement.
That the vote is not an inalienable right is affirmed by Supreme Court
decisions, the practice of nations, and the dictates of common sense. No
state can enfranchise all its citizens, and since the stability of
government rests ultimately upon a relentless enforcement of law, the
maintenance of a sound fiscal policy, and such adjustment of the
delicate interweaving of international relations as makes for peace and
prosperity, it is right that the state should place the responsibility
of government upon those who are best equipped to perform its manifold
duties.
Woman's citizenship is as real as man's, and no reflection upon her
abilities is involved in the assertion that woman is not fitted for
government either by nature or by contact in daily experience with
affairs akin to government. She is weak along the lines where the
lawmaker must be strong. In all departments where the law is to be
applied and enforced, woman's nature forbids her entrance. The casting
of a ballot is the last step in a long process of political
organization; it is the signing of a contract to undertake vast
responsibilities, since it is the following of the ballot to its
conclusion which makes the body politic sound. Otherwise political power
without political responsibility threatens disaster to all.
Thus far we have made a few crude experiments in double suffrage, but
nowhere has _equal_ suffrage been tried. Equal suffrage implies a fair
field with favor to none--a field where woman, stripped of legal and
civil advantages, must take her place as man's rival in the struggle for
existence; for, in the long run, woman cannot have equal rights and
retain special privileges. If the average woman is to be a voter, she
must accept jury service and aid in the protection of life and property.
When the mob threatens, she must not shield herself behind her equal in
government. She must relinquish her rights and exemptions under the law
and in civil life, if she is to take her place as a responsible elector
and compete with man as the provider and governor of the race. Such
equality would be a brutal and retrogressive view of woman's rights. It
is impossible, and here we have the unanswerable answer to woman
suffrage theories.
No question of superiority or equality is involved in the opposition to
votes for women. The test of woman's worth is her ability to solve the
problems and do the work she must face as a woman if the race is not to
deteriorate and civilization perish. The woman's suffrage movement is an
imitation-of-man movement, and as such merits the condemnation of every
normal man and woman.
Doubtless we can live through a good deal of confusion, but it is not on
any lines of functional unfitness that life is to be fulfilled. Woman
must choose with discrimination those channels of activity wherein "what
she most highly values may be won." Are these values in the department
of government or in the equally essential departments of education,
society, and religion?
The attempt to interpret woman's service to the state in terms of
political activity is a false appraisal of the contribution she has
always made to the general welfare. All this agitation for the ballot
diverts attention from the only source from which permanent relief can
come, and fastens it upon the ballot box. It is by physical,
intellectual, and moral education that our citizenship is gradually
improved, and here woman's opportunities are supreme. If women are not
efficient in their own dominion, then in the name of common sense let
them be trained for efficiency in that dominion and not diffuse their
energies by dragging them through the devious paths of political
activity.
Equal suffrage is clearly impossible; double suffrage, tried under most
favorable conditions in sparsely settled western states has made no
original contribution to the problem of sound government. On the other
side of the ledger we find that the enfranchisement of women has
increased taxes, added greatly to the menace of an indifferent
electorate, and enlarged the bulk of unenforced and unenforceable laws.
Why does double suffrage, with its train of proved evils and its false
appraisal of woman's contribution to the general welfare, come knocking
at our doors? Not a natural right; a failure wherever tried; demanded by
a small minority in defiance of all principles of true democracy; what
excuse is there for it?
The confusion of social and personal rights with political, the
substitution of emotionalism for investigation and knowledge, the mania
for uplift by legislation, have widely advertised the suffrage
propaganda. The reforms for which the founders of the suffrage movement
declared women needed the vote have all been accomplished by the votes
of men. The vote has been withheld through the indifference and
opposition of women, for this is the only woman's movement which has
been met by the organized opposition of women.
Suffragists still demand the vote. Why? Perhaps the answer is found in
the cry of the younger suffragists: "We ask the vote as a means to an
end--that end being a complete social revolution!" When we realize that
this social revolution involves the economic, social, and sexual
independence of women, we know that Gladstone had the prophet's vision
when he called woman suffrage a "revolutionary" doctrine.
Woman suffrage is the political phase of feminism; the whole sweep of
the relation of the sexes must be revised if the woman's vote is to mean
anything more than two people doing what one does now. Merely to
duplicate the present vote is unsound economy. To re-enforce those who
clamor for individual rights is to strike at the family as the
self-governing unit upon which the state is built.
This is not a question of what some women want or do not want--it is
solely a question of how the average woman shall best contribute her
part to the general welfare. Anti-suffragists contend that the average
woman can serve best by remaining a non-partisan and working for the
common good outside the realms of political strife. To prove this
contention they point to what women have done without the ballot and
what they have failed to do with it.
Anti-suffragists are optimists. They are concerned at the attempt of an
organized, aggressive, well financed minority to force its will upon the
majority of women through a false interpretation of representative
democracy; but they know that a movement so false in its conception, so
false in its economy, so false in its reflections upon men and its
estimate of women, so utterly unnecessary and unnatural, cannot achieve
a permanent success.
II
THE BALLOT AND THE WOMAN IN INDUSTRY
MRS. HENRY PRESTON WHITE
_Sara C. White, wife of Henry Preston White; educated in the Emma
Willard School of Troy, New York; a member of the Auxiliary Board
of Directors of the Brookline Day Nursery; member of the Committee
on Ventilation of Public Conveyances (Woman's Municipal League);
With Miss Mabel Stedman of Brookline, Mrs. White started the model
moving-picture show in connection with the Brookline Friendly
Society. She is a well-known speaker for the anti-suffrage cause._
_J. A. H._
The argument that the woman in industry needs the ballot in order to
obtain fair wages and fair working conditions has undoubtedly made many
converts to the cause of woman suffrage. The sympathies of the average
man, who is ever solicitous for the welfare of women, go out especially
to the woman who must compete with men in the work-a-day world. And so,
when he is told that there are 8,000,000 such women in this country, and
that their lot would be much easier if they could vote, he is apt to
think it worth a trial anyway and to give his support, without further
consideration, to the "votes for women" movement.
Now, if it were true that there are 8,000,000 women in industry, and
that these must have the ballot in order to get fair treatment, it would
be a strong argument for woman suffrage--though by no means a conclusive
argument, since the fundamental question is the greatest good of the
greatest number, and not the greatest good of any class. But it is not
true that there are 8,000,000 women in industry, and a single sensible
reason has yet to be advanced for the contention that women in industry,
even if they numbered 8,000,000, could better their condition by
undertaking political methods.
There are in the United States, according to the last census, 8,075,772
females 10 years of age and over engaged in gainful occupations. Of
these, over 3,600,000 are employed in domestic and personal service,
where wage and working conditions are determined chiefly by women, and
in "agricultural pursuits," a classification including every female who
sells eggs or butter on the home farm. Approximately 4,000,000 of the
remaining gainfully occupied females work in store, factory, and shop,
and of these nearly 1,500,000 are under twenty-one.
Thus, instead of 8,000,000 women in industry who are alleged to "need
the ballot," we have only about 2,500,000 women of voting age employed
in industries that can reasonably be said to come within the category of
those properly subject to remedial labor legislation; and of these
women a very large percentage are aliens and would not be entitled to
use the ballot if woman suffrage were granted. By itself, of course,
this fact does not dispose of the argument that the industrial woman
needs the ballot, but it does reveal how comparatively few are the women
who could possibly try to improve their working conditions by means of
the vote, and how hopelessly outnumbered they would be if reduced to the
necessity of fighting for their rights at the ballot box.
The premise of the suffrage argument that the woman in industry needs
the ballot in order to get fair treatment is the assumption that she now
fails to get as fair treatment as is given the industrial man, and that
this is due to the fact that she has no vote. This arbitrary assumption
is without justification either in fact or reason. Every law placed upon
the statute-books of any state for the benefit of the working man is a
blanket law and covers men and women engaged in the same industry. All
the benefits that have accrued to the working man through legislation
are enjoyed equally by his sister in industry. In addition she has the
advantage of special protective laws which have been enacted simply
because she is a woman--because she is weaker physically than man and
because she is a potential mother and must be protected in the interest
of the race.
I am not arguing, of course, that the working woman has all the
protection she needs, but I am arguing that she is not unfairly treated
as compared with her industrial brother, who has the ballot, and that
whatever hardships she may now suffer are as likely to be removed
without woman suffrage as they are with it. If she is being unfairly
treated, I think it will be found that she is so treated in common with
all industrial workers--simply because she is a worker and not at all
because she is a woman.
And in taking this ground I am by no means forced to depend upon theory;
for, after all, the best answer to the dogma that the woman in industry
needs the ballot in order to obtain fair wages and fair working
conditions is the fact that in states where women have voted anywhere
from 4 to 46 years the laws for the working woman are no better than
they are in male suffrage states. Indeed, it is pretty generally agreed
that the states which have been first and most progressive in enacting
laws for the benefit of women and children in industry are states that
have refused to give women the vote.
It is quite true, as the suffragists so constantly tell us, that the
only states having eight-hour laws for women in industry are woman
suffrage states. But it is true, too, that the eight-hour laws of
California, Oregon, and Washington, of which so much is heard, are not
to be taken at their face value, since they do not cover the canning
industry, which is the chief industry in all those states. It is true,
also, that what is considered by experts the most advanced step in
protective legislation for women in industry, the prohibition of night
work, has been taken only in male suffrage states. In Massachusetts and
Nebraska the laws provide for a 54-hour week for women in industry,
provide for one day's rest in seven, and prohibit night work. Will any
one deny that these laws are infinitely better for women in industry
than the boasted eight-hour law of Colorado, under which it is
permissible for a woman to work nights and Sundays and 56 hours a week?
Now as to the question of "fair wages." The suffragists tell us that
women in industry are entitled to equal pay with men, and that this will
follow upon the heels of woman suffrage. Here again we have experience
to guide us, and we find upon investigation that in no state has the
ratio between men's and women's wages been affected by doubling the
electorate. Dr. Helen Sumner, who made a thorough investigation of this
point, says in her book entitled _Equal Suffrage:_ "Taking the public
employment as a whole, women in Colorado receive considerably less
remuneration than men. It is the old story of supply and demand in the
commercial world, and suffrage has probably nothing to do with the wages
of either men or women. The wages of men and women in all fields of
industry are governed by economic conditions."
By tables carefully compiled, Dr. Sumner shows that in Colorado, women
in private employment receive an average of only 47 per cent of the
average of men's wages, while in the United States as a whole the
average for women is 55.3 per cent of the average for men, and in
Massachusetts, where woman suffrage was recently defeated by nearly two
to one in the largest vote in the state's history, women receive 62
cents for every 100 cents paid to men in wages.
No one can deny, of course, that the wages of women in industry average
considerably lower than those of men. But the reasons for this are found
entirely outside of politics. The average girl is a transient in
industry, going into it as a temporary expedient to tide her over until
she attains her natural desire, which is to marry, settle down, and
raise a family. She is, therefore, not so good an investment for her
employer as the boy who works beside her, who has gone into the business
with the idea of making it his life work, and who has a stronger
incentive to make himself more valuable.
It must be remembered that employers of labor do not pay for men and
women, but for results. Samuel Gompers, an ardent suffragist, says women
get less because they ask for less. That is true in part. Women do ask
for less. One reason for this is that they look upon the job as
something temporary. Another reason is, very frequently, that they are
not entirely dependent on their own earnings, but are partly supported
in their parents' home. But in the majority of cases, the industrial
woman gets less than the industrial man because she is worth less, being
not only less experienced, but physically unable to compete with him on
a basis of absolute equality.
If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the proof of woman
suffrage is in its operation; and, when we find that it has failed to
fulfill its promises where longest tried, it is hard to listen patiently
to pleas for its further extension. The vote has never raised the wages
or shortened the hours of men. It has never done it and can never do it
for women. The industrial woman can gain nothing by it. She will lose
much, as will other women.
III
A BUSINESS WOMAN'S VIEW OF SUFFRAGE
EDITH MELVIN
_Miss Edith Melvin, educated in the public and private schools of
Concord and by her father, James Melvin, who, by reason of service
in the Civil War was a totally helpless invalid confined to his
bed for many years before his death, when he left a widow and
an only child dependent upon themselves for support. After three
months as assistant to the advertising manager of a large medicine
producing company, she entered the law office of Judge Prescott
Keyes without business training other than in stenography and
typewriting. In this law office has had more than twenty years
practical business and legal experience, a position of ever
increasing responsibilities requiring steady and efficient study
and thought. Not a member of the Bar, never having applied for
admission because not believing in women becoming lawyers. Has
served as President of the Guild of the First Parish (Concord)
and Secretary of the South Middlesex Federation of Young People's
Religious Unions. Is an experienced public speaker. Has been an
officer and active member of Old Concord Chapter, D. A. R. For
many years a householder and taxpayer._
_J. A. H._
After more than two decades spent in active business life, I am of the
opinion that members of my sex do not need the ballot, and that it would
be a distinct and unnecessary encumbrance to them. For more than twenty
years, I regret to state, my life has been more that of a man than of a
woman. A home-supporter by the actual work of my hands and my brain,
rather than a home-maker; my life has been past amid the heat and
turmoil of business life, working shoulder to shoulder with men, pitting
my brain against the brains of men; and having no male relative to
represent me in the business of the government, a taxpayer "without
representation." That business life has been satisfactory to me in many
ways, I admit; but in order to wrest its satisfactions from the turmoil,
I have been forced to summon up the determination, the endurance, the
physical and mental labor, which by all the laws of nature belong not to
the "female of the species" but to the male. Its successes have been
apparent successes when considered as parallel with man's work in the
world, but failures when one considers that not for the sharp, insistent
contact of business life was woman created. I still feel no desire to
assist the male sex in the business of government, nor do I think I am
fitted so to do. I desire to be permitted to continue my present freedom
from political activities, and I am content to leave that part of life's
work in the hands of the sex which, to my mind, has managed it hitherto
exceedingly well.
I have never seen any point or place where the power to cast a ballot
would have been of the slightest help to me. For myself I should regard
the duties and responsibilities of thorough, well-informed, and faithful
participation year after year in political matters as a very great
misfortune; even more of a misfortune than the certainty of being mixed
up in the bitter strife, the falsifications, and publicity often
attendant upon political campaigns. Though my work has trained me to use
my mind in matters pertaining to law and to business, it would certainly
be incumbent upon me to make a thorough study of the theory and practice
of government before attempting to exercise the franchise. I feel sure
that the average business woman cannot make such a study or engage in
politics without interference not merely with her physical, but with her
mental business life, which should command her constant and best
attention.
Many women are now undertaking to engage in business, not as a
life-work, but as an incidental experience. It is true, however, that of
the many thousands of women so engaged, very, very few climb up the
ladder of success to the top rounds. It is the rare exception rather
than the rule for women to attain marked distinction, great wealth, or
fame in the business world. This is not caused by any unfairness of the
male sex, but by the nature, the physical and mental limitations, of the
members of the female sex. The trivialities of the afternoon tea are too
often present in the work of the wage-earning woman--too often she has
too slight a regard of her duty to return full value for the pecuniary
consideration she receives. The career of too many wage earning women is
now entirely haphazard, the result of necessity rather than
well-grounded choice. It is fair to assume that political matters would
receive the same degree of smattering knowledge and thought as is too
often received by the daily occupation into which many women drift.
It is much to be deplored that the trend of some modern young women is
more towards the commercial life in which her success is doubtful,
rather than toward the home-keeping, child-bearing, social, religious,
and philanthropic life for which she was physically and mentally
designed. These latter duties women faithfully and successfully perform
as their natural function, and through them they may rise to the
greatest distinction. Femininity should be cherished by the woman whom
circumstance or necessity drives into the wage-earning world, and she
can cherish it by retaining her hold on social, religious, and
charitable interests; but she cannot hope to do so if she attends
political meetings, serves on political committees, canvasses districts
for votes, watches at the polls, serves on juries, and debates political
questions or records and promises of political candidates. We have seen
the loss of femininity produced by the constant campaigning for
suffrage.
The instability of the female mind is beyond the comprehension of the
majority of men. The charm, the "sweet unreasonableness," the lack of
power of consecutive thought upon any intricate problem, which mark the
average woman are sometimes attractive and in personal or family
relations not without compensating advantages. In the business world,
however, these attributes are wholly detrimental. Business women might
possibly bring to political matters such training and experience as they
acquired, but to restrict the franchise to them would be to create a
class franchise. We must remember that suffrage would bring to the
electorate not merely the small number of business women, but the great
mass of women who have had little or no experience of life outside of
their homes.
In brief, then, the voting privilege granted to women, and particularly
to business women, would be a detriment to the women, and it would not
be of sufficient value to the government to outweigh the loss to them.
IV
SOME PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF THE QUESTION
ELLEN MUDGE BURRILL
_Miss Ellen Mudge Burrill, educated in the Lynn public schools,
graduated from the Lynn Classical High School; now in the employ
of the Commonwealth as Cashier in the Sergeant-at-Arms Department;
Supervisor in the First Universalist Sunday School of Lynn; a
member of the Council of the Lynn Historical Society; author of
the "State House Guide Book," "Essex Trust Company of Lynn" (the
successor of the Lynn Mechanics Bank,) "The Burrill Family of Lynn
During the Colonial and Provincial Periods," and of "Our Church
and the People Who Made Her," being a history of The First
Universalist Parish, Lynn._
_J. A. H._
If suffrage were a natural right, then women should have it, and at
once, but it is not like the right to have person and property
protected, which every man, woman and child already possesses. It is not
a natural right, but a means of government, and therefore a matter of
expediency. The question is, will government by the votes of men and
women together produce better results than by men alone? Suffrage means
more than casting a ballot; if it means anything effectual, it means
entering the field of politics. Had the proposed amendment been
ratified, it would have become the duty of all women to vote
systematically in all primary and regular elections. Would they have
done it in justifiable numbers?
Look at Public Document No. 43, giving the number of assessed polls and
registered voters for the Massachusetts State election of 1914:
_Assessed Polls_
1,019,063
_Registered Voters_
610,667
_Persons Voting_
466,360
Also for the City and Town elections of 1914:
_Assessed Polls, Male_
1,229,641
_Registered Voters, Male_
740,871
_Males Who Voted_
532,241
It is evident from these figures that a larger proportion of men should
fulfill their duty to the State. Government being one means to the end,
of making better conditions, the indifference of so many thousand is
beyond comprehension, and is a serious menace to the Commonwealth. It
was Governor Curtis Guild who said: "I base my anti-suffrage position on
the fact that our great failures in legislation are caused not so much
by a vicious element among the voters, as by abstention from voting and
emotional voting."
That granting the ballot to women would greatly increase the proportion
of those who neglect to vote, is clearly shown by the results of giving
women the school vote. In 1879 the Massachusetts Legislature, assuming
that women were peculiarly interested in school affairs, bestowed the
school franchise upon them. See how they have accepted that charge!
According to the United States Census of 1910, there were 1,074,485
women of voting age in this State. Of this number there are
approximately 622,000 eligible to register and vote for School
Committee. Here is the School vote for 1914:
_Women Who Registered_
101,439
_Women Who Voted_
45,820
Here is the school vote of the women for the city election in Lynn,
1914:
Approximate number of women of voting age in Lynn 18,000
Total registration 1,759
Number of women who voted 1,070
In a pamphlet entitled, "Women and the School Vote," Miss Alice Stone
Blackwell, trying to explain away the real meaning of the situation,
says:
"A woman's name, once placed on the register, is now kept there until
she dies, moves or marries. When a town or city shows a large
registration of women and a small vote, it means that on some occasion,
perhaps ten years ago, there was an exciting contest at the school
election, and many women registered and voted. When the contest was
over, many of the women ceased to vote, but their names stayed on the
register."
Her conclusion is that this is "the simple explanation of the lessened
proportion of women's votes to registration." But a more striking
conclusion must be drawn, namely, that it isn't enough to vote when
there is an exciting contest; that it is only well as far as it goes,
but it should be kept up. The State has a right to expect it. In view of
their actual record in the use of the school vote, I see no reason to
think that women would vote in sufficient numbers and with sufficient
regularity to improve politics or government.
The effect of woman suffrage upon the tax rate must also be considered.
If the good to be gained were to justify the expense, there would be
nothing to say; but if not, then we ought to pause to give certain facts
some thought. Take the expenses for the primary and state elections. The
total cost to the Commonwealth in 1914, merely for the preparation,
printing, and shipping of ballots, was $50,046.17 (Auditor's Report,
1914, page 240). I am informed that if women were given the ballot, a
conservative estimate would add 50% to this figure. If women become
candidates for public office, there would be the further expense of
handling the nomination papers. And these calculable expenses are only a
fraction of the total economic loss.
The City of Lynn has the second largest voting list in the state,
outside of Boston. The expense now, for the state and city election
machinery and assistants, is $9,000 a year, in round numbers. The
amendment would entail nearly double the expenditure. There are 53
cities and 320 towns in the state. Think it over before it is too late.
The financial side must enter into the problem some time; isn't the
present a good time?
The milk question was referred to several times in the recent campaign,
the suffragists implying that the Commonwealth was ignoring the need of
legislation and inspection. Here are some of the milk laws on our
statute books, that are administered by the State Department of Health:
The Revised Laws, Chapter 56, provide:
Penalties for the sale of adulterated, diseased, or skimmed milk.
Penalties for sale of milk not of good standard.
For the marking of skimmed milk.
For the marking of condensed milk.
Penalty for using counterfeit seal or tampering with sample.
Penalty for connivance or obstruction.
For the sending of results of analysis to dealer.
That inspectors must act on information and evidence.
The following acts are also in force:
To prohibit the misuse of vessels used in the sale of milk (Acts 1906,
chapter 116).
To establish a standard for cream (Acts 1907, chapter 217).
To establish the standard of milk (Acts 1908, chapter 643).
To provide for the proper marking of heated milk (Acts 1908, chapter
570).
Relative to licensing dealers in milk (Acts 1909, chapter 443).
To provide for the appointment of inspectors and collectors of milk by
Boards of Health (Acts 1909, chapter 405).
Relative to the liability of producers of milk (Acts 1910, chapter 641).
To provide for the inspection and regulation of places where neat
cattle, their ruminants or swine are kept (Acts 1911, chapter 381).
To authorize the incorporation of medical milk commissions (Acts 1911,
chapter 506).
Relative to the establishing of milk distributing stations in cities and
certain towns (Acts 1911, chapter 278).
Relative to the labelling of evaporated, concentrated, or condensed milk
(Acts 1911, chapter 610).
To regulate the use of utensils for testing the composition or value of
milk and cream (Acts 1912, chapter 218).
To safeguard the public health against unclean milk containers and
appliances used in the treatment and mixing of milk (Acts 1913, chapter
761). Relative to the production and sale of milk (Acts 1914, chapter
744).
To prohibit charges for the inspection of live stock, dairies, or farm
buildings (Acts 1915, chapter 109).
The State is divided into eight health districts, with an inspector for
each in the State employ. Each city has its board of health; each town
administers the laws through its selectmen. The City of Lynn has a
board of health; also health inspectors, who do much of their work
before we are up--from 2 to 5 o'clock. They inspect all the milk
stations; take samples from milk wagons; inspect dairies that sell milk
in Lynn, wherever those dairies may be, even out of the State--as, for
instance, the Turner Centre Creamery in Maine. All that doesn't look as
if the milk situation was being neglected.
Massachusetts is doing a great deal for the children. There are over
5,800 wards in the care of the State Minor Wards Department. I do not
need to tell you what a great work is being done for the care and
education of these little ones; it speaks for itself.
Our opponents do not say much about the work women are doing on State
Boards. There are plenty of positions already held by women who are
doing inconspicuous and unexciting work, yet, nevertheless, most useful
to the Commonwealth. Here are some of them, with the number of women on
each board:
The State Board of Health, Lunacy and Charity was organized in 1879,
with 2 women on the board.
The work is now divided among different departments.
The State Board of Education had 1 woman member as far back as 1880; it
now has 2.
The State Board of Charity has 2.
The Free Public Library Commission has 2.
The Commission for the Blind has 2.
The Homestead Commission has 1.
The Minimum Wage Commission has 1.
The Board of Registration of Nurses has 3.
The Prison Commission has 2, who also serve on the Board of Parole for
the Reformatory for Women.
The Board of Trustees of the State Infirmary and State Farm has 2.
The Board of Trustees of the Hospitals for Consumptives has 1.
The State Hospitals at Worcester, Taunton, Northampton, Danvers,
Westboro, Medfield, Monson, Boston, Foxboro, have 2 each.
The Gardner State Colony has 2.
The Wrentham State School has 2.
The Massachusetts Training School Trustees has 2.
The Massachusetts General Hospital has 1.
The Perkins Institution for the Blind has 1.
The Hospital Cottages for Children has 1.
Here are forty-five women doing voluntary work on these Boards, all
appointed by the Governor and working under laws passed by the _men_ in
the Legislature.
Take another line. The manual of the labor laws enforced by the State
Board of Labor and Industries, covers the enforcement of the laws
relative to the education of minors, employment of minors, hours of
labor, apprenticeship, hours of labor for women, health inspection,
lighting, ventilation, cleanliness, guarding against dangerous
machinery, work in tenement houses, etc.
The little book entitled "Woman Suffrage, History, Arguments, Results,"
tells all about the suffrage states and gives the good laws that have
been enacted since women voted. It gives the impression that none such
are passed in male suffrage States. It has just two words about
Massachusetts; under the heading of "School Suffrage," it says,
"Massachusetts--1879." Under California, however, it gives a list of the
following laws and institutions:
Mothers' Pensions.
Minimum Wage.
Juvenile Court.
State Training School for Girls.
Teachers' Pension.
Weights and Measures.
Civil Service.
State Housing Commission.
Milk Inspection.
Tuberculosis.
Workingmen's Compensation
Psychopathic Parole.
But it carefully omits to mention that Massachusetts has all of these,
that some of them are much broader in scope, and that many are of longer
years standing.
You go into the Western States, and you find that legislation is
conducted on a different basis from what it is in Massachusetts.
Altogether too frequently, bills are pigeon-holed; the bills can't be
reported out of committee unless the chairman consents; and the result
is that many bills never see the light. Here in Massachusetts
law-making is better managed. The number of bills presented is large;
3,459 were printed during the session of 1914, and 2,802 were printed
during the last session. Some of these were offered by women. A woman,
as well as a man, can petition the Legislature. Every bill is referred
to a committee; it is given a public hearing, is reported upon and
action taken, one way or another; not one bill is pigeon-holed. The
Massachusetts system of legislative procedure is not surpassed anywhere
in the United States, and there are competent boards and officers who
carry out the various laws. Many of the things the suffragists agitate
about and think they need the franchise to bring to pass, they would
find are already being administered at the present time if they would
only look into the facts.
V
HOW MASSACHUSETTS FOSTERS PUBLIC WELFARE
MONICA FOLEY
_Miss Monica Foley, was educated in the Boston schools, graduating
from the Boston Academy of Notre Dame; is a member of the
Massachusetts Bar and Secretary of the Massachusetts Association
of Women Lawyers. She is a director of the Notre Dame Alumni
Association of Boston, and is connected with the State Commission
on Economy and Efficiency._
_J. A. H._
In the suffrage campaign just closed so much was heard of the
greatness of some of our states, including Utah and Nevada, Colorado
and Wyoming, that one was tempted to inquire, "Is there no good now in
Massachusetts?" It seemed passing strange that our Commonwealth, which
had always been the leader in every great turning point of the policy of
the nation, should have so signally failed that it ceased to exist as a
model to be extolled; it was stranger still that her worthy record was
ignored by her own sons and daughters. And yet the facts are that while
we may hold high in memory the examples of those who have gone before
us, we may also rejoice that the men of our own time not only uphold
the best ideals and lofty purposes of our State, but are day by day
working out her problems in such a way that her position is still secure
as a pioneer in sane legislation, her laws are still models for all
states (particularly woman suffrage states) her name is still cherished
in the wildernesses where her sons are pioneers, still venerated on her
own soil where her people stand at the gateways and welcome the
oppressed.
Proud as we are of her traditions, glorying as we do in her present
achievements, we are unafraid that the future will see her fall from her
eminence, from the dignity which has always characterized her statehood
and made her name a synonym for the best in government in the nation,
our Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
While this paper deals almost wholly with the executive functions of the
state, to make no mention of our judiciary would be to omit reference to
one of the brightest pages of our history. Massachusetts law and
Massachusetts judiciary decisions have always been and are now quoted
and respected in the greatest courts of the country. This splendid
system is being maintained at an annual cost exceeding $600,000.
Hand in hand with the establishment of a great judiciary system,
Massachusetts has devoted herself to the highest ideals of human
charity, and her enormous expenditures show that selfish materialism
plays no part in her legislation. Year by year the calls for charity are
more insistent, and year by year the State responds more generously.
The State Board of Charity was first organized in 1863, and at the
present time is an unpaid board of nine members, two of whom are women.
The institutions under their supervision are governed by unpaid boards
of seven members, two of whom are women, this latter being provided by
law, except in the instance noted below. The institutions under the
supervision of the board are the State Infirmary for the sick poor at
Tewksbury, and the State Farm at Bridgewater for misdemeanants and
insane criminals, both opened in 1854 and costing the state nearly
$1,000,000 annually. The training schools for delinquent children are
the Lyman School for Boys at Westborough (1848) and the Industrial
School for Boys at Shirley (1909) and for Girls at Lancaster (1856)
costing over $300,000 annually. The hospitals for consumptives are
located at Rutland (1898), North Reading (1909), Lakeville and
Westfield, both the latter being opened in 1910. Upon these suffering
poor the State spends over a half million dollars each year. The Norfolk
State Hospital at Walpole was opened in 1911 for inebriates and drug
habitues. There are no women on this board of trustees, there being no
women inmates of the hospital. There has also been located at Canton
since 1907 a Hospital School for crippled children. A hospital for
lepers has been maintained at Penikese Island since 1905.
Under the direction of the Board of Charity, aid is given mothers with
dependent children, the support of poor babies is undertaken, and the
tuition of poor children is paid. The board places the children in
homes wherever possible--institutional life being approved only when
necessary. Certain suffragists (of the Socialist persuasion) would give
the children to the State under the new order. In 1914 the Board
together with the institutions under their direction expended over three
million dollars and cared for more than 7000 persons in the institutions
alone. Is there anything here in the State's charity work which would
make any woman other than proud of its record?
The State's care of her insane is under the direction of a paid board of
three members, each hospital having a board of seven unpaid trustees,
including two women. The hospitals for the insane are at Worcester
(1833), Boston (Dorchester, 1839), Taunton (1854), Northampton (1858),
Danvers (1878), Westborough (1886), Foxboro (1893) and Medford (1896),
Gardner (1902.) There is a hospital for epileptics at Monson with
schools for the feeble-minded at Waltham (1848), with a colony at
Templeton since 1900 and a school at Wrentham (1907). In 1914 the State
cared for over 14,000 of these unfortunates and expended over three and
one-quarter millions of dollars for their maintenance.
The reformatory and correctional work of the Commonwealth (other than
exercised over the training schools) is under the direction of a board
of five prison commissioners (two women), only the chairman being paid.
Four institutions comprise this group; the State Prison at Charlestown
since 1805, but first established in 1785; the Reformatory at Concord
(1884); the Women's Reformatory at Sherborn (1877); and the Prison Camp
and Hospital at West Rutland, the camp being opened in 1904, the
hospital in 1907. Massachusetts has the distinction of being the first
state in the union to separate its women offenders from the men, by
establishing the Sherborn Reformatory. No child is born at this
institution. A mere man a few years ago, realizing the needless handicap
an innocent child would suffer through life if born in a prison,
petitioned the legislature to prevent the possibility. A law accordingly
was passed, and these unfortunate women are placed in a state hospital
until after their children are born. In 1914 over 1500 persons were
cared for in our prisons at a cost of more than a half million dollars.
Two boards of parole now study the histories of prisoners and recommend
certain persons for parole, the men's board in addition recommends
persons to be pardoned to the governor and council.
In no other sphere of the State's activities is the great throbbing
heart of the Commonwealth shown with such poignant fervor as in the case
of her unfortunates, and this phase of her work alone would entitle her
to the homage of all our people--but she does not stop here. She
dominates the educational field, and stands preeminent before the nation
and the world for the superiority of her educational institutions.
Massachusetts has given abundantly to the great university at Cambridge,
still endows freely the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and gives
annually of her funds to the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the
Textile Schools at New Bedford, Lowell, and Fall River, and other
independent industrial schools. She practically maintains the
Agricultural College at Amherst, and gives to other agricultural
schools, and also aids certain cities and small towns.
In aiding the deaf, dumb, and blind in 1914, Massachusetts spent over
$200,000. In 1891 she opened a nautical school to train her young men in
seamanship, navigation, and marine engineering. In 1839 Massachusetts
founded the first Normal school in this country, and today ten of these
schools are open throughout the State. In this line of endeavor in 1914
the State expended over one and one-half millions of dollars.
The Commonwealth maintains a Department of Health, established in 1869,
expending in 1914 over $350,000. In Massachusetts also was passed the
first pure food law in the country.
The Metropolitan Water Works have cost the State since 1901 over
$50,000,000. Our park system is one of the finest in the world, and is
maintained at an annual cost of over half a million dollars. In addition
to the parks in the Metropolitan District, there are six other
reservations throughout the State. These parks represent an outlay of
over $20,000,000.
Our Homestead Commission was established to investigate defective
housing conditions and study building and tenement house laws. Its
members are unpaid, though the labor representative is reimbursed for
any loss he may suffer from absence from his regular occupation.
It can truly be said that no State in the union shows such grateful and
worthy appreciation to its veterans as does Massachusetts. In 1914 over
$700,000 was given to the veterans of our Civil War and to certain of
their dependent relatives, and to women army nurses. Under a special
gratuities act of 1912 she gave each living veteran of the war the sum
of $125, this one act alone costing over $500,000.
Among other of her good works, she appropriates each year $15,000 for
the relief of injured firemen and families of firemen killed in the
performance of their duty, and since the fund was established has
expended $270,000 for this work. The State also provides under a
contributory system for its employes.
Nowhere in the country are the people's savings and insurance more
zealously guarded than by Massachusetts, and here again she is leading
the way in the savings bank life insurance legislation. The bank
commission was established in 1838, the insurance commission in 1855,
the savings bank life insurance board in 1907, these three departments
costing in 1914 almost $200,000.
In dealing with her labor problems Massachusetts maintains a Department
of Labor and Industries (1913) which investigates industrial conditions
and enforces the labor laws; an Industrial Accident Board (1912) which
enforces law compensating injured employes. These two boards together
constitute a joint board for the prevention of industrial accidents and
diseases. There is also a Board of Conciliation and Arbitration (1886)
which mediates and arbitrates industrial disputes, and a Minimum Wage
Commission (the first in the country), which investigates the wages of
women and minors, and forms boards to recommend scales of wages in low
paid industries. Over $200,000 was expended by these boards in 1914.
On encouraging farming and caring for her forests, fisheries, and game,
was spent over $600,000 in 1914. This was distributed in many ways, some
being in form of bounties to children and youths, to agricultural
societies to encourage orcharding, poultry raising, for the purchase of
forest lands, the prevention of forest fires, the propagation of wild
birds and animals.
Preparedness was not overlooked, over half a million dollars being
expended on the militia in 1914. On highways and harbors nearly a
million dollars was spent.
Over a million and a quarter dollars was spent on public buildings, the
total valuation of state properties being over $8,300,000, the State
capitol and land itself being valued at over five and one-half million
dollars.
This is the record of Massachusetts. The suffragists have shown wisdom
in avoiding reference to these facts. They could not well do otherwise,
however, since they are allied with those detestable groups in our midst
who are preaching anarchy and revolution as a means to better
government. Better government where? This record is one that the men of
the State may well be proud of; it is a record that its women will
continue to make possible by their non-partisan influence in government,
by the training of its future citizens, by the teaching of those lessons
of civic honesty and uprightness that make for national integrity as
exemplified in the history of our Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
VI
MASSACHUSETTS COMPARED WITH SUFFRAGE STATES
CATHERINE ROBINSON
_Miss Catherine Robinson was a student at Radcliffe in 1911;
graduated from Miss Wheelock's Kindergarten Training School in
1915; has worked two winters among the children in the cotton
mills of Georgia, and has been affiliated with Neighborhood
House in East Boston, and with the Associated Charities in the
Co-operative Workrooms. She is now connected with the Social
Service Department of the Massachusetts General Hospital, her work
being in the Orthopaedic Clinic for Children. Miss Robinson was
formerly a suffragist, but after studying the question decided
that the suffragists' claims are illusions which never become
realities. She says: "Everything I do along these lines (Social
Service) convinces me more than ever what a detriment the vote
would be to our sex."_
_J. A. H._
Not long ago I heard Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, the President of the National
Woman Suffrage Association, say at Springfield:
"Laws have nothing to do with this question of woman suffrage; facts
have nothing to do with it. I shall not answer facts. We do not promise
to do great things for women; why should we? All we ask is the right to
vote."
All suffrage speakers are not so frank about their inability to answer
facts as Dr. Shaw is, nor do they cease from claiming that good laws for
women exist chiefly in suffrage states.
Massachusetts gives to her women the best protection of any state in the
Union. In January, 1915, New York ranked first, but since our
legislative enactments of 1915, Massachusetts is again in the lead. We
have, in the first place, the Maternity Act. Then we have the law
prohibiting women in industry from working more than fifty-four hours
per week. We have the absolute prohibition of night-work for our women
in textile, mercantile, and manufacturing establishments. We are one of
the five states in the Union to have such a law. All the five states are
male suffrage states. Not a single woman suffrage state prohibits the
night employment of its women; and yet among the laws safeguarding the
health of women workers, the prohibition of night work is of the most
fundamental importance.
Some women suffrage states do not even set a limit to the hours a woman
may work. In Wyoming, Nevada, and Kansas--all woman suffrage states, you
note--there is no limitation of hours of labor and no prohibition of
night work. Some one may say that Colorado, California, Oregon and
Washington have an eight-hour limitation. They have; but in each case
the canneries are excepted, so that in those states where the cannery
business is of vast importance, the women therein employed may work any
number of hours and any time of the day or night. Not long ago in New
York a similar law was proposed, allowing women and children to work
seventy-two hours a week in canneries, but the bill was defeated.
Colorado, to be sure, has the eight-hour law, but it does not prohibit
night work for women, so that the eight hours can be at night; neither
does Colorado require one day of rest in every seven. In Massachusetts
and New York there is a law specifically requiring one day of rest in
every seven for employees in factories, workshops, and all mercantile
establishments.
Another way in which we can protect women is by early closing hours, and
prohibition of work before a certain hour in the morning. Again we find
that it is in the male suffrage states that women have acquired such
protection, for New York sets an early closing hour of 5 p. m. for her
women in factories, mercantile, and manufacturing establishments, and
Massachusetts sets 6 p. m. Fourteen other male suffrage states set 10
p. m. as the closing hour; and all these states prohibit work before 6
a. m. What do we find in the woman suffrage states? Simply that out of
the eleven suffrage states, one state, California, sets a 10 p. m.
limit, but it does not apply to canneries.
As women enter further into the industrial field, more and more laws are
made for their protection. The men have done wonderfully for our women.
Whenever the public conscience is aroused to the need of a law, that
law is passed. Women do much, in fact, nearly everything, towards
arousing that public conscience, but we find when we study the laws as
they exist in our state that our men have made better laws for the
protection of our women than the men and women have made together in any
suffrage state. Let me add some of the other good laws we have in
Massachusetts. We have the Mothers' Pension Bill. This law was
originated by a man in a male suffrage state. We have the Equal
Guardianship Law. There are suffrage states where neither of these laws
exist.
Not long ago Mrs. Maud Wood Park, asserted that I was misstating the
laws in suffrage states. She said I did not know the happenings in the
legislature this year. I have made a careful study of the laws proposed
and the action taken upon them in the eleven suffrage states and the
four big "campaign states" in the legislative year of 1915. I find that
while in Massachusetts we enacted _five_ new laws relating to our women
and children assuring them of still greater protection and better public
health regulations, Arizona turned down five laws for women which
already exist here in our own state. I was unable to find any suffrage
state which could compare in any favorable way with the progress
Massachusetts has made. Wyoming turned down a bill regulating the
employment of children and a bill limiting the hours a woman may work.
As long as I have mentioned Arizona, let me continue the comparison one
step further and point out that on the 16th of February, 1915, Mrs.
Berry, an Arizona suffragist, introduced a bill regulating and granting
teachers' pensions. The bill was indefinitely postponed. In the same
year Massachusetts women teachers introduced a bill asking to have their
former pensions granted again to them. At the same time the men teachers
introduced a similar bill; and it is an interesting fact that the men
were turned down, while the women's bill was signed by the Governor. For
our suffrage friends who say that women must have the ballot to be
listened to, this is rather a stumbling block. I happened to be up at
the State House the day the bill went through, and heard one of the
women who was interested say: "It's a mighty lucky thing we women did
_not_ have the vote." This is the latest example of what Massachusetts
men are interested in doing for Massachusetts women. Let us voice our
just pride that Massachusetts touches the high water mark of protective
legislation and stands as an example to all other states.
VII
WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND WAR
MRS. CHARLES P. STRONG
_Mary B. Strong, widow of Dr. Charles P. Strong of the Harvard
Medical School; studied for three years at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology; former President of the Saturday
Morning Club; Vice-President of the Cambridge Indian Association;
Corresponding Secretary of the Massachusetts Women's Anti-Suffrage
Association._
_J. A. H._
When the great European war broke out in 1914, the suffragists tried to
use the situation to further their propaganda. They remind me of the mad
philosopher who suggested it would be well to profit by an eruption of
Vesuvius in order to boil an egg.
The incongruity of suffragists attempting to pose as a peace party is
obvious to anyone with a memory and a sense of humor. Before the war
broke out, American suffrage leaders were applauding, feasting, and
subsidizing the British virago who instigated the setting on fire of 146
public buildings, churches, and houses, the explosion of 43 bombs, the
destruction of property valued at nearly two million dollars (not
including priceless works of arts), and many cases of personal assault.
In 1912 they justified the destruction of the Rokeby Venus; in 1914 they
professed horror at the bombardment of the Cathedral of Rheims. Is this
insincerity or hypocrisy, or mere aberration of mind?
The best time to work for peace is before war breaks out. The suffrage
organization was not conspicuous in seizing the many opportunities for
furthering the cause of peace before it was too late. In 1911 Mrs.
Frederick Nathan, a prominent suffragist, was asked to contribute to the
American Society for the Judicial Settlement of Disputes. She sent the
following characteristic refusal:
"Mrs. Frederick Nathan prefers to give her money to the Woman Suffrage
Association.... She has no faith in Courts of Law and Equity which deny
justice to women."
Was this boycotting of the peace movement condemned by the suffragists?
Not at all; Miss Alice Stone Blackwell, President of the Massachusetts
Suffrage Association, was glad to print the refusal in the official
organ of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Miss Blackwell, in
holding up this example to its members, scornfully declared that several
of the peace society were "prominent opponents of equal rights for
women." In those days, the suffragists were not hitching their wagon to
the quiet star of peace; it has been their constant practice to attach
themselves, for publicity's sake, to whatever movement is conspicuous on
the front pages of the newspapers--eugenics, or sex drama, or red-light
abatement, or what not--and to abandon that ephemeral interest whenever
it has ceased to serve the purpose of advertisement.
And so, when the war broke out, the boycotters of peace societies, and
colleagues of militants, made a rapid shift of costumes, and tried to
play roles in the Woman's Peace Party. So hurried was their change of
mental attitude that their thoughts on the subject were splendid
instances of snap judgment.
In truth, the breaking out of the war was most embarassing to them. Like
a bull in a china shop, the rush of brutal fact destroyed many of their
pretty theories. The stereotyped suffrage answer, when anti-suffragists
pointed out that physical force was the fundamental basis of government,
had been that this was no longer true. For example, Dr. Mary Putnam
Jacobs, speaking of women's demand for the ballot, said, about 1895:
"Women could not claim the ballot while it was necessary to defend
opinions by arms, but this is no longer necessary or expected." And Mrs.
Susan Fitzgerald in 1912 declared: "The age of the fighting man is
passing. The world is coming to be ruled by intellect." When will the
suffragists learn Lowell's maxim: "Don't never prophesy--onless ye
know!" It is, however, a characteristic of professional false prophets
not to lose their imperturbality and effrontery, but to trust that their
followers will forget their mistaken guesses and listen open-mouthed to
a new dispensation.
The essential dogma of the Woman's Peace Party (none but suffragists
admitted!) was that the adoption of woman suffrage was a necessary and
effectual step toward abolishing war. "If women had had the vote in all
countries now at war," said Mrs. Catt, "the conflict would have been
prevented." History shows women at least as much inclined to war as
men--a fact illustrated in the French Revolution, in our Civil War, in
the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and in other instances too numerous
to mention. The suffragists, ignorant of that fact, or ignoring it,
advanced in support of their proposition a series of specious arguments
designed to catch popular opinion. Of these arguments two were at the
outset of the movement especially harped upon: (1) the alleged
"international solidarity of women," and (2) the supposed likelihood of
woman's opposition to militarism.
What was meant by the "solidarity of women" is explained in Mrs. Pethick
Lawrence's words: "The interests of women, being fundamentally the same,
are so universal that no national distinctions can cut deeply into them,
as may possibly sometimes happen with the national distinctions between
men." Following that notion, Dr. Anna Howard Shaw issued an appeal to
the women's organizations in the belligerent countries, urging them to
put a stop to the war. The replies received showed that the expected
"international solidarity of women" was imaginary. The Association of
Austrian Women's Clubs, for example, replied that nobody understanding
the causes of the war, would have addressed such a request to them.
"Being women of those countries," ran this reply, "where our husbands,
brothers, and sons are fighting for the existence or non-existence of
our state, for our homes, for their wives and children, we cannot say:
'Do not fight'!" Similarly, the women's societies of France refused to
accept any invitations to peace palavers. In short, the real
"solidarity" was discovered to exist, not between women of different
nations, but between the women and the men of each nation.
The falsity of the other argument--that woman suffrage would tend
against militarism--was crushingly refuted when Dr. Ernest Bernbaum drew
attention to the recent history of militaristic policies in England and
Australia. In male suffrage England, Lord Roberts, despite his personal
popularity and strong arguments, was unable to get sufficient support
for his program of universal military service. In woman suffrage
Australia and New Zealand, on the other hand, the same line of arguments
was completely successful by 1911. There, boys from their twelfth year
are required to be enrolled for instruction in drill and the rudiments
of military science. The penalties for failure are severe, and public
opinion supports their enforcement; in New Zealand a boy was sent to
jail for refusing service, on ground of conscientious scruples; another
was fined and went into exile. The electorate was determined that New
Zealand and Australia should be nations in arms; indeed they were more
drastic than Germany, where many exemptions from military service on
various grounds are allowed. It is instructive to recall that when in
March, 1914, Winston Churchill, Lord of the Admiralty, advised Australia
that, in view of the Japanese alliance, it did not need to spend as much
money on warships, the Australian statesmen frankly intimating their
distrust in alliances, declared they would proceed with their expensive
naval program, which was supported by both political parties. I do not
say that what is termed "militarism" is a bad policy; I do say that when
the suffragists state that woman suffrage tends against militarism they
state what is diametrically opposed to the real truth of history. In
this case, as usual, they draw their principles not from observation of
what is happening but from what they wish and fancy would happen.
The theories of the Suffrage Woman's Peace Party being false, it is not
surprising that their actions prove bewilderingly futile. They brought
together a group of "hand-picked" delegates, quite unrepresentative of
the real sentiment of the nations they were nominally representing, and
forgathered in a so-called Woman's Peace Conference at the Hague. Miss
Jane Addams supplied the American press with rose-colored accounts of
its proceedings. Her reports were justly condemned by the New York Times
as bad journalism, because they did not "tell the whole of the truth."
They were calculated to give the impression that the Conference was
harmonious, and that its deliberations led to really practicable
conclusions. Not to conceal the truth, it must be said, that these
pacific ladies, who surely ought in their own circle to have exhibited
that "international solidarity" which the sex as a whole had failed to
manifest, soon developed sharp antipathies. One of the few British
delegates who went to the conference (need it be said she was not Mrs.
Pankhurst?) disturbed its complacency by reminding those present that
they really did not represent the sentiments of the warring nations.
When it came to discussing the actual situation and specific terms of
peace, there arose strong differences of opinion--along national lines.
The chief resolution offered,--that peace should be made without
delay,--could not be passed until an amendment, adding the words "with
justice," was accepted,--words which each belligerent would interpret in
a different manner. Needless to say, the amendment rendered the
high-sounding resolution a useless mass of ambiguous words.
Equally futile were the subsequent travels of the delegates of the
Woman's Peace Party. At a time when the energy and money of every woman
should have been whole-heartedly devoted to practical deeds of charity,
these misguided women wasted their means and strength in fool's journeys
to the capitals of all the great nations. They made proposals for
immediate peace negotiations, which were listened to with more patience
and politeness than their amateurish character deserved, but which were
of course without exception pigeon-holed.
Having moved the nations to mirth by one modern version of "Innocents
Abroad," the suffragists appear to have thought it a good advertisement
to send forth a second. This time they attempted to screen themselves
behind the figure of Mr. Henry Ford, wearing a celluloid button, "Out of
the Trenches by Christmas!" But when a man acts with apparently
inexplicable foolishness, it is generally safe to say, "_Cherchez la
femme!_" In this case, the truth presently came out: the unfortunate Mr.
Ford was merely the "angel" of the new travelling troupe. It was Mme.
Schimmer, professional suffragist-pacificist, who had persuaded him to
launch his argosy. As Mr. Ford himself confessed on his ignominious
return, he was "simply backing up and financing the plans of the Woman's
Peace Congress." The second expedition, like the first, developed an
astounding fighting spirit among the peace delegates, and accomplished
nothing. (It is worth noting that woman-suffrage Denmark prohibited the
party from holding any public meetings.)
There is a lamentable as well as ridiculous aspect of the suffragists'
activity in connection with the peace movement. Their intrusion into the
pacificist camp has brought discredit not only upon themselves, but upon
every pacificist. If the word "pacificist" today suggests to most men an
ecstatic, irresponsible dreamer, it is they who are to blame. The sane
pacificist, whose patient labors are directed toward unsensational and
unspectacular, slow but sure, organization of friendly relations to be
gradually made closer and closer, realizes that his task is a
complicated one, not to be solved by emotionalism, but by calm
reasoning and patient adjustment. He realizes that many different
functions must be brought into co-operation before the likelihood of war
can be reduced. His noble work is in danger of being thought ridiculous
because of the meddling of suffrage fanatics.
The present war, instead of justifying the suffragist theory, has
refuted it. It has vindicated the position of the anti-suffragists.
What is the chief lesson of the great war? It has shown that
international law and treaties are so weak as to be useless, unless
there is physical force to ensure their not being violated. What
anti-suffragists have always maintained in national government has
proved true in international relations. Any law that is made by those
unable to support it through force of arms will sooner or later become a
"scrap of paper." Consequently the most sanely progressive step in the
peace movement is the formation by men like Mr. Taft, and Mr. A.
Lawrence Lowell, (both anti-suffragists, by the way) of a league to
enforce peace, which aims to give international law the sanction not
only of world-wide opinion, but of the irresistible power of the united
armed forces of the great nations. That is the work of men toward world
peace.
What is the work of women? In this field as in all others, it is not to
try to compel, but to educate and civilize, to create in the children
committed to her care an intelligent love for fair play, justice, and
self-control. The suffragist is an enemy to the diffusion of the peace
spirit, because she would force women into political warfare, where
contention is bred. She closes her eyes to woman's greatest opportunity
for diminishing the spirit of belligerency--that of keeping one of the
sexes out of the bitter strife of partisan politics. The
anti-suffragist, asking that the mothers of men may be left free to
develop the milder attributes of character, has the true vision of the
road that leads to lasting peace.
VIII
WOMAN SUFFRAGE VS. WOMANLINESS
MRS. THOMAS ALLEN
_Alice Ranney Allen, wife of Thomas Allen; member of the
Woman's Municipal League, in which she was the organizer of the
Department of Streets and Alleys; member of the Woman's Education
Association; reader of the Committee on Selection of Fiction for
Libraries; Chairman of Boston Committee on the work of District
Nursing in the mountains of North Carolina; a well-known speaker
against woman suffrage._
_J. A. H._
To me the chief reason why political duties should not be imposed on
women is the effect that this preliminary dip into politics, this
struggle for votes-for-women, is having on the women themselves. It is
surely not making them any more lovely, or pleasant in their lives. They
grow bitter, aggressive, and antagonistic, liking the excitement of
campaigning and finding their natural, proper duties "flat, stale, and
unprofitable."
Speaking from platforms and being constantly in the public eye, does not
improve women. We anti-suffragists have taken part in a political
campaign to keep ourselves out of politics for the rest of our lives,
and to keep our daughters out of politics, but we know that in a proper
division of duty we have better work to do along civic, sanitary, and
philanthropic lines, and in our homes, than to be, as our Western
sisters are, out campaigning for candidates, and engaged in struggles
for political supremacy.
Anyone may gauge the bitterness of the recent campaign if he remembers
the abuse heaped on the anti-suffragists by the President of the
National Suffrage Association; and we must judge every movement by its
leaders. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, at a hearing before the Senate Committee
at Washington, said:
"We are not afraid of the body of women who are going up and down the
land opposing suffrage. They are just enough in number so that by
holding out their skirts they can make a screen for the men operating
dens of vice and iniquity and prostitution to hide behind."
In an interview printed in the New York Sun, Dr. Shaw referred to the
anti-suffrage leaders as "vultures looking for carrion."
As important a person as Dean Thomas, of Bryn Mawr College, in an appeal
for funds for the National American Woman Suffrage Association in
February, 1913, said:
"The ballot for women is the greatest of all the modern reforms. We urge
those who are today contributing to other causes to _withdraw_ or
_curtail_ their contributions until the ballot for woman is secured."
This seems to us anti-suffragists extremely narrow, as we know that
woman suffrage is not a reform, but an experiment in legislation only.
In a public resolution passed by the New England Women's Suffrage
Association at its forty-seventh annual meeting, the anti-suffragists
were referred to as using "pole-cat" tactics--why, we do not know. These
are only a few of the many evidences of the bitterness of feeling in
this political campaign.
The whole ideal of womanhood seems to be changing. The wife of an editor
of our most important New England magazine said to me:
"What use is it for you to oppose the suffrage movement, when it is only
the first step in this larger movement for the emancipation of women
that is sweeping over the world?" And I said: "Then we will do our best
to stop the first step," for I remembered the doctrines of the suffrage
leaders preached from their platforms. Mrs. Ida Husted Harper has said:
"There is not a single forward step of woman that has not been blocked
by the words 'wifehood' and 'motherhood'."
Dean Thomas, in an address to women at Mount Holyoke College, is quoted
in Mr. Martin's book, _The Unrest of Women_, as saying: "Women may have
spent half a lifetime in fitting themselves for a scholar's work, and
then may be asked to choose between it and marriage. No one can estimate
the number of women who remain unmarried in revolt before such a
horrible alternative."
Dr. Stanton Coit is reported as saying from a suffrage platform:
"Wifehood has all the characteristics of slavery--work without wage; no
specified hours; no right to change employers."
We find constantly the evil influence that this first step of suffrage
is having on the young women of our day; and, to me, the gist of the
whole matter seems summed up in a paragraph from a pamphlet written by
Mr. Joseph Pyle:
"With Christianity there came into the world a new example and a new
thought. To woman's whole nature appealed that life of self-sacrifice,
of love, and of willing service that has created a new Heaven and a new
earth. From the foot of the Cross there arose and went out into the
world a womanhood that did not demand, or claim, or threaten, or
arrogate; a womanhood renouncing, yielding, loving, and, therefore,
conquering. For twenty centuries that has been the law of woman's life.
It is sneered at and rejected today by the clamorous, but it has made of
woman what we now find her. You see it in your mothers, your daughters,
your wives. Do you wish to have that ideal changed? Woman has become to
man not only a companion, but an inspiration. Out of the crucible of the
centuries has come what we not only love but adore; before which, in
certain hours, we bow with a reverence that links us unconsciously with
the Divine. It is Christian civilization that is in the balance."
IX
ARE SUFFRAGISTS SINCERE REFORMERS?
MRS. AUGUSTINE H. PARKER
_Caroline M. Parker, wife of Augustin H. Parker; was educated
in the Boston schools; is a member of the Dover Grange;
Vice-President of the Unitarian Alliance of Dover; for five
years President of the Vincent Club._
_J. A. H._
If the energy and vast sums of money squandered to promote suffrage in
this country had been expended to bring about the reforms which the
suffragists claim will be at once brought about by their votes, the
reforms would all have been accomplished long ago. But do the suffragist
leaders care a jot about the reforms? We hear of a Seattle woman who,
now that she can vote in her own city, leaves home and husband to come
East and agitate for suffrage. Little does she care that her husband
sues for divorce on the ground of desertion. It is the excitement of
agitation that she craves--the duties and responsibilities of the ballot
are of no interest whatsoever to her.
A mayor in a city near Boston appointed a suffragist on the city
planning board. Did she eagerly grasp the chance to plan the city so
that it should be a joy and a blessing to its inhabitants for all time?
Not at all. She said that the mayor did not consult her, that she had
not even known there was a city planning board, and that she would not
think of serving on it in any case.
Through the Civic Federation, the Municipal Leagues, and the Women's
Clubs, an enormous amount of work for the good of all has been
undertaken; but the suffrage members of these associations far from
welcoming all public spirited workers, attempt to make the belief in
woman suffrage the test of a worker's value, and introduce party
politics and petty strife into these great, non-partisan bodies of
women, thereby impairing their services to the Commonwealth to such an
extent that the eyes of many women have been opened to what the state of
affairs would be if all women were in politics. It is not too much to
say that many women, hitherto indifferent on the suffrage question, have
been aroused by such interested and partisan methods into joining the
anti-suffrage cause.
There is more work waiting to be done than there are workers to do it.
Ministers are constantly asking from the pulpit for workers. There are
more offices open to women now than there are women to fill them, but
they are the offices that mean hard work and no notoriety, and these are
not what most of the feminist-suffrage leaders are looking for. These
feminists tell you constantly how badly the men manage the country; the
idea being how much better the women would govern it. But would they?
The anti-suffragists think that, on the whole, the men are doing well,
and that a government ought to be in the hands of those who have the
power to enforce the laws they make. To have responsibility without
power is to be in a very uncomfortable and ignominious position. To the
observer it seems that the professional suffrage agitator is _not_ out
for service or the good of her town, state, and country, but for her own
good. This is so obvious that her self-assertion is not convincing. It
is through service and not by self-assertion that true women contribute
their best work to their country.
Because they are unconvinced by the feminist's protestations, few women
care to be represented by other women. Approximately half the stock of
the Pennsylvania Railroad is owned by women. They could elect several
women directors if they wished to do so, but the board is composed
entirely of men. Women do not as a rule, employ other women to take care
of their business affairs.
We anti-suffragists ask to be left free from the useless turmoil of
partisan politics so that we may employ what time and strength we have
in the service of those who need them most. We do not care to waste them
in the petty personal struggles of the political arena--we can well
afford to let the men fight the battles and crowd the polling booths
because we in our own places and to the full extent of our power, have
an equally valuable contribution to make to the welfare of the nation.
The help of all good women is now at the service of the men who have the
nations' welfare at heart, nor are they hampered by the interference of
the less good as they must be when the vote of the best might be
nullified by the vote of the worst.
We beg the men not to be deceived by the noise and clatter of a few paid
professional agitators, supported by misguided enthusiasts whose hearts
are larger than their heads; and we ask the men to help us to uphold the
womanhood of woman with all its responsibilities, its ideals, and its
spiritual endowment.
X
SUFFRAGE AND THE SCHOOL TEACHER
ELIZABETH JACKSON
_Elizabeth Jackson graduated from the Bridgewater High School
in 1908, from the Bridgewater State Normal School in 1910, from
Radcliffe College A. B. (Summa cum laude) 1913, A. M. 1914; is a
candidate for the degree of Ph. D.; treasurer of Radcliffe Chapter
of Phi Beta Kappa 1914-16; President of the Radcliffe Graduates'
Club, 1915-16._
_J. A. H._
An essential weakness in the suffrage argument is the failure to
distinguish between government and culture, the functions and the
instruments of each. Government is an organization for compelling one
portion of the community to do the will of another portion. In a
democracy, the minority is forced to obey the majority. The fundamental
idea is compulsion, a thing not lovely in theory and frequently unlovely
in practice. The golden haze that surrounds the dream of ideal democracy
is dissipated by contact with any given city ward. The machinery of
government is a matter of stress and strain; of selfishness, cruelty,
and hate, at the worst; at best, of conflicting interest, mutual
incomprehension, and maddening friction. When we refer to good
government, we may mean either of two things. We may perhaps describe a
community where the majority is notably successful in imposing its will
on the minority so that laws are strictly enforced and scrupulously
obeyed. In my experience, this is not the sense in which the suffragist
uses the phrase. Woman suffrage is not advertised as a means of
producing a more tractable minority. On the contrary, as Mr. Taft has
pointed out, the suffrage movement is a conspicuous instance of one
great menace of the age, the unwillingness of minorities to abide by the
best judgment of the state as a whole. Again, the campaign orator does
not assure the Maine audience that under equal suffrage statewide
prohibition, instituted by male voters, will become a fact instead of a
joke; no speaker in our home town has informed us that woman's vote will
wipe out the saloons that defy the "no" of the March meeting. Rather, as
I understand it, the "good government" which the suffragist promises to
inaugurate consists of improved legislation along certain specific
lines. That is to say, she promises not that the laws will be better
enforced, but that they will be different. A community's predilection
for good laws or bad, however, depends not on government but on
civilization. Public opinion is moulded by innumerable forces, of which
the home, the church, the newspaper, and the public school are merely
illustrations. In most if not all of these, women already play a
conspicuous part; through them they wield an incalculable power. The
confusion, unconscious or otherwise, of these forces of culture and the
forces of government, is one of the prime fallacies of the suffrage
position.
To make the true state of the case more clear, take a single
institution, the public school, with its various bearings on the
question of woman suffrage. Pass over the school committee vote which
only about two per cent of Massachusetts women regularly use, and
consider merely the power which the very nature of our school system
puts in women's hands. All the children in our primary grades, and all
but an infinitesimal fraction of those in the grammar grades, are taught
by women. The preponderance of woman teachers is nearly as great in the
high schools where, except in a few cities, men are employed for
administration and discipline and only secondarily for instruction. That
is to say, women and not men are shaping the minds of future voters
during the formative and decisive years. From women rather than men, our
children learn the elements of good citizenship,--respect for public
property, obedience to law, and the power of independent thought.
The degree to which the lesson is learned, depends upon two things;
namely, the quality of the teacher and the extent of her influence.
Accordingly, two questions arise. Would woman suffrage give us better
teachers? Would it increase the power which they already hold? One may
get some light on the first point by studying the placing of normal
school graduats. The connection between the schools and politics is
already lamentably close. Many districts, with administrations
predominantly of one party or religious sect choose first teachers of
that sect, good or bad, and sisters and daughters of voters of that
party; then enough women to complete the necessary number. Suppose that
the teacher, instead of being the daughter of the voter, holds the vote
herself. The evil would become universal. There is no indication that a
woman's salary and position under such circumstances be more directly
conditioned upon her abilities as a teacher. The chances are that woman
suffrage would tend to make the school more truly the servant of the
party in power than of the general good. Moreover, a vote can be used as
a commodity of exchange; and the woman-voter who amid the fluctuations
of city politics would protect her position by a shrewd use of her
ballot would hardly be the best school mistress of American youth.
The effect of suffrage upon the teacher's influence in the schoolroom
would not be beneficial. Her treatment of some subjects, like grammar,
nature study, and raffia work, would of course remain unchanged. It has,
however, been said by suffragists that her discussion of civic problems
would be more intelligent. Would her judgments be cooler because she is
in the thick of the fight, and her statements more convincing because
she is in direct conflict with the fathers and mothers of half her
class? It is of the utmost importance that the child shall look upon the
teacher as impartial. He may consider her in some respects his natural
enemy, but he must none the less regard her as one of the immutable
things of the universe. For this reason public commotions over school
affairs, however well intentioned, injure the institutions they design
to benefit. Anything which tends to increase the possibility of
opposition between the teacher and the child's family, and makes the
child's attitude partisan is a menace. Suffrage in this field as in so
many others, offers no compensation for the increased friction and
unrest.
XI
SUFFRAGE AND THE SOCIAL WORKER
DOROTHY GODFREY WAYMAN.
_Dorothy Godfrey Wayman, wife of C. S. Wayman; was educated at
Bryn Mawr and at the School for Social Workers in Boston; has
done organized charity and settlement work in Fitchburg and Boston;
was for one year state organizer of the Massachusetts Womans'
Anti-Suffrage Association; is a member of Massachusetts Civic
League._
_J. A. H._
Among people who have what has been called "the sheep type of
mentality," it is frequently asserted that since Miss Jane Addams, Miss
Julia Lathrop, Dr. Katherine Davis, and other "servants of humanity" are
suffragists, it follows that all women should become suffragists. Such
people do not, however, carry this line of thought to its logical
conclusion; for even they do not consider themselves bound to become
Progressives because that is Miss Addams's political party, nor to
become members of her church.
This _argumentum ad hominem_ has great weight in the suffrage
propaganda, and it is high time that it should be considered less
superficially. Having been a social worker myself in a large city, I
have been much interested in the history and career of such workers, and
find therein one of the most positive anti-suffrage arguments.
It is a striking fact that the very women whom suffragists use as
personal exhibits accomplished the social work that won them fame, under
male suffrage. Conversely, in the long list of women's names honored for
their social service, not one of national reputation earned that
reputation in a woman suffrage state.
The National Institute of Social Science awards a gold medal for
distinction in social service. Men like William H. Taft and Charles W.
Eliot have been thus decorated. Miss Jane Addams, Miss Lillian D. Wald
of the Henry Street Nurses' Settlement in New York, Miss Mabel Boardman
of the National Red Cross, and Miss Anne Morgan of New York are the
women who have been presented with this medal in past years.
On February 25, 1915, the National Institute of Social Sciences
conferred this medal for distinction in social service upon Miss Louisa
Schuyler of New York City. In a long life of useful citizenship, though
unblessed by the ballot, Miss Schuyler has contrived to inaugurate
several undertakings and lived to see them grow, till from radical
innovations, they have become the groundwork of much of our modern
charity. Miss Schuyler discovered the shocking conditions prevailing in
almshouses fifty years ago, and organized a series of volunteer visiting
committees which eventually became the N. Y. State Charities' Aid
Association, with headquarters in New York City. Miss Schuyler was the
organizing genius of the Bellevue Visiting Committee, which from
visiting the poorhouses of Westchester County, progressed to the
establishment of the first training school for nurses in this country.
Trained nurses have come to be such a necessity today, that I imagine
few suffragists realize that they are indebted to one woman's initiative
for the ministrations of skilled hands that so often may mean the
difference between life and death. Today there are 1100 training schools
for nurses, whose existence can be traced to the ideas of a woman living
and working in a male suffrage state. Another feat, more political in
its aspects, accomplished by Miss Schuyler was the inauguration of the
system now in force of State care for the insane, and of the removal of
insane persons and children from the physically and morally degrading
atmosphere of the almshouse where they were formerly cared for. In 1908,
Miss Schuyler grappled with another of our great modern problems and
organized the first committee in this country, composed of physicians
and laymen, for the prevention of blindness. What a long way behind the
world would be today if Miss Schuyler had done as Dr. Anna Howard Shaw,
and devoted her great organizing genius to suffrage propaganda!
Miss Jane Addams' achievements in Chicago at Hull House, are too widely
known to require any enumeration, but I would emphasize the fact that
her work was done while Illinois was still a male suffrage state. In
_Twenty Years at Hull House_, which was published in 1910, three years
before women attained partial enfranchisement in Illinois, Miss Addams
gives her estimate of the field of a settlement in social work for a
community: "It seems impossible to set any bounds to the moral
capabilities which might unfold under ideal civic and educational
conditions. But, in order to obtain these conditions, the Settlement
recognizes the need of cooperation, both with the radical and the
conservative, and from the very nature of the case, the Settlement
cannot limit its friends to any one political party or economic school."
Since these words were written, Miss Addams has allied herself
definitely with a political party, at great loss of personal prestige,
but that does not alter the truth of her written opinion. The end of
every public spirited woman is identical with that of the Settlement,
"to obtain ideal civic and educational conditions" for her community;
and "the very nature of the case," as Miss Addams says, demands that
they be not obliged to limit their friends to any one political party,
but remain free from political affiliations in order that their
disinterestedness may not be cavilled at.
Miss Lillian D. Wald's work as a district nurse at the Henry Street
tenement she chose to occupy on graduating from her training course as a
nurse showed the way to the efficient Visiting Nurses' Associations that
are being organized today all over the country, and also to the public
recognition of the value of instruction in health which is finding
expression in the staffs of nurses maintained in many cities by the
Board of Health and School Departments whose services are free to the
people. This humanitarian work manifestly had no connection with the
ballot.
Miss Kate Barnard, the "Girl Commissioner of Charities" in Oklahoma, is
a striking figure of our day. The neighboring state of Kansas is a woman
suffrage state, yet Miss Barnard seems to prefer residence in the male
suffrage state of Oklahoma and has done great things there. When
Oklahoma was admitted to statehood, it was Miss Barnard who wrote the
child labor, prison reform, and other humanitarian measures into the
State constitution; and she was made State Commissioner of Charities,
which position she holds today. Miss Barnard, too, recognizes the power
for evil of partisan politics. She is at present waging a bitter fight
for the property rights of the Indian wards of her state, and writing in
the _Survey_, says: "I want the people of the U.S. to stand by me until
the hand of _partisan politics_ is wrested from the control of Indian
affairs in Oklahoma and in the nation."
In 1912, when the Children's Bureau was established at Washington, we
might have expected that one of the women constituents of the
petticoated West would be placed at its head. Instead, President Taft
appointed Miss Julia C. Lathrop, a resident of Hull House in Chicago,
and a former member of the Illinois State Board of Charities, where she
was credited with the enlargement of the Illinois State charitable
institutions and their thorough reorganization, though, of course,
obliged to work without the ballot. Time has proved the wisdom of Mr.
Taft's appointment and also borne witness to the peculiar advantage
enjoyed by women in politics, provided they are not shackled with the
ballot.
One of the thought-inspiring books of 1914 was also a splendid argument
for the anti-suffragists. It was _Beauty for Ashes_, Mrs. Albion
Fellowes Bacon's account of the securing of the Indiana Model Housing
Act, which was accomplished through the initiative and leadership of
this one woman, mother, and home-maker, with no political prestige, with
no previous reputation built by long publicity, without the all-powerful
ballot.
Mrs. Bacon was supported by the Federated Woman's Clubs of her State,
and enlisted the aid of earnest men and women citizens throughout the
State. Her bill was bitterly contested by the worst class of landlords,
but after three sessions of the Legislature, at which Mrs. Bacon was
obliged to appear in person and explain her bill, it was passed. She
says of that day: "The women, the homes of Indiana, were honored that
day by the men of the Legislature, and we had won a law for the 101
cities of our State. No wonder the women applauded as some of the men
who gave their reasons, added 'and because the women wanted it'." Her
conclusion is: "Most strongly have I desired to show how much can be
done by women's organizations by simply demanding right legislation, and
to show their equally important part of helping to enforce legislation
after they get it."
Speaking of her own work, she says: "Having no hand in the management of
political affairs, I may leave to the various political parties the care
of reaping the thorns in each other's fields. It has been my pleasand
task to gather only the grapes.... I have encountered more figs than
thistles, and fewer thistles than what seems to be a sort of cacti,
that, I firmly believe, might be Burbankized for human good. Would that
they might be, and that we might include in the conservation of vital
resources those great powers for good that are now so wasted by constant
warring for political supremacy."
That last sentence forms a scathing indictment of the shortsightedness
of suffrage policy. It is pitiful to think of the energy and ability
which today is diverted from channels of human helpfulness to this
sensational struggle for a mistaken cause. It is not to be thought of
that we can permit woman's energy to be permanently dissipated in
political warfare or handicapped by party vicissitudes.
These examples of achievements by women of our own day, in our own
country, should convince the clear thinker that woman's contribution to
community organization and progress is best accomplished as a
non-partisan. The stories of Miss Schuyler and Mrs. Bacon prove that
whenever a woman has a righteous cause or a sane ideal, she will be
successful in its realization without the ballot. The three women cited
above whose work most depended on legislation for its accomplishment,
Miss Addams, Miss Barnard and Mrs. Bacon, have all in their penned words
lauded the power of non-partisanship.
And, borrowing from Miss Barnard, the anti-suffragist may say to the
woman who seeks to enfranchise her sister, thus destroying the power of
that great, womanly contribution towards the solving of the vexed
questions of the day made by the disinterested, because disfranchised
citizenness: "Stand by me till the hand of partisan politics is wrested
from the control of society's charities, till prisons, almshouses,
children's homes, public hospitals, are administered for the public good
rather than private profit; till decent housing, progressive education,
adequate recreation, pure food, living wages have been made a matter of
public, rather than political, concern." Let us not dissipate our
energies in internecine warfare, nor yet seek to perpetuate the
drawbacks of our partisan system of government by enfranchising the
women who now stand outside politics.
XII
WOMAN SUFFRAGE A MENACE TO SOCIAL REFORM
MARGARET C. ROBINSON
_Margaret Casson Robinson, wife of Professor Benjamin L. Robinson
of Harvard University; President of the Public Interests League
of Massachusetts; President of the Jaffrey Village Improvement
Society; Vice-President of the Cambridge Hospital League;
Vice-President of the Friends of Poland; member of the Executive
Board of the Cambridge Anti-Tuberculosis Association; Editor of
the "Anti-Suffrage Notes," and a frequent contributor to the
press._
_J. A. H._
The truth of our anti-suffrage doctrine that woman suffrage will destroy
the present non-partisan power of women and give us nothing worth having
in its place is constantly confirmed by the current happenings in
suffrage states. We have now, in the eastern and middle states, a body
of non-political women workers of incomparable value, and one is amazed
at the wrong-headedness which would deprive society of their influence.
Under present conditions the intelligent woman interested in public
affairs brings the full force of her influence to bear upon legislation;
her influence is a moral influence--it is direct and can be used with
men of all political parties. The possession of this unprejudiced,
unrestricted power is something which anti-suffragists value so highly
that the threat of the suffragists to destroy it is a very serious
grievance.
It is surprising that social workers and club women in larger numbers
are not awake to this danger; but, as has well been said, deciding
wisely on this question is not a matter of intelligence but of
information; and it is easier to accept suffrage theories and the
_mis_information which suffrage orators generously supply as to how
suffrage _will_ work than to study the happenings in suffrage states and
learn for oneself how it _does_ work.
Social workers and club women know their present strength and how many
good laws they have helped to put on the statute books. What they
seemingly do not realize is how quickly this power will be gone when
they divide into political parties. Many of them are apparently too
ignorant of politics to understand that _as voters_ it is only those men
for whom they will vote that they can influence.
A despatch from Topeka, Kansas, describing the recent campaign in that
state says that three years ago the Kansas Federation of Women's Clubs
lined up solidly for suffrage, and won it--and that they have not been
lined up solidly for anything since! Instead of throwing their influence
as a unit for good legislation, as women's clubs are wont to do in male
suffrage states, these women are divided into Republicans, Democrats,
Progressives, and Socialists, and the friction among them is greater
than ever before.
At the time Jane Addams joined the Progressive party it was very
striking that such ardent suffragists as Ida Husted Harper and Edward
Devine, editor of "The Survey," should have protested publicly in the
strongest terms against her action. They realized perfectly that
political partisanship narrows a woman's sphere of influence, and that
Miss Addams as a member of the Progressive party could exercise much
less influence upon Democrats and Republicans. She had before been able
to reach men of all parties, but now her field had suddenly become
immensely restricted in its scope. And while Mrs. Harper and Mr. Devine
were perfectly willing, even eager, that other women should enter
politics and ally themselves with political parties, Miss Addams was too
valuable to the causes they had at heart, namely, suffrage and social
service, for them to view with equanimity such a narrowing of her field
of influence.
In an article on the "Legislative Influence of Unenfranchised Women," by
Mary R. Beard, which appeared in the "Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science," for November, 1914, Mrs. Beard, although
an ardent suffragist, admits that women without the vote have been a
strong influence toward good legislation. She says:
"National as well as state legislation has been affected by women, if
the testimony of men like Harvey W. Wiley is accepted. In his campaign
for pure food laws, he stated repeatedly that his strongest support
came from women's organizations. That support was not passive and moral,
merely expressed to him privately, but these women inundated congress
with letters, telegrams, petitions, pleading for the passage of the laws
in question. These communications were presented to congress by their
recipients who often urged as their reason for supporting pure food laws
the appeals of women whose interests in food should not be ignored.
"The Consumers' League of New York helped the national food committee to
defeat a mischievous amendment to the Gould bill, which requires that
all package goods should be labelled as to the amount of their contents.
"Mrs. Albion Fellowes Bacon, of Indiana, practically single-handed,
secured the first tenement house laws of value for Evansville and
Indianapolis. She did this before the National Housing Association, of
which she is now a director, was formed. The recent improvements in the
Indiana housing legislation are due apparently to her continued
leadership and to the public opinion which she has helped to create. In
her case it was personal initiative and moral persuasion.
"Another example of personal influence on legislation exerted by women
is that of Frances Perkins, of New York, in her fight for the fifty-hour
bill for the women workers of her state. Unlike Mrs. Bacon, Miss Perkins
represented a society--the Consumers' League--which asked for this
measure, and she was supported in her demand by the Women's Trade Union
League and other organizations. The measure would have been defeated, as
is widely known and acknowledged in New York, had it not been for the
personal sagacity and watchfulness of Miss Perkins.
"The social service committee of the 'American Club Woman' states that
in the first year of its existence it has done important and effective
work. It was largely responsible for the passage of an ordinance by city
councils regulating dance halls.
"Similar activities, both positive and negative, can be discovered in
the records of practically every woman's association not organized for
purely literary purposes."
We all know that this is true. Mrs. Beard also says:
"The woman's influence lies not in physical force, but in the occasional
subservience of the mind of man to the actual presence of a moral
force."
The influence of this moral force is so strong and has come to be so
well recognized that certain types of politicians and commercial
interests rebel against it. They wish to destroy it, and as the best
means to that end they advocate--woman suffrage! That is not at all in
line with what one is told at suffrage meetings. We are told that women
need the ballot in order that they may improve the conditions in the
home, that they may help the working girl, and put through good
legislation. But the rank and file of suffragists are being deceived in
these matters, for suffrage works, and will work directly the other
way. The New York World has committed a great indiscretion and has let
this cat out of the bag. The World recently came out for suffrage and
gave its reasons. One of them is that a few women, representing perhaps
ten per cent of the sex, have under present conditions too much
influence. These women, the World says, "have maintained at times a
reign of terror over legislative bodies, in consequence of which half
the country is now bedeviled by some form or other of harem government,
and legislators are forever making ridiculous concessions to women
agitators." These "women agitators" are, of course, the club women,
social workers, and others interested in social welfare. In order to
make it unnecessary for legislators to make "ridiculous concessions" to
this type of woman, the World advocates--what? Giving the vote to all
women! It has certainly hit upon the most effective expedient, and it is
because the vote will do exactly what the World claims for it, that
anti-suffragists are so opposed to it. The World says that most of the
reasons urged in favor of suffrage are fantastic and unreal, that women
are not purer and more noble than men, and that they are not so wise as
men in general affairs. It admits that they will not purify
politics--indeed, that they will confuse and disorganize government,
without reforming it; but nevertheless it believes in woman suffrage
because it will destroy the power of the ten per cent of women whose
influence is now so strong!
The question for intelligent women to decide is whether or not they
_want_ this influence destroyed. If they wish to give up the moral
influence which a body of women, educated, public-spirited,
non-partisan, can wield--an influence so strong that legislators feel
obliged to make what the World calls "ridiculous concessions" to it--if
in its stead they wish to depend on political influence gained through
the ballot, which can be applied only to one party, which can be
entirely offset by the votes of women who are ignorant, boss-controlled,
and whose votes are purchasable--if they prefer that, they will get
their wish if woman suffrage wins. That is exactly how it is working out
in the suffrage states. In Wyoming the politicians were clever enough to
foresee this. Woman suffrage was granted by one of the most corrupt
legislatures Wyoming ever had. These men knew that at that time good
women were few in that sparsely settled State, and they knew they could
"manage the others."
Nevada is offering us a most perfect example of the good woman's loss of
influence by entering politics. The easy divorce laws of that state, in
force until three years ago, were a national scandal. This was realized
by certain women of the state, who in consequence brought their moral
influence to bear upon the legislature for the repeal of these laws.
Their efforts were successful and the laws were repealed. Woman suffrage
was granted in Nevada last fall, and one of the very first acts of the
legislature was to re-enact the easy divorce laws! These women again
protested, but with no success. They were now voters, and the
legislature knew perfectly well that plenty of women's votes could be
secured to offset those of the protesting women. The moral influence of
this minority of Nevada women who cared for social betterment was gone
since the vote had been given to all women.
In her admirable anti-suffrage address before the Maine legislature at
the recent hearing on suffrage, Mrs. J. F. A. Merrill said:
"What do men do when they want to bring about a reform?
"They do as the men of Portland did a short time ago, when a number of
citizens became convinced that the moral conditions in Portland were not
what they should be. And what did they do? Did they vote about it? Did
they form party organizations? No; they resorted as nearly as they
could, to what is known as 'women's methods,' and formed a non-partisan
citizen's committee, just as detached as possible from politics. And why
did they resort to women's methods? Simply because they had all had the
vote since coming of age, and they all knew how useless it is as a means
of accomplishing reform work.
"Gentlemen, in every community there are a handful of women who can be
relied upon to carry on church and philanthropic and reform work; but we
all know that the vast majority are indifferent, and that they neither
help nor hinder. And then there is a third class, of women--the
wrongminded. They do not hinder reform work now, because they cannot.
"But, gentlemen, when you give the ballot to all women your handful of
earnest women in each community, who are willing to give their time and
thought to reform work, will have only their handful of ballots to cast
for reform measures; your great mass of indifferent women will be
indifferent still, and will omit to cast their ballots, and your very
considerable number of wrongminded women will have had a weapon put into
their hands which they will not omit to use against your reform
measures, because it is of importance to them to see to it that their
way of life is not interfered with.
"So for the sake of reform which women have done in the past, and ought
to be able to do in the future, we beg of you not to tie their hands and
hamper them by giving suffrage to women!"
That is the matter in a nutshell--and proofs of the correctness of this
statement are constantly multiplying. In an attempt to prove that woman
suffrage will not lead women to neglect their homes, a writer signing
herself "Annie Laurie" says in the San Francisco Examiner:
"I've been in Denver when a good man was being maligned and almost
robbed by political enemies, and he needed the vote of every good woman
in town to keep the good work he had done from being stultified. And do
you think you could get a single woman out to vote for that man if she
wanted to go to a 'tea' or to stay at home and knit socks for the new
baby? You could not."
This is just what anti-suffragists maintain--that the great body of
home-making women will not vote.
The Woman Citizen, a suffrage publication of California, in its July
issue, bears testimony on this question as follows:
"There are today many women in California and other States of the union
who, being enfranchised, are too indifferent to vote. We are loath to
believe that these women--thousands of them in the United States--are
aware of the wrong they are doing. We do not think they know they are
shirking a fundamental duty of citizenship. Too many ballots are cast in
the cause of dishonesty and corruption. Honest and law-abiding citizens
must exert their united strength at the polls to uphold honesty and good
government. There are too many women today who are priviliged to vote,
yet refrain from doing so either because they do not believe a woman
should go to the polls, or because for some inexcusable reason they have
neglected to register. They regard their franchise as an invitation to a
bridge party, something they can accept or reject as their fancy
dictates."
There is no lack of testimony that the wrongminded women do vote. On
November 4, the day after election, the San Francisco Examiner said:
"McDonough Brothers had several automobiles busy all day long hauling
Barbary coast dance hall girls and the inmates of houses on Commercial
street to the different booths, and always the women were supplied with
marked sample ballots."
They were outvoting the women reformers!
What is the result? What is happening to moral conditions in San
Francisco since women vote? The American Social Hygiene Association
pointed out last spring that there had been an _increase_ in the number
of questionable dance halls, and the "Survey" of April 10 stated that
danger signals were being flashed all over the country to young people
bound for the exposition, as there was much unemployment, and the city's
moral condition gave cause for anxiety.
A later report, by Bascom Johnson, counsel of the Social Hygiene
Association, who was sent to San Francisco for further investigation,
appears in full in the September issue of "Social Hygiene." It is far
more serious than previous reports. Within the exposition are several
concessions, maintained despite protests specifically against them,
which are deplorably vicious. In the city itself conditions are
appalling, the policemen being there apparently to prevent anything from
interfering with the orderly and profitable traffic in vice.
Summing up his report, Mr. Johnston says, "_in spite of announcements of
officials to the contrary_, San Francisco remains one of the few large
cities of this country where prostitution is frankly and openly
tolerated. The natural and inevitable result has been that San Francisco
has become the Mecca of the underworld, and that for every such addition
to her population the problem is rendered that much more difficult."
These are the conditions in a city where women vote! Mr. Johnson says
that the Y. W. C. A., the W. C. T. U. and other organizations of the
kind have tried to improve these conditions, but have failed, as they
received "_little or no support from the city officials_." This fact is
directly in opposition to the suffrage theory that women must have the
vote in order that city and state officials shall pay heed to their
wishes. If California were still under male suffrage--if the thousands
of dissolute women in San Francisco who will vote as the party in power
dictates did not have the vote--the moral influence of the ladies of the
Y. W. C. A. and the W. C. T. U. would be much more likely to be a factor
in the situation. If these ladies vote at all, their vote is divided
between the Democrats, Republicans, Progressives, and Socialists, and is
therefore of much less importance than the big vote which can be
controlled. Dr. Helen Sumner, sent by the suffragists to study
conditions in Denver several years ago, states that "the vote of these
women to whom the police protection is essential is regarded as one of
the perquisites of the party in power."
With these facts in mind it is very clear that the statement constantly
made by suffragists that after women are enfranchised they need not vote
if they do not want to, is shallow and unprincipled, and the woman who
makes it proves herself an unsafe person to be enfranchised. The
stay-at-home vote is a great and serious menace.
Voting differs from the higher education and other so-called "woman's
rights." They are privileges only. Whether a girl goes to college or
does not go to college is a personal matter, and her decision works no
danger to other girls or to the community. The college is there, and she
can go or not, as her taste and circumstances decide. But voting is a
totally different matter. Enfranchisement confers a privilege and an
obligation, the obligation being inseparable from the privilege. Since
the shirking of this obligation means a serious menace to the community,
the unwillingness of a large majority of women to accept the obligation
is a factor of the utmost importance in the situation.
The San Francisco Chronicle says: "Results show that in this state women
refuse to accept the obligation which at their request, or upon their
apparent acquiescence, has been imposed upon them, or to discharge the
resulting duties. The question, then, for the people of other states to
decide is the light of experience of the western States is whether it is
in the public interest to impose on women imperative duties which the
great majority of them refuse to discharge after they have been imposed
upon them."
Another danger connected with woman suffrage is this--the character of
the women chosen for the positions of responsibility will change.
The Woman's Journal of March 20, 1915, speaking of Mayor Harrison, of
Chicago, says: "If he had occasion to appoint a welfare worker for women
and children, he did not appoint a woman who had experience for the work
and could do it well, but picked out a woman who would be a cog in his
political machine." Naturally! It is when women are outside politics
that they are appointed on their merits. When they have the vote those
are naturally chosen who are cogs in the political machine.
The suffragists never tire of quoting Julia Lathrop. As she holds an
important position as head of the Federal Children's Bureau, they
consider her views on suffrage, since her views coincide with theirs, as
most valuable and important. What _is_ important is the fact that if
Miss Lathrop were allied with a political party she would not be holding
the position which is supposed to give her views such weight. It was
only because she was a woman and a non-partisan that she retained her
position at the change of administration, when the Republicans went out
and the Democrats came in. Every _man_ at the head of a similar bureau
lost his job!
Miss Jane Addams, in a suffrage speech in Boston, claimed that by means
of the ballot women in Chicago have accomplished several important
reforms. These were:
1. Covered markets had been secured where food might be kept clean.
2. A court for boys of 17 and under 25 had been established.
3. Public wash-houses have been established.
4. The garbage dumps have been abolished.
The record of accomplishments of Chicago women voters as presented by
Miss Addams is not impressive, for the reforms she cites have been
accomplished in other cities without votes for women.
What the women accomplished in Chicago _before_ they got the vote makes
a much more impressive showing. It is to them, says the Chicago Tribune,
that Chicago owes the kindergarten in the public school, the juvenile
court and detention home, the small park and playground movement, the
vacation school, the school extension, the establishment of a forestry
department of the city government, the city welfare exhibit, the
development of the Saturday half-holiday, the establishment of public
comfort stations, the work of the Legal Aid Society, and the reformation
of the Illinois Industrial School. This is a long and brilliant list of
women's achievements, not to be matched by the voting women of any
state. Chicago women were working together when these things were
accomplished--now they are fighting each other in rival political
parties.
Henry M. Hyde, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, which has long
supported the woman suffrage movement, wrote over his own signature his
impressions of last spring's election in Chicago, and the part women
played in it. He says:
"The first mayoralty campaign in which women voters participated failed
to develop the refining and elevating influence which the sex was
expected to exert. When one sees a woman of dignified presence and
cultivated appearance greeted with torrents of hisses and insults from
the frenzied lips of both men and women; when one sees her finally
driven from the platform with no chance of speaking a word, one is
tempted to retire to some quiet spot for a moment and meditate on what
it all means.
"When one watches a venerable lady trying to quell the tumult by waving
a flag and almost dancing to the same rhythm, while 1,200 shrieking men
and women order her to 'sit down and chase herself,' one remembers his
own grandmother, and makes a feeble effort to blush. One is almost
tempted to pick that discarded and discredited old relic once known as
masculine chivalry out of the scrap heap, and see how many people would
recognize it."
These references are to a woman's political mass meeting, which was
described in a Chicago despatch to the Boston Herald as follows:
"A demonstration approaching a riot marked the women's political meeting
here today, and was ended only when the managers of the theatre where
the meeting was held dropped the steel curtain and a spectator sent in a
riot call for the police."
Does this sort of thing tend to increase woman's influence in uplifting
and benefiting her community?
A suffrage writer said recently that the son who grows up to find his
mother a voter will have a broadened respect for womanhood. With these
scenes in Chicago in mind, do you think he will? Suppose she has just
voted for Bath-House John, the notorious candidate who got a majority of
the women's votes in his ward, or in favor of saloons, as thousands of
women have done--will he have added respect for her? This same writer
says: "It might be a new and stimulating experience for a man to have to
explain to his wife just why he was voting on the side of a corrupt
boss, in favor of the liquor traffic, or against the suppression of
child labor." But if she had just done those things herself--and in
Chicago the women voted just as the men did--why should the experience
be a stimulating one?
Jane Addams, while on her foreign mission of "Peace--with suffrage" said
in London, on May 12, 1915:
"I am a strong supporter of woman suffrage, and, although I hope to see
the women of England enfranchised, I see around me endless opportunities
for social work which could be usefully performed while the vote is
being won."
The interesting point about this is that English women have for many
years had the vote on all matters pertaining to housing, care of the
poor, sanitation, education, liquor regulations, police, care of the
insane, care of children, etc. Probably Miss Addams does not know this.
They have failed completely to do with the vote what even Miss Addams,
confirmed and prejudiced suffragist that she is, admits that they could
do perfectly well without the vote. This is certainly a striking
admission on her part.
Why have they failed so lamentably? Mrs. Pethick Lawrence tells us. She
says:
"I never saw so many women working for social betterment as I have seen
in the American cities I have visited. _In England women have turned
their attention to politics and have accomplished nothing like so much
in civic reform._"
Anti-suffragists ask women not to turn their attention to politics and
neglect civic reform; not to make this appalling mistake, which will set
back the social progress of our cities for many years; not to make
powerless, through woman suffrage, as the New York World wants to do,
the women who are now working for social betterment.
The suffragists apparently do not care what evils follow, provided they
get their way.
The Rev. Anna Shaw, president of the National Suffrage Association,
says:
"I believe in woman suffrage whether all women vote or no women vote;
whether all women vote right or all women vote wrong; whether all women
will love their husbands after they vote or forsake them; whether they
will neglect their children or never have any children."
In introducing this astounding statement, Dr. Shaw declared: "I believe
I speak for the thousands of women belonging to the national
association."
Perhaps she does. At least no one of them has been heard to deny it; but
fortunately she does not speak for the 24,000,000 women of voting age in
the United States who are not members of the National Suffrage
association. Many of these do care for public welfare, for social
well-being, and for human happiness, all of which would be destroyed if
all women voted wrong, if they deserted their husbands, and neglected
their children. Anti-suffragists protest against having political power
put into the hands of women with no higher ideals than those of Dr. Shaw
and her followers. They neither wish to be ruled by such women nor do
they wish to have to wage an eternal fight not to be ruled by them, and
one thing or the other will be necessary if the ballot is forced upon
women. In California the men are begging the home-making type of women
to come out and fight the political women, whom they already recognize
as a danger and a nuisance.
Men who believe in fair play will refuse to force political life upon
all the women of their states because a small fraction think they want
it. Those who care for the political welfare of their states will
decline to adopt this innovation, which assuredly cannot stand the tests
of rational criticism and of experience. If they value in the slightest
degree the assistance which educated, public-spirited women are able to
give in securing enlightened legislation, they will certainly not favor
votes for women; for what woman suffrage does is to take the power out
of the hands of these women, who without the vote exert a strong moral
influence toward good legislation, and put the power gained through an
increase in the electorate into the hands of the bosses who can control
the largest woman's vote.
"Practical politicians" are learning this lesson rapidly. The New York
Commercial calls attention to the fact that in our cities the female
vote is more easily manipulated than the male. This fact does not
escape the bosses, and they are rapidly coming into line for woman
suffrage. While woman suffrage was largely an untried theory suffragists
could maintain with some plausibility that woman's vote would be cast
for moral and humane legislation, and would purify politics; but with
the actual conditions in Chicago, San Francisco, Reno, Denver, and
Seattle what they are, this theory no longer holds water, and it is
becoming increasingly evident that the way to do away with the moral
influence of women in public life is to give the vote to all women.
XIII
THE ANTI-SUFFRAGE IDEAL
MRS. HERBERT LYMAN
_Ruth Whitney Lyman, wife of Herbert Lyman; studied two years at
Bryn Mawr; a member of the Woman's Municipal League of Boston and
of the Board of Directors of the North End Diet Kitchen._
_J. A. H._
Women today find their sex disquieted by deep unrest. Our sex is seeking
to adjust itself to new conditions. Suffrage, feminism, militancy, have
been the symptoms of the first phase of modern woman's attempt to adjust
herself to twentieth century conditions. That phase was the outgrowth of
hasty judgment, and is rapidly giving place to the second phase, wherein
the sober second thought of the normal woman is repudiating the false
values preached by those women who impulsively leaped to the conclusion
that man's sphere was more potent than woman's and therefore more
desirable.
The struggle over woman suffrage presents the spectacle of two camps of
women arrayed against each other with opposing ideals. Let no one be so
simple as to suppose that the issue is one between men and women. It is
not a "woman's rights" question; it is a _which_ woman's rights
question. Two types of women are at war, for although both desire the
same end--namely, a better world to live in--they differ fundamentally
as to the method of attaining it.
The fundamental difference is this--that the suffragist (like the
socialist) persists in regarding the individual as the unit of society,
while the anti-suffragist insists that it is the family. Individualism
is the all-important thing to the suffragist; to the anti-suffragist it
is soundness of family relationships. Suffragism is founded upon a
sex-conscious individualism and sex antagonism, which leads it to say
that woman can only be represented by herself, and that women now are a
great unrepresented class. As a matter of fact, women are not a class,
but a sex, pretty evenly distributed throughout all the various classes
of society.
Anti-suffrage is founded upon the conception of co-operation between the
sexes. Men and women must be regarded as partners, not competitors; and
the family, to be preserved as a unit, must be represented by having one
political head. The man of the family must be that representative,
because government is primarily the guarantee of protection to life and
property and rests upon the political strength of the majority, which
should be able in times of need to force minorities to obey their will.
That is the only basis on which a democracy can endure. Suffragism says
that in order to attack existing evils women must organize for
participation in law making. It stakes its faith on more government (a
second resemblance to socialism), upon control by law. The
anti-suffragist sees the evils of society as fundamentally resulting
from the evil in individuals, and calls on women to check it at its
source. They emphasize the power of individual homes to turn out men and
women, who, trained to self-control, will not necessitate control by
law. Knowing well that the great training school for private morality is
family life, the anti-suffragist seeks to preserve conditions making for
sound family life, the sum total of private morality being public
morality, the conscience of the people.
Moreover, the twentieth century has given us its watchword, which is,
differentiation or division of labor. Anti-suffragists by accepting it,
and applying to their sex the new demands of specialization, put
themselves abreast of the times; but suffragists lag behind, still
harping on the exploded theories of equality and identity. The
strikingly progressive message the new century presents us is this: Give
equal opportunity to men and women for expression along their
_different_ lines. Government, law making, law enforcement, with all the
allied problems of tariff, taxation, police, railroads, interstate and
international relationships, etc., must still be the business of men.
The business of women must be to work out a national ideal of domestic
life and juvenile training. They must standardize the family life with
their new understanding of the importance of the product of every
separate family to the state.
The suffragist, who is so often the unmarried or childless woman, here
objects that women could also vote. But it is practically impossible for
women as a sex to undertake the regular and frequent political duties.
If the highest efficiency in private life is to be striven toward, women
must regard themselves as a sort of emergency corps, prepared to meet
the unexpected; for illness, accidents, temptation, sorrow--all the
disturbances of domestic life--do not come at stated intervals. Anyone
can readily see that for women private duty would constantly conflict
with public duty. To become an efficient political unit, a woman would
have to set aside much time and strength upon organizing and bringing
out the woman's vote. There would be the splitting up of women into
rival political groups on class, race, or religious lines, the
dissipation of energies and strain of contention for women who in
America already reach with sad frequency the breaking point of nerves
and body.
In contrast to such obligatory activity for all women, consider the
field of voluntary non-partisan activity now open to the single woman,
the woman of leisure, and to every woman at such times as her family
duties permit. Indeed the germ of the true woman's movement lies in the
activities of such organizations as education societies, playground
associations, municipal leagues, and so forth, which are only in their
first stages of usefulness. Here is ample scope and outlet for talents
and energy.
Our sex, if kept out of politics, has the opportunity in these days when
we prate so much about peace, to set about disarming distrust and
discord within our own borders. Shall we not dream of a united American
womanhood? We twentieth century women may take a noble stride toward it,
if we will, by working for those causes that disregard the divisions of
race, religion, and politics. Is it surprising that the anti-suffragist
sees a vast, unexhausted field for woman's influence outside the
political? No wonder that to the suffragist's craving for a new sphere
and new rights she opposes the plea of old duties unfulfilled and
existing opportunities neglected.
To contrast the opposing ideals of the two groups of women, let me quote
from what a great Frenchman said in the time of the French Revolution:
"You have written upon the monuments of your city the words
Liberty--Fraternity--Equality. Above Liberty write Duty; above
Fraternity write Humility; above Equality write Service; above the
immemorial creed of your Rights inscribe the divine creed of your
Duties." I truly believe that the women who, perceiving present duties
imperfectly performed, refuse to take up the cry for more rights, are
following the more Christ-like ideal. I do not think that twentieth
century American women have outgrown His peerless example, which urges
them to be faithful first over a few things as He commanded. God made us
women; and if we are told that women suffer more than men in peace and
war, let us answer, "Very likely--Christ Himself found His cross
heavy--let us bear the cross and crown of womanhood in His name."
XIV
THE TRUE FUNCTION OF THE NORMAL WOMAN
MRS. HORACE A. DAVIS
_Anna Hallowell Davis, wife of Horace Davis; was educated in
Boston private schools and is a graduate of Radcliffe College;
was a member of Local School Board No. 46, New York City, for eight
years; is a member of Brookline Civic Society, the North Bennett
Street Industrial School Association, and of the Massachusetts
Peace Association._
_J. A. H._
The whole question of suffrage and anti-suffrage is significant chiefly
as it affects the married woman with children and a home; for if there
is any elemental fact on which to plant our feet, it is that the normal
woman is a wife and mother and home-maker. But is not the contention of
the suffragists fundamentally based upon the circumstances of the woman
who is not leading this normal life,--who is unmarried, who has no
children, or who is not making a home and bringing up her children
herself? It is in planning for these exceptional women, as I think they
do, that the suffragist leaders tend to ignore the truly representative
women--the majority. Do we not suspect, indeed, that they are turning
to new ideals, because they have never tried the old? As Chesterton
says: "The ideal house, the happy family, is now chiefly assailed by
those who have never known it, or by those who have failed to fulfil it.
Numberless modern women have rebelled against domesticity in theory,
because they have never known it in practice."
"But," the suffragists ask, "granting that your woman of 'normal' life
is in the majority, and doesn't want the vote, _oughtn't_ she to want
it? Casting a ballot takes next to no time, and that is all she needs to
do. Most men do no more than that."
But men ought to do more. That is just the point. That is just why
corrupt government has been fastened on our cities. The Tammany leaders
do more. They give all their time to politics; but the "reform" vote
cannot, except occasionally, be got to the polls in sufficient numbers;
and too few of the best men will run for office. If women are simply
going to aggravate these conditions, if the "normal," representative
woman isn't going to vote and hold office, and the non-representative,
exceptional woman is, where is the advantage to the state of adding
women to the electorate? Probably, however, rather than have this
happen, the representative woman would feel that she must enter the
lists. In competition with "abnormal" or unscrupulous women, she would
be forced to vote and to hold office. More than just going to the polls,
she would have to think, read, and talk politics, as men do, or ought to
do. The whole question here is: Is it better for her to do this, or to
do the things which men don't do? _For one person can't do it all well._
A good mother of three or four children already has more than she can do
well. If she takes up this whole new department of life and thought, I
am convinced she will have to let something else go, and already under
the influence of the feminist movement, that "something else" seems to
be her home. So, this is what the anti-suffragists feel most
keenly--that once the franchise is imposed as a duty, they would have to
do the things which men already are doing (and doing as well as the
women could do them); that they would no longer be free to do what they
think is the higher work for them, as women. Therefore, when a
suffragist tells me she has a "right" to vote, I say that, in the name
of the best interests of the community, I have the right _not_ to vote.
Another thing which the anti-suffragists feel is not recognized
sufficiently by their opponents, is the essential and valuable
difference between men and women in their manner of approach to any
given human problem. "Law" to the antis seems a man's word. Man thinks
of people in masses. He makes laws for the whole. He generalizes better
than women. On the other hand, where woman is stronger than he is in her
feeling for the individual person, and her use of love rather than of
law, neither the masculine nor the feminine gift is better, the one than
the other, but the two work together as necessary parts of one whole. As
Ida Tarbell puts it: "Human society may be likened to two great
circles, one revolving within the other. In the inner circle rules the
woman. Here she breeds and trains the material for the outer circle,
which exists only by and for her. That accident may throw her into this
outer circle is, of course, true, but it is not her natural habitat. Nor
is she fitted by Nature to live and circulate freely there. What it all
amounts to is that the labor of the world is naturally divided between
the two different beings that people the world. It is unfair to the
woman that she be asked to do the work of the outer circle. The man can
do that satisfactorily if she does her part, that is, if she prepares
him the material. Certainly, he can never come into the inner circle and
do her work."
So, in claiming for women the right to take a part in the man's half of
life, the suffragists, I think, lose sight of what the woman's half is.
In urging that they must have a hand in law-making and government and
public life generally, they do not see that woman's peculiar work is
pretty independent of laws and of government, is rather in private life.
For it is just where the law cannot reach that woman is supreme. It is
just in the finer, more personal and intimate relationships of life,
which government cannot include, that woman finds her work waiting for
her, which she alone can do--what Octavia Hill calls "the out-of-sight,
silent work."
That woman is today neglecting this, her own part of the world's work, I
think is everywhere apparent. Surely we do not need more laws; what we
do need is more of the spirit which shall make people want to obey the
laws which we have. What else does it mean when we say we cannot enforce
the laws? The suffragists are clamoring for more laws, for more of the
man-element in society; the anti-suffragists feel that it is the inner
life and character, the mother's work, which everywhere needs
strengthening. Settlement workers, doctors, ministers, and police
commissioners, are beginning to feel this, too. They are telling us that
in their work they find that no laws and no institutions can take the
place of home teaching and influence with young people. The outer
restraint and penalty are little effective unless they are met by the
inner desire to do right.
On points like these I believe the accent should be laid today. The
pendulum is swinging too far away from the things which our mothers and
grandmothers made their chief concern. What is called "the rise of
woman," her new feeling of influence and power, are blessings only as
they help her to do better and of freer choice the things which are in
tune with Nature and with the need of the world.
XV
THE IMPERATIVE DEMAND UPON WOMEN IN THE HOME
MRS. CHARLES BURTON GULICK
_Anne Hathaway Gulick, wife of Professor Charles B. Gulick of
Harvard University; graduated at the Framingham State Normal
School; taught four years in Boston and Cambridge, and is
Secretary of the Public Interests' League of Massachusetts._
_J. A. H._
In his address to the Associated Press on April 21, 1915, President
Wilson said: "You deal in the raw material of opinion, and if my
convictions have any validity, _opinion_ ultimately governs the world."
This is exactly what the anti-suffragists believe and teach. They know
that the vote merely registers public opinion, it does not make it.
Therefore, they oppose laying the useless burden of the ballot on the
shoulders of woman, who already has every opportunity in her own special
province to mold public opinion by educating the inmates of her home to
live right and to think right. From such homes, where high principles
are inculcated, comes the public spirited, right minded man, whose vote
registers the fact that the mother in that home has done her duty
faithfully and well. A woman who has thus fulfilled her obligation to
the world knows that there is not time left to take up political duties.
Either the home or the politics must suffer. In the end, in the great
majority of cases, nature would assert herself, and the political duties
would be neglected.
A minister, who is a suffragist, is quoted recently as saying: "Our
young men, we believe, would be safer if their mothers and wives had the
ballot, for they are the ones most injured by many evils." In what way
will our young men be safer because their mothers and their wives have
the ballot? Instead of devoting themselves wholly to teaching their sons
and daughters the value of self-restraint, of respect for the rights and
comfort of others, and the importance of high ideals of citizenship, if
these same mothers and wives are dividing their attention between the
home and political strife and strain, can they reasonably be expected to
fulfill their greatest duty successfully? No woman should be obliged to
divide her energies, and so have less time to give to the study of her
children. No two children are alike, and each child requires special
consideration and care for its best development. Can any one tell at
what moment a child may need unusual attention and thought to guide it
aright? Supposing the mother had the ballot, would the political
campaign wait because her child was going through a particularly trying
period, when a step one way or the other might make or mar its
character? Or would the child wait to take the step because it was
important for the mother to throw all the weight of her sound sense and
good influence into the political campaign, and she must, therefore,
just at this critical time set aside her home duties? No, most certainly
not. The mother must have _no_ other duties which could come before her
home duties at any time.
Some one said recently: "A man must have a place to go from and to come
to." In order to make him continue to want to go from and come to his
home, there must be something there to make him look forward to the
home-coming with pleasure as the reward of his labor. If this home is
kept by a woman who cannot be at home often when most needed, who labors
under the excitement of the political campaign, how long is he going to
look forward to his home-coming? Of course, the answer to this is that
most women would not spend any more time over politics than they do now.
But if that is so, of what use will they be as voters, and why add a
perfectly useless body of voters, when this addition to the electorate
will mean an increase in the expenses of the government and consequently
higher cost of living, already too high for the average family?
We do not believe with Mr. Creel that "the old fashioned idea of home is
bunk," nor do we agree with Mr. Roger Sherman Hoar, who is reported as
saying that "woman suffrage, by doubling the electorate, will double the
opportunities of each man for political interest." He goes on to say
that when a man's wife becomes a voter he will talk politics with her
and will give more weight to her political opinion, thereby learning the
home point of view on home matters. Is it probable that a man who has
not spent enough time with his wife to know what the home point of view
is before she has a vote, would be induced to spend more time there
because she had? It is much more likely that he would spend less time
there, since without political duties she was unable to make his home
attractive, and with political duties she would have even less time to
give to the making of a good home. Further on we read: "With increased
interest in matters political"--this increase to be brought about by
giving women the vote--"the men will scrutinize their public servants
more carefully." What becomes here of the contention of the suffragists
that the _ballot_ is the only thing that wakens interest in good
government, if the men who already have the ballot are not interested in
good government, but need to have the women enfranchised before they can
have a real interest in matters political?
No, woman must specialize in the home. I am not speaking of those who
"by choice or accident have missed the highest privilege of womanhood,"
as Mr. Pyle ably puts it, but of the great majority of women. To my mind
the advantages of a properly conducted home life far outweigh the
advantages of any institution, no matter how good. That I am not alone
in this opinion is witnessed by the fact that the trustees of the best
orphan asylums are making every effort to diminish the number of
children in their institutions and to place the children in homes. They
have learned that even a poorly conducted home is better than a well
conducted asylum, and that they have no right to deprive children of the
benefits of family life. Yet the feminists, closely allied with the
suffragists, advocate putting children of tender age into institutions,
where, according to them, they will be better cared for than at home.
"If they are well, the institution nurse is as good; if they are ill,
she is much better than the mother" says one suffrage leader. Those of
us who have known better can only pity people who hold such beliefs. To
them mother love can have no meaning. Yet those of us who have felt this
mother love, know what a guiding star it has been, and must always
continue to be, brightening steadily as the years go by, and beckoning
us more persistently than ever to higher ideals when it is only a
memory. Who would dare deprive our children of this precious heritage?
Only the unknowing.
After all, the women who rebel against the idea that home is the place
for woman are largely those who misunderstand the duties of home, who
think only of the drudgery, and forget to think of the happiness that
comes with watching our families develop under our care. Although the
mother must do all the work in the average family, it is not from these
homes where in most cases the women are happily busy with their home
duties that most of the agitation about abandonning the home comes, but
from among those people who have too much leisure on their hands, and
who, unfortunately, do not find sufficiently exciting the duties of
training good citizens. Whatever our work in life, whatever our
occupation, we cannot rid ourselves of drudgery. Is there not more
deadening, unvarying monotony for the business woman, the shop girl, the
factory hand, than for the woman in the home who is her own mistress and
can in some degree regulate and vary her work to suit her own pleasure?
It is only because such work is new and untried by them that many women
think it preferable to home duties; but the fact that so many girls in
industry marry young to get away from this uncongenial work proves that
when tried it is not found either so exciting or so interesting as these
advocates of woman in industry and out of the home imagine.
Do not mistake me: No woman should spend all of her time at home. Public
needs and social duties must be attended to. From the latter she brings
refreshment and new ideas to the home, and by giving a proper share of
her energies to the former she can do her part toward helping the
community in which she lives to be constantly improving itself, and so
to become an ideal place in which to develop worthy citizens. With these
interests she can be a real influence for good, and without them she
must fall short of ideal motherhood. We must not forget that a woman can
select her own time for her social duties, and they can be set aside at
any time that more important matters need her attention in the home,
but that she could not select her own time for political duties.
Let us remember, then, as Miss Lucy Price says, that after all, women in
big business are not the successes, men can do that work as well and
better than they. It is the women in the home, outnumbering all others
fifteen to one (and fourteen of these do not keep a servant), who are
really the great and typical women of the world.
XVI
SUFFRAGE AND THE SEX PROBLEM
MRS. WILLIAM LOWELL PUTNAM
_Mrs. William Lowell Putnam; a director of the American
Association for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality;
Chairman, Department of Public Health of Women's Municipal League
of Boston, which has the following committees: Household Nursing,
Prenatal and Obstetrical Care, Sanitation and Safety of Public
Buildings and Conveyances, Hygiene of Occupations, Abatement of
Noise, Social Hygiene and Quackery; a member of the National Child
Welfare Exhibit Committee, and of the Massachusetts Committee
on Unemployment of the American Section of the International
Association; Chairman, Executive Committee of Massachusetts Milk
Consumers' Association; Chairman of the Sub-Committee on Boston
of the Special Aid Society for American Preparedness._
_J. A. H._
More talk and less thought is expended on the subject of sex today than
on almost anything else.
It is a hopeful sign for the future that society in general is awakening
to the far-reaching importance of the relations between the sexes,
and--feeling that these relations at present leave much to be
desired--is offering many suggestions for the solution of this vexed
problem, even though the suggestions themselves are not always
calculated to obtain the desired results. The fact that throughout much
of the civilized world, women outnumber men, combined with the attitude
of certain women whose lives have been passed without personal
experience of sexual relations has led to the suggestion that the sex
problem may be simplified in the future by the development of a neuter
sex which these people think they see approaching. But this seems hardly
a likely solution, for asexuality must of necessity be self-destructive,
and need not, therefore, occupy us long, though just now the type does
seem rather self-concious. A less fanciful, though not more satisfying,
solution is that of the feminist, who, in hunting for a cure, demands
for men and women alike no restraint on sexual relations beyond the
immediate desires of the two people most intimately concerned, while her
milder sister, the suffragette, believes that women by voting can bring
about in both sexes the control of human passion.
That the sexual relation interests the world is not so new a condition
as we sometimes think; indeed, half unconsciously, sex has always been
of paramount interest from the cradle to the grave, from the time when
the child alone first nurses tenderly its doll, or in groups plays
house, and at being father and mother and children. It is only the
realization and open discussion of the interest which is new. Sex is the
most vital thing in the world, for on it all but the lowest forms of
life depend; hence the instinct of reproduction is equalled in its force
by no other except, perhaps, that of self-preservation. We must think
about it. Only let us think straight.
The reproductive instinct is normally stronger in men than in women;
because in matters of sex, whatever he may be in other things, man is
certainly the giver and woman the receiver of the gift. This fact has
led to the assumption that man is, therefore, responsible for all the
sins of sex, and this would undoubtedly be true were instinct and
passion matters quite beyond our personal control, but they are not. The
instinct of self-preservation is the most fundamental feeling that we
have, and yet in the sinking of the "Titanic" and the horror of the
"Lusitania," we saw this instinct controlled--how gloriously--by the
highest manhood of men, not only of those from whom we should have
expected the utmost consideration, but also of those who, we might have
thought, had forfeited their manhood by lives of uncontrolled and sodden
self-indulgence, lives full of injury to women, and to children born
through them. Their manhood was not lacking when the call to protect the
women and the children came in terms which they could understand. Why
were they not taught to control the other fundamental instinct of life
at a time when such a thing was possible? Are men responsible for the
evil of their upbringing? Is it not their mothers rather, who should
bear the heaviest burden of blame?
Every man is born of woman and almost every man is cared for by a woman
throughout his earliest years. The Jesuits, in their wisdom, founded on
much experience, have said: "Give me a child until he is seven and after
that you may do what you like with him!" It is these early years that
count most in a man's future. What have the mothers done in these years?
Have they taught their children the laws of the transmission of life in
their sacredness and their beauty, or, while willingly telling them of
all the other facts of life, have they let this one, by far the most
important, go untold, fear tying their tongues, and given to themselves
the excuse of ignorance unequal to its task--an ignorance which in a
mother is culpable--I had almost said criminal? Moreover, the
responsibility of women for the moral standards of men does not end with
their boyhood, for each sex is ultimately what the other demands of it
to be. Men have demanded purity of their women, but women have not
demanded it of men. Have not good women been in the habit of receiving
into their society men whose past they know to have been bad--yes, and
even of encouraging their daughters to marry such men for the sake of
money or of social position? Women's responsibility for the social evil
is greater than that of men, and those who are most responsible are the
good women of the community. The arraignment is severe, but is it not
deserved?
It is in childhood that the teaching of the sex relation must be
given,--with the children that the training of self-control must begin.
If men and women are started right in childhood, the later time will
take care of itself. I would not belittle the father's influence, nor
his teaching of his children; but of the two the mother is the more
important, for the man who has talked of all things with his mother, to
whom the sacredness of motherhood is indissolubly bound up with the
great instinct of reproduction, will find it very hard to go far wrong.
The girl, too, who understands the laws of her own nature and that of
the young men whom she meets, will be in a position not only to choose
her mate more wisely, but in the things that come up every day among
young people of opposite sexes she will not excite in him, by word and
gesture, through mere careless ignorance, as is so often done, a
passion, which, though she go free and ignorant of harm, may bring to
him much needless suffering, and may sometimes end in ruin both for him
and for some other.
Women, through their training of their sons and daughters, hold the
future of the world in their keeping. This training cannot be given by
the enactment of laws; we cannot legislate the control of human passion.
The law-maker bears no relation to the character builder.
"They're no more like than hornet's nests and hives
Or printed sarmons be to holy lives."
Law can only prevent wrongdoing, it is negative at best, for its appeal
in the end must be to fear, and a people ruled by fear becomes a race of
slaves. In a free country it is impossible to enforce a law unless the
will of the people is behind it; and the moulding of this will, its
training and development, must come in early childhood and must be done
by its women. There is no greater sophistry than that women need the
vote to protect themselves and one another from evil men. Were most men
libertines today, no law could be enforced against them. Were all men
self-controlled and pure in heart, no law would be required. The failure
of the women--the good women of the community--to bring up their sons to
be such men cannot be corrected by any short and easy road, nor can
their responsibility for the present evil be obliterated by talk. Women
have failed to do their duty, and the only way to prevent further evil
is to do that duty now.
XVII
SUFFRAGE A STEP TOWARD FEMINISM
LILY RICE FOXCROFT
_Lily Rice Foxcroft, daughter of the late Rev. Dr. Charles B.
Rice of Danvers, Mass., for nearly twenty years Secretary of the
Congregational Board of Pastoral Supply; wife of Frank Foxcroft,
editor of "The Living Age." Frequent contributor to the religious
press, the author of a volume entitled, "While You Are a Girl,"
and a well-known speaker in opposition to woman suffrage._
_J. A. H._
The strongest motive for anti-suffrage action is the deepening dread of
woman suffrage as a menace to the home. The radical suffragists have
little use for the home, and the radical suffragists are young and
brilliant, and their following grows rapidly. It is they who are in the
public eye; whom the reporters interview; who, far more than the
conservatives, are really influencing the thought of the day. They claim
to be the consistent thinkers, reasoning from the common premise to
conclusions from which "older women" shrink. They welcome with
whole-hearted enthusiasm the theory of "economic independence."
This theory was first popularized by the _Woman's Journal_, in a notable
series of articles by Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an associate
editor, which appeared weekly in 1904, and of which the central thought
was, "The woman should be in the home as much as the man is, no more."
She urged women to "come out of their little monogamous harems,"
promised that "when _all_ women are in industry, the conditions of
industry will be compelled to suit the conditions of maternity," and
predicted the time when "a man would no more think of having a woman
become his house servant than a woman would think of marrying her butler
and retaining him in that capacity." Mrs. Gilman summarized these ideas,
again, in a lecture in New York last year: "The home of the future is
one in which not one stroke of work shall be done except by professional
people who are paid by the hour."
This theory meets so well the anti-suffrage argument that the woman,
while spending most of her time within the home, cannot be expected to
attain outside it a degree of efficiency equal to that of the man, that
it naturally becomes part of the creed of the logical and consistent
suffragist. Miss Henrietta Rodman--a wife who, like Miss Fola La
Follette, retains her maiden name, because taking that of a husband
"dwarfs individuality"--gave to a reporter of the _Boston Herald_ last
year her opinion that "a house is as demoralizing a place to stay in all
day as a bed," and assured him that the ideal feminist apartment-house,
with its co-operative nursery on the top floor, had its plans actually
drawn, its site chosen. "Trained staffs are to relieve women of the four
primitive industries--care of houses, clothes, food and children." "By
real motherhood," said Miss Rodman, "I do not mean washing the baby's
clothes, preparing its food, watching over its sleep, nursing it through
its baby illnesses, nor, in later years, darning the children's
stockings, making or even mending their clothes, preparing their food or
supervising their education. All these things can be done better by
experts."
No one can follow the utterances of this group of suffragists without
noting the constant slight cast on "domestic drudgery," and the
eagerness to prove other lines of activity better adapted to women.
"There is rising revolt among women," wrote Miss Edna Kenton, in _The
Century_ for November, 1913, "against the unspeakable dullness of
unvaried home life. It has been a long, deadly routine, a life-servitude
imposed on her for ages in a man-made world."
General Rosalie Jones, of "hiking fame," who is now breaking into the
automobile business, says: "There are idiot asylums in every state whose
inmates are expert at darning and mending. Any one of those idiots
sitting by the fireside could do the family mending, while the woman of
education, ingenuity and common sense, could utilize her faculties to
the betterment of her family and the country.... After suffrage is
granted, women will no longer be content to waste their brains in this
manner." Miss Inez Boissevain's "Ten Minutes-a-Day Housekeeping" is
well known, as is her declaration to the reporter that she "should go
crazy if she had to do housework one whole day." "Young children," she
admitted, "need their mother. But," she added hopefully, "the age at
which they can be left with others is much less than it was formerly
supposed to be." Mrs. Rheta Childe Dorr, Mrs. Pankhurst's closest
companion on her last United States tour, says: "Men are not yet used to
seeing their wives in the role of wage-earners. They'll have to get used
to it, that's all.... I don't say that every married woman must go to
work outside her home. I should commit suicide if I had to spend my life
doing housework, but some women probably like to do it. Let them do it
then. All I ask is that every woman, married or single, should be
allowed to choose the work in which she finds the most pleasure."
"To choose the work in which she finds the most pleasure"--there is the
real individualistic note, sounded so often by the radical suffragists.
It is struck still more clearly when to the reporter's question: "What
about the argument that the wife with a business career is apt to
deprive her husband of the joys of fatherhood?" Mrs. Dorr replies: "No
one but the individual woman herself has any right to decide whether or
not she shall have children. That is a question which she alone is
entitled to settle."
In the same tone of contempt for the domestic round in which the average
wife and mother has been accustomed to find her fair share of human
satisfaction, Mrs. Susan Fitzgerald wrote in the opening number of
"_Femina_": "Of course, some women don't want to do independent work;
some prefer the quiet routine and detail of the home and are satisfied
to make a profession of its many little refinements, even as many men
have not the ambition to go into business for themselves.... But the
creative artist, whether in a profession or business, gets most of the
joy of living out of the satisfaction that comes to him in his work, and
so I say, do away with the prejudice against married women working
outside their homes."
Miss Alyse Gregory--who has campaigned for suffrage in Connecticut and
New Jersey with striking success--says: "Girls should be self-supporting
up to the time of their marriage, and after marriage up to the time when
they begin to bear children. During the child-bearing period there might
be some provision made for mothers by the State, as is now done in
France; then all women who have reared families and who again find
themselves with leisure on their hands, should again be
self-supporting." This, of course, is the Socialist view, and Miss
Gregory, like so many of the younger suffragists, is presumably a
Socialist.
Another pronounced advocate of economic independence is Mrs. Havelock
Ellis--an English suffragist much fêted on her visits to this
country--of whom an admirer writes in the _Chicago Herald_, that "she
has never accepted a penny from her husband since they were married." It
will be noticed that all these women are in professional work, in which
their earnings may reasonably be expected to provide "expert" care for
their children. Incidentally, does not that support the anti-suffrage
claim that the suffrage movement is gauged to the talents and habits of
exceptional, rather than average, women, and that its principles are not
those under which the average woman's life finds its best development?
This tendency away from domestic life fosters the very evils which
conservative suffragists hope to remedy by the vote. Even more startling
is the tone taken in the discussion of "sex problems." Interviewed on
the subject of "war babies" last summer by an enterprising syndicate
which spread her views all over the country, Mrs. Rheta Childe Dorr
said: "There are always war babies at a time when normal restraints are
removed and slackened. After a great religious revival in any town there
is an increased number of illegitimate children.... The government
endowed immorality when it entered the war.... The government made war,
the war made war babies--then let the government take care of them."
To the same interviewer, Miss Eleanor Gates, of the Empire State
Campaign Committee, said: "It's unfortunate that the parents of these
babies did not take out licenses to be parents.... But more unfortunate,
to my mind, than an omission of the license, is the fact that motherhood
should ever be counted a crime.... And, when all is said and done, I,
myself, respect the unmarried woman with a child more than I do the
married woman with a poodle."
These are the utterances of conspicuous leaders of the younger, more
radical wing of the woman suffrage movement; and no one who follows with
any care their speeches and writings can claim that they are out of
character. Is it unfair to say such utterances confuse moral values and
weaken the sense of individual responsibility?
This regret that "motherhood should ever be counted a crime" is often
more tersely expressed in the phrase "right to motherhood," first made
fashionable, I believe, by Mr. Bernard Shaw. It was given publicity last
June through an address made by Prof. W. I. Thomas of the University of
Chicago at the banquet held by the Chicago Equal Suffrage Association in
honor of the National Executive Council. Professor Thomas said, "in
substance"--I quote the _Woman's Journal_--"that many women who could
not marry were earnestly desirous of children, and that it ought to be
recognized that monogamy was not the only relation in which it was
respectable for a woman to have a child." The National Association, as
is well known, is the conservative wing of the wrangling suffragist
army, and contains most of those "middle-aged reformers" whom the
"younger generation" dispose of so easily by saying that they have not
kept up with the times. Miss Alice Stone Blackwell promptly combatted
the speaker's opinions, and the _Woman's Journal_ reports that she was
heartily applauded.
But Professor Thomas is not so easily disavowed. A ten-page pamphlet,
"Votes for Women," published by the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage
Association, is of his authorship. In _The Case for Woman Suffrage_, a
bibliography with critical comments, published by the National College
Equal Suffrage League in 1913, eighty-eight lines are given to
quotations from Professor Thomas's works, while Miss Blackwell's receive
only forty. Such comparisons may seem trifling, but they are
significant. If any one doubts the hold of the feminist ideas upon many
of the most influential suffragists, he may be convinced by himself
examining _The Case for Woman Suffrage_. Anti-suffragists are often
accused of arguing from isolated, casual utterances. For my part, I find
it impossible to reproduce, by any quotations, the impression of
recklessness left by habitually reading publications, both American and
English, in sympathy with suffrage.
Our age is not one that can afford to trifle with recklessness. Its own
problems are of the sort that call for prudence and restraint. The
International Purity Congress in San Francisco has laterly drawn
attention to the spread of immorality among school girls. Suffragists
offer to "mother the community." It is the individual girl that needs
mothering. She is not helped to self-control by reading in her favorite
news-paper that Inez Haynes Gilmore, interviewed as to the use of "obey"
in the marriage service, has said: "To me the promise to love and honor
is more extraordinary--it's easier to promise to obey. It's impossible
to promise to control the emotions." The lesson the girl draws from a
play like Hindle Wakes, when Inez Milholland, in _McClure's_, calls her
attention to it, is not that men must be as chaste as women, but that
it is one of women's rights to be as lax as men.
Professor Thomas' views called forth resolutions from the Executive
Board of the National Suffrage Association, which took a curious form.
They read: "While we do not wish to criticise the speaker's remarks as
such, we heard them with profound misgivings as to their effect upon the
cause of suffrage in the campaign states." The anti-suffrage majorities
in the campaign states certainly proved the misgivings well-timed. But,
however such remarks may have been received, is it not a significant
fact that they were ventured, by a reputable man, at a reputable
gathering? Can anyone doubt that radical views are startlingly on the
increase?
Two years ago Mrs. Winifred Harper Cooley wrote in _Harper's Weekly_ of
the "single standard": "There is a violent altercation going on
continually, within the ranks of feminists in all countries, regarding
this question. The conservative women reformers think the solution is in
hauling men up to the standard of virginal purity that has always been
set for women. The other branch, claiming to have a broader knowledge of
human nature, asserts that it is impossible and perhaps undesirable to
expect asceticism from all men and women." In the _Forum_, of April,
1915, a correspondent from California signing herself "Lottie
Montgomery," expanded in revolting detail what was, after all, pretty
much the same idea. "On every hand," she remarked, "we hear of the
'single standard of morals,' by which the 'purists' mean a strict
monogamous life for both men and women, and by which the feminists mean
an opportunity to express themselves sexually whenever they see fit
without the interference and permission of the Church and State, and
this neither constitutes promiscuity, nor yet polyandry, but an
opportunity to live your own life in your own way and not to have to
sacrifice your name, privacy, self-respect and income in order to
gratify the sex instinct." And, passing from theory to practical
observation, she asserts: "Whether we like to admit it or not, the fact
remains that women today, from the mansion to the tenement, are
acquiring sex experience outside of marriage, which accounts for the
great mental strides they have made with the past two decades." In the
publication, by a leading editor, of such sentiments, we have an
alarming sign of the times.
There are too many such signs. Do we not all know long-established
magazines which have published, within the last five years, serials that
they would not have considered fifteen years ago?
Says _Punch's_ reviewer of a recent heroine: "Her point of view was
typified in her attitude toward the illicit and incidental motherhood of
one of her acquaintances. Without hearing the facts, she pronounced it
to be 'a courageous stand against conventional morality,' which it just
possibly might have proved to be upon enquiry, and by no means a weak
surrender to immediate desires, as much more probably it was in fact."
The author of _Angela's Business_ depicts precisely the same mental
attitude in the crimson-faced woman at the Redmantle Club, who demands
of Charles in an angry sort of way, "Don't you favor a public reception
immediately to splendid Flora Travenna? Don't you think she's struck a
great blow for freedom?"--Flora Trevenna having just returned home after
an absence of two years in the company of another woman's husband.
One of Robert Herrick's heroines prophesies--in line with Professor
Thomas--"The time will come when single women like me, who work as men
work, will have the courage to love and bear children if they need--and
men will respect them."
Will it be believed that an English magazine of fine literary quality,
in which the work of Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett has often appeared,
has printed an article by a woman pleading for a public sentiment in
favor of irregular unions? "Women will go a step further toward freedom
than men have dared to go," says Mrs. Walter Gallachan. "I believe that
if there were some open recognition of these partnerships outside of
marriage, not necessarily permanent, there would be many women who would
be willing to undertake such unions gladly; there would even be some
women, as I believe, who would prefer them to the present system that
binds them permanently to one partner for life."
To many women these views seem so shocking that they cannot believe them
to be widespread. I can only say that such women are leading "sheltered
lives." Said a conspicuous young feminist in an interview given to a
Boston Sunday paper, "It is both cruel and foolish (eugenically and
ethically) to prevent people from trying more than once to find their
ideal comrade for race propagation." The fiction of today is full of the
disgusting experiences of young persons trying to find their ideal
comrades. And an appalling number of these books bear marks of brilliant
talent, utterly unconscious of moral standards, "studies of
adolescence," many of them are. Illicit relations are entered on in the
most casual way and dropped as casually, and yet glorified as marking
new eras of "development."
I know, of course, the answer made by thoughtful, conscientious
suffragists who believe as strongly as I do in the integrity of the
home, when facts like these are brought to their attention. "All
suffragists are not feminists. All feminism is not of this extreme sort.
Feminism is nothing but a theory, anyway."
Each of us must judge from her own observation; but it should be
observation, not merely of the lives of one's personal acquaintance, but
of current thought and tendency. Many of us are convinced that an
increasing and influential number of suffragists are feminists, that a
great deal of feminism is of this extreme sort, and that it is a
"theory" which, through channels direct and indirect, is poisoning our
literature and our social life.
IMPORTANT ANTI-SUFFRAGE PUBLICATIONS
(For pamphlets and leaflets on the various aspects of the question
address the Secretary of the Women's Anti-Suffrage Association,
Kensington Building. 687 Boylston Street, Boston.)
BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS
_James M. Buckley_, THE WRONG AND PERIL OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE. (Fleming H.
Revell Co., New York.) Not a recent book, but contains a good deal of
permanently useful matter not found elsewhere.
_Helen Kendrick Johnson_, WOMAN AND THE REPUBLIC. (25c; The Woman's
Protest, 237 West 39th Street. New York.) Especially valuable for its
information about the history of woman suffrage in relation to the
political and social development of the nineteenth century.
_Ida M. Tarbell_, THE BUSINESS OF BEING A WOMAN. ($1.25; The Macmillan
Company, New York.) The book which best expresses the anti-suffrage view
of woman's place in modern society. See also Miss Tarbell's THE WAYS OF
WOMAN; (The Macmillan Company,) and THE BOOK OF WOMAN'S POWER. ($1.25;
do).
_J. Lionel Tayler_, THE NATURE OF WOMAN. ($1.25; E. P. Dutton & Company,
N. Y.) The best treatment of biology and sex in their relation to the
question.
_E. S. Martin_, THE UNREST OF WOMEN. (D. Appleton & Company, New York.)
A good-natured, but shrewd, analysis of manifestations of feminism in
Miss Thomas, Mrs. Belmont, Miss Millholland, etc., by the genial editor
of _Life_.
_Ernest Bernbaum_ and _George R. Conroy_, THE CASE AGAINST WOMAN
SUFFRAGE, (Anti-Suffrage Association, 687 Boylston Street, Boston.) This
pamphlet of fifty small pages, which briefly covers all the chief points
of the anti-suffrage case, was widely distributed during the 1915
campaign.
PERIODICALS
ANTI-SUFFRAGE NOTES. Issued every other week, sometimes weekly; $1
a year. (Subscriptions should be sent to Mrs. George Sheffield, 33
Brewster Street, Cambridge.)
THE WOMAN'S PROTEST. Monthly. The organ of the National Association
Opposed to Woman Suffrage. $1 a year. (37 West 39th Street, New York
City.)
THE REMONSTRANCE. Quarterly. The organ of the Massachusetts
Anti-Suffrage Association. 25c a year. (Mrs. James M. Codman, Walnut
Street, Brookline.)
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
1. Passages in italics are surrounded by _underscores_.
2. Obvious punctuation errors have been corrected without note.
3. The following misprints have been corrected:
"policital" corrected to "political" (page 28)
"witheld" corrected to "withheld" (page 28)
"accomplised" corrected to "accomplished" (page 74)
"promisuity" corrected to "promiscuity" (page 150)
4. Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies
in spelling, punctuation and hyphenation have been retained.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Anti-Suffrage Essays" ***
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