Part 6

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Speaker Clark is no “neutral” when it comes to woman suffrage. During the House debate the other day the officers of the Suffrage Association were invited to occupy his bench in the gallery and have luncheon in his rooms at the Capitol. Give him the Iron Cross.

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A man in Chicago has written a booklet against woman suffrage, in which he relates that when he was a small boy he and his sister were attacked by wolves, which his mother drove off with a gun. “If she had been a suffragette,” he says, “she would probably have been away from home that night attending a political meeting and Sister Lucy and I would have been eaten alive.” Sister Lucy might have been a loss to the world.

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A wife has recently laughed herself to death at one of her husband’s jokes. At least there is the consolation that she never will have to listen to any more of them.

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The anti-suffragists say that “feminism and the family are inherently and irrevocably incompatible.” When we find out what that means we are going to get mad about it.

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Professor Hugo Münsterberg, of Harvard University, after years of careful research has decided that women form their opinions and judgments just as rapidly and accurately as men. Thanks for that small concession, kind sir! It is so unexpected!

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The women anti-suffragists have just held their first convention, while the suffragists have had them by the hundreds. Now let the antis get up one parade and match it against the more than a thousand suffrage parades on May 2d, to prove that “the vast majority of women do not want to vote.”

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A speaker at the annual convention of the National Municipal Leagues takes President Wilson to task because his “History of the American People” scarcely mentions women. Why single out the President’s for what is common to all histories? The women ought to get even by writing histories themselves and leaving out the men. That is almost though not quite the case in the history of woman suffrage, but the men are mentioned whenever they vote it down.

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“The cause of equal suffrage is so one with civilization and humanity that I wonder any civilized man can be against it,” is the latest utterance of William Dean Howells on the question. He was careful not to say “civilized woman,” because he did not want to hurt the feelings of the Anti-Suffrage Association.

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The president of the Arizona Federation of Women’s Clubs said, in a recent speech, “It requires courage to be a good statesman and only nerve to be a good politician.” To apply this formula to suffrage—it requires only nerve to be a good anti-suffragist, but one really has to wonder where they get enough of it.

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A six-foot woman who has recently been appointed purser on a Hudson River boat is opposed to suffrage because she does not feel equal to the burden and she thinks it would tend to make women take men’s jobs away from them. Her picture in the papers should be labeled “The Typical Anti-Suffragist, an Unconscious Humorist.”

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One member of the lower House of Congress obtained unanimous consent that another member’s eulogy on his dog should be printed in the Congressional Record. Worse stuff probably has gone into that Record; but if two women members of the Legislature in some of those Western States had been guilty of this performance wouldn’t the country have rung with their unfitness for office?

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The reformers say that when woman is economically independent she will be free to do the “proposing.” Perhaps then she won’t want to.

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A man has started to walk with a donkey from Maine to Oregon on an election bet. The photographers should label their pictures, “Find the man.”

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Great Britain has solved the race-suicide problem. Hereafter the parents, where either is insured, will get thirty shillings for each new baby. What a simple solution! What a magnificent recompense! The little island won’t hold the infants.