Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/623

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NATIONAL AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1918-1919
587

war the same as men?" He answered: "They are doing their part and it may be just as essential as the man's, for if there is not somebody here to provide the ammunition the guns would be useless, but it is not military service."

The war had been in progress three and a half years when these assertions were made and the whole world knew the part that women had taken in it.

"The third personal duty of citizenship is jury service," Mr. Bailey said, "and while women are physically capable of performing that service there are reasons, natural, moral and domestic, which render them wholly unfit for it.... We go to the court house for stern, unyielding justice. Will women help our courts to better administer justice? They will not. Nobody is qualified to decide any case until they have heard all the testimony on both sides but the average woman would make up her mind before the plaintiff had concluded his testimony." The awful consequences of "sending women with strange men into the jury room to discuss testimony which a sensible mother would not talk over with her grown daughter were declared to be that "modesty for which we reverence women would disappear from among them." "Who will care for the children during the mother's absence?.... They tell me they will require the unmarried women to act as jurors. There will be enough of them, for marrying will become a lost habit in our country if we apply ourselves much longer to this business of making women like men." Mr. Bailey appeared not to know that women had been serving on juries for from twenty to forty years in the western States where they were enfranchised.

"Will women vote intelligently? Can they do it? What time will a woman have to prepare herself for these new duties of citizenship? Will she take it from her home and husband or from her church and children or from her charities and social pleasures? She must take it from one or all of them and will she make herself or the world better by doing so?" Mr. Bailey asked. He said he wished that "every woman in the land was fortunate enough to have servants to do their work"; deplored "the unfortunate situation of eighty per cent. of the good women whose hard lot it is to toil from sunup to sundown" and inquired: "Do