bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? and if you wrong us shall we not revenge?"
To hear the opponents of woman suffrage talk one would think woman some strange, unclassified creature, some rare excotic, foreign to this world, and utterly unable to exist under its stern laws.
A certain Kentuckian was some years ago appointed to a Federal office in Wyoming. Writing home to a Kentucky paper he tried to show that woman suffrage was a failure. The only point he made was that women had not purified politics there inasmuch as a large per cent of a candidate's prospective salary was already mortgaged for campaign expenses: The writer did not assert that any of this money went into the pockets of the women voters, so I fail to see how his statement had any bearing upon woman suffrage. I think he must have realized this, for, facts failing him, he fell back upon metaphor and exclaimed poetically, "Would you purify a cesspool by throwing a rose into it?" "Why of course not," exclaim the opponents of woman suffrage. "A cesspool cannot be purified by throwing a rose in it, therefore women ought not to vote."
This, you will observe, is the sort of thing that passes for logic with the anti-suffragists whether they be "most learned judges" or ignorant clowns. But suppose we drop metaphor and come down to plain speech.
Women are not roses.
Politics is not a cesspool.
Politics is the science of good government.
Women are citizens of the country and subject to its government.
Therefore women ought to vote.
I defy any logician to take this syllogism and show me a shadow of falsity in either its premises or its conclusion. The Rose and Cesspool style of argument is not the one I learned when I studied logic and somehow it is not at all convincing to my feminine mind.
In the course of his graduating oration I once hear a young man say: "Why should any woman want to vote in Kentucky, where every woman is a queen?"
"Every woman a queen!" There may have been some in that audience who were weak enough to feel flattered by such gallant words, but as for me, I had a vision of the "queens" who had gone from house to house begging their loyal subjects to consent to a petition that prayed the legislature of Kentucky to grant to married women the right to own and dispose of their own property. I saw the "queens" who had laid down youth, health, and beauty at the feet of their kings, who by reason of "Care and sorrow and child-birth pain" were but pale shadows of their former selves. I saw the wives of faithless husbands, the daughters of faithless fathers, the sisters of faithless brothers, and my soul sickened at the sound of such hollow flattery.
Whenever I hear men calling women queens and goddesses I smile to think how utterly dumbfounded they would be if we should arrogate to ourselves the prerogatives of royalty. A man was once talking to his minister about "woman's sphere." "Don't you think, Brother B.," he said, "that God created woman to be company for man?" "Company!" snapped out a quickwitted little woman who was sitting by. "Then why don't you treat us like company? Who ever heard of putting company to cooking and scrubbing and patching old clothes?" If we are queens, why don't you treat us like queens?
The language of mediæval romance is not applicable to women of the nineteenth century. Women nowadays are not leaning from their casements, waving adieux to plumed knights. They are not sitting at castle windows listening to a troubadour's serenade and waiting to be crowned "Queens of Love and Beauty." The "doughty deeds" that please "my lady" of the nineteenth century are a lance-thrust against prejudices that hinder woman's free development, or a tournament against the injustice that robs her of the rights of humanity, and the crown she craves is the crown of a perfected womanhood won by the exercise of every talent that God has given her.
It is idiotically maintained by some that if women have justice they must relinquish chivalry. "Give me the luxuries of life and I will dispense with its necessaries," said a witty Frenchman. Give women justice and they can dispense with chivalry. The chivalry of mediæval days was a disgusting sham, and much of our nineteenth century chivalry is open to the same objection. The chivalry that leads a man to give a woman a seat in a street car, but at the same time does not prevent him from looking on with apathetic indifference while she is defrauded of her property rights, is not the sort of chivalry that a self-respecting woman values.
"The profession of woman is a hard one," said Victor Hugo. Everywhere she is the life-giver, and as if maternity were not enough, the heaviest drudgery of domestic life falls to her share even in the most civilized countries. I once heard a good Methodist minister say with emphasis "There is not a comfort that man enjoys that women do not have to suffer for." In return for all this vicarious and unavoidable suffering so patiently endured by women, it would seem that men, from the depths of their tender chivalry, would have said long ago: "If there is anything in this wide universe that you covet, O, Woman: name it and it is yours, if my effort can obtain it for you. Go where you will, do as you please. "The Queen
