Part 4

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The Anti-Suffrage Association claims the credit for defeating the appointment of a Woman Suffrage Committee in the lower house of Congress. The only question voted on in the Democratic caucus was that “woman suffrage is a State and not a Federal question,” but this will not disturb the complacence of the “antis.” They will simply claim that they originated the doctrine of State’s rights.

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The Texas preacher who asked all the women of his congregation on Easter Sunday to take off their hats had St. Paul beaten to a frazzle.

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The “antis” are failing to scare the suffragists by warning them that they will get the worst of it when they “rouse the brute force in men.” As long as they are gradually getting everything they ask for they will never believe that men are brutes.

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Englishmen are howling because, under the new income-tax law, the wife can find out how much property the husband has. But didn’t she know already, as he promised at the altar, “With all my worldly goods I thee endow”?

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There seems to be some anxiety lest the new women internes at Bellevue Hospital may not be able to jump on a speeding ambulance. Some encouragement is given by the news from Vassar that one girl has just thrown a basketball seventy-five feet and another has “smashed the broad-jump record” with a jump of over nine feet. Give the new internes a chance.

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A man in the audience of State Senator Helen Robinson, of Colorado, called out that as there was only one woman and thirty-four men in the Senate, this showed it was a place for men. She answered that as there were eighty-seven women and eight hundred men in the State penitentiary, this evidently showed the same thing. Doesn’t she know that men won’t love her if she talks like that?

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Why are there so many more widows than widowers? Because a man finds marriage such a nice institution that he gets right back into it, while a woman—well, she doesn’t.

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Ex-Speaker Cannon says that as women can now vote in Illinois it is a good time for handsome men to run for office, and that is why he ran. But Illinois women can’t vote for Congressmen and that is why he was elected.

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The women of Alaska, at the first election since they were enfranchised, elected an entire non-partisan ticket. It is no wonder the old party machines put on speed and try to run over a woman-suffrage amendment.

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According to the latest medical discovery, love causes an intoxication of the nerve centers which may lead to insanity. That is probably why people who are in love are said to be crazy about each other—their nerve centers are on a spree. Cynics might call marriage a jag cure.

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The anti-suffragists say that the suffrage movement is driving women away from marriage and “the feminist movement is turning marriage into a trade for alimony,” and yet that the two movements are one and the same. But how can a woman make an alimony bargain if she has not been married? It really seems as if those “antis” had set out to prove the charge that the feminine mind is incapable of logic.

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If the anti-suffragists would observe their Golden Rule, that “a woman’s place is at home,” it would not be half so easy for those other women to get the ballot.

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Outside of the South only two States voted solidly against the woman suffrage amendment in the lower house of Congress—Vermont and Delaware. Please excuse them, they’re such little ones.

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Virginia suffragists have discovered that in 1829 her women petitioned a constitutional convention for the franchise. That was only eighty-six years ago, and petitions from women are seldom acted upon in so short a time as that.