Part 30

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The “antis” appeal to the legislators to “listen to logic instead of the dropping of ballots.” Impossible! Compared with the thud of those ballots all other noises sound like utter silence.

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Grand opera was sung to fourteen lions at the zoo in Berlin and they didn’t do any violence to the singers. Audiences in many countries have been just as forbearing.

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A society has been organized in New York to arouse in fathers more interest in their children. Perhaps they have already sufficient interest but in many cases it has to be spread out over such a large surface.

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Miss Dora Keen, the Pennsylvania woman who recently climbed to the top of Harvard Glacier in Alaska believes that she has the physical strength to cast a ballot, but the men of her State insist that she must stay at home and let them protect her from being jostled at the polls.

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All sorts of explanations have been made as to why those Kansas women, when they found they had won the suffrage, built a bonfire and threw their old hats in it. Perhaps they concluded that, now they were voters, they must act as silly as men. Maybe they had such swelled heads that the hats wouldn’t fit. Possibly they thought they could get new ones on election bets. But most likely they only wanted to show that now their hats are in the ring and they are ready for the fray.

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The Woman’s Journal says the devil and the anti-suffragists will be busy all summer. Why both?

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Now 12,000 bakers are going on a strike. It didn’t used to be that way when the nation’s wives and mothers baked the bread.

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A National Desertion Bureau has been incorporated to try to settle all the domestic quarrels in the country. There won’t be enough of that bureau left to kindle a fire on a marriage altar.

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“Women must not have the suffrage,” says an authorized document of the antis, “because Max Eastman’s wife goes by her maiden name.” Where does she “go?” That is much more to the point, if she is to decide the question.

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“On one side,” says a Pennsylvania official in the Anti-Suffrage Association, “are the mother and the home; on the other the woman seeking the place man occupies as the framer of constitutions and the administrator of civil-government.” Seems as if we know of several men who don’t frame constitutions or administer any kind of government, and a good many women who can’t stay on the side of the home because they have to go out and earn the money to have a home. Men and women can’t be divided like goats and sheep, and if they could, there is no valid reason why the voting booths should all be on one side of the line.

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There is a great cry in Washington about retiring the superannuated clerks for the good of the service. What is impairing the service is the large number of inefficient chiefs of departments who are drawing big salaries while their poorly paid women assistants do the work.

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For the second time a Radcliffe girl has won the $100 prize open to students of all colleges for the best essay on municipal government. Oh, yes, women may be very good on the theory, but only men have the practical knowledge. Just observe what a shining success they have made of city governments!

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The way women will lose the respect of men when they get a vote was illustrated in Arizona, where as soon as women were enfranchised the men nominated the president of the Suffrage Association for State senator, and she received six hundred more votes than any other candidate on the ticket.

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Votes for Women says that the Peers, when they argued against woman suffrage, should have been clothed in skins with feathers in their hair, and Lord Curzon, when he moved the rejection of the bill, should have begun by dancing around the woolsack and singing an incantation. We must protest against this libel on the American Indian; he would scorn to take an Englishman’s attitude against the rights of women.