Part 29

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Just as the Anti-Suffrage Association issued its bulletin announcing that there was no favorable movement in the South, the Georgia Federation of Labor strongly indorsed the suffragists and the Atlanta Constitution declared editorially, “Success seems about to crown their efforts.” The antis are playing in hard luck; no sooner do they get their type all nicely set up than the other side does something or other that knocks it into “pi.”

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One of those gifted male lecturers who know everything says, “We have new models of automobiles every year; we should work out new models of the antiquated family machine.” Go ahead; women have no objection as long as they are permitted to sit at the steering wheel.

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“Marse Henry” Watterson says he has found only three classes of women who want the suffrage: “Those who wish to exploit their own interests, those who are soured on life and the brainless sheep who think it is fashionable.” Maybe it is like that in Kentucky, but the men in some States have found several other kinds.

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The “bachelor tax” which the Montana legislators want to impose varies from $2.50 to $100 per annum, but the majority think $5 would be about right. It seems like cruelty to animals to put on any tax at all when there are more than twice as many men as women over twenty-one years old in the State and those across the border are in just as bad a fix.

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Emile Deschamps tells us in his new book that the American woman cannot keep her husband’s love because she does not return it. But if she returned it of course she couldn’t keep it. Funny how many things these foreigners find out about American women never discovered by American men, who seem to be well enough satisfied not to go wife hunting in any other country.

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Almost every organization in the “campaign” States which stands for anything that ought to be stood for has indorsed the suffrage amendment. Will the antis name one which has declared against it—that is, has declared publicly?

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It’s funny how every woman who does anything nowadays, from climbing a steeple to taking the prize at a beauty show, is described as “a leading suffragist.” Don’t the “antis” ever get married or die or have triplets or do anything worth notice?

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One striking difference between the United States Senate and the British House of Commons is that when a deputation of women suffragists make a call the Senators receive them with open arms and the Commoners shout for the police.

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The nurses who cared for Mr. Roosevelt in the Chicago hospital have been so deluged with offers of marriage they have had to go into seclusion. It’s such a very funny way men have of showing their appreciation of a woman by offering to marry her!

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The women in China, it is said, have now advanced so far that they are held accountable for their crimes instead of their male relatives. Here, too. It used to be the law in many of our States that a wife could not be punished for a crime committed in the presence of her husband. Having a husband was considered sufficient punishment for her—or at least that seemed to be just as good a reason as any for the law.

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Captain Amundson, the antarctic discoverer, who comes from Norway where women vote, says of the English suffragettes: “They are quite right, and I’d like to help them in their fight for freedom.” The captain had better confine himself to easy jobs like finding the South Pole.

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The anti-suffrage headquarters in Trenton, N. J., have a big placard in the window, asking, “Why the Increase in Juvenile Crime in Denver?” Because, according to the chief of police, “juvenile crime in Denver has decreased nearly two hundred per cent. in the last ten years”—that’s why. It is amazing how the anti-suffragists manage to acquire so much misinformation.

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In Colonel Roosevelt’s latest pronunciamento on the question of suffrage, he says that he “always believed it exactly as much the right of women as men, but he only favored it ‘tepidly’ until his association with such women as Jane Addams,” etc. Is the colonel quite sure that he was not slightly influenced by those 2,000,000 women out West with the vote already in their hands?

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At the recent suffrage debate in Congress a great deal was said about women “trailing their skirts in the mire of politics” by some of the befo’-the-wah members. Evidently the old gentlemen hadn’t learned that trailing skirts went out of fashion years ago and now the men can’t make the political mud deep enough to touch the hem of the up-to-date dresses.