Are Women People?/Section 2

by Alice Duer Miller

CAMPAIGN MATERIAL

(For Both Sides)

Our Own Twelve Anti-suffragist Reasons

1. Because no woman will leave her domestic duties to vote.
2. Because no woman who may vote will attend to her domestic duties.
3. Because it will make dissension between husband and wife.
4. Because every woman will vote as her husband tells her to.
5. Because bad women will corrupt politics.
6. Because bad politics will corrupt women.
7. Because women have no power of organization.
8. Because women will form a solid party and outvote men.
9. Because men and women are so different that they must stick to different duties.
10. Because men and women are so much alike that men, with one vote each, can represent their own views and ours too.
11. Because women cannot use force.
12. Because the militants did use force.

Why We Oppose Pockets for Women

1. Because pockets are not a natural right.
2. Because the great majority of women do not want pockets. If they did they would have them.
3. Because whenever women have had pockets they have not used them.
4. Because women are required to carry enough things as it is, without the additional burden of pockets.
5. Because it would make dissension between husband and wife as to whose pockets were to be filled.
6. Because it would destroy man's chivalry toward woman, if he did not have to carry all her things in his pockets.
7. Because men are men, and women are women. We must not fly in the face of nature.
8. Because pockets have been used by men to carry tobacco, pipes, whiskey flasks, chewing gum and compromising letters. We see no reason to suppose that women would use them more wisely.

Fashion Notes: Past and Present

1880—Anti-suffrage arguments are being worn long, calm and flowing this year, with the dominant note that of woman's intellectual inferiority.

1890—Violence is very evident in this season's modes, and our more conservative thinkers are saying that woman suffrage threatens the home, the Church and the Republic.

1900—A complete change of style has taken place. Everything is being worn a l'aristocrate, with the repeated assertion that too many people are voting already.

1915—The best line of goods shown by the leading anti-suffrage houses this spring is the statement that woman suffrage is the same thing as free love. The effect is extremely piquant and surprising.

Why We Oppose Women Travelling in Railway Trains

1. Because travelling in trains is not a natural right.
2. Because our great-grandmothers never asked to travel in trains.
3. Because woman's place is the home, not the train.
4. Because it is unnecessary; there is no point reached by a train that cannot be reached on foot.
5. Because it will double the work of conductors, engineers and brakemen who are already overburdened.
6. Because men smoke and play cards in trains. Is there any reason to believe that women will behave better?

Why We Oppose Schools for Children

(By the Children's Anti-School League.)

1. Because education is a burden, not a right.

2. Because not one-tenth of one per cent. of the children of this country have demanded education.

3. Because if we are educated we should have to behave as if we were and we don't want to.

4. Because it is essentially against the nature of a child to be educated.

5. Because we can't see that it has done so much for grown-ups, and there is no reason for thinking it will make children perfect.

6. Because the time of children is already sufficiently occupied without going to school.

7. Because it would make dissension between parent and child. Imagine the home life of a parent who turned out to be more ignorant than his (or her) child?

8. Because we believe in the indirect education of the theatre, the baseball field and the moving picture. We believe that schools would in a great measure deprive us of this.

9. Because our parents went to school. They love us, they take care of us, they tell us what to do. We are content that they should be educated for us.

But Then Who Cares for Figures

An argument sometimes used against paying women as highly as men for the same work is that women are only temporarily in industry.

Forty-four per cent of the women teachers in the public schools of New York have been more than ten years in the service, while only twenty-six per cent of the men teachers have served as long.

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The Bundesrath of Germany has decided to furnish medical and financial assistance to women at the time of childbirth, in order "to alleviate the anxiety of husbands at the front."

How strange this would sound: "The Bundesrath has decided to furnish medical assistance to the wounded at the front, in order to alleviate the anxiety of wives and mothers at home."

When a benefit is suggested for men, the question asked is: "Will it benefit men?"

When a benefit is suggested for women, the question is: "Will it benefit men?"

Why We Oppose Votes for Men

1. Because man's place is the armory.
2. Because no really manly man wants to settle any question otherwise than by fighting about it.
3. Because if men should adopt peaceable methods women will no longer look up to them.
4. Because men will lose their charm if they step out of their natural sphere and interest themselves in other matters than feats of arms, uniforms and drums.
5. Because men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions shows this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them peculiarly unfit for the task of government.

The Logic of the Law

In 1875 the Supreme Court of Wisconsin in denying the petition of women to practise before it said:

"It would be shocking to man's reverence for womanhood and faith in woman … that woman should be permitted to mix professionally in all the nastiness which finds its way into courts of justice."

It then names thirteen subjects as unfit for the attention of women—three of them are crimes committed against women.

Consistency

("Vile insults, lewd talk and brutal conduct were used by the indicted men to frighten respectable women who went to the polls in Terre Haute at the last election, asserted District Attorney Dailey."—Press Dispatch.)

Are the polls unfit for decent women?

No, sir, they are perfectly orderly.

Tut, tut! Go there at once and swear and be brutal, or what will become of our anti-suffrage argument?

Sometimes We're Ivy, and Sometimes We're Oak

Is it true that the English government is calling on women to do work abandoned by men?

Yes, it is true.

Is not woman's place the home?

No, not when men need her services outside the home.

Will she never be told again that her place is the home?

Oh, yes, indeed.

When?

As soon as men want their jobs back again.

Do You Know

That in 1869 Miss Jex-Blake and four other women entered for a medical degree at the University of Edinburgh?

That the president of the College of Physicians refused to give the women the prizes they had won?

That the undergraduates insulted any professor who allowed women to compete for prizes?

That the women were stoned in the streets, and finally excluded from the medical school?

That in 1877 the British Medical Association declared women ineligible for membership?

That in 1881 the International Medical Congress excluded women from all but its "social and ceremonial meetings"?

That the Obstetrical Society refused to allow a woman's name to appear on the title page of a pamphlet which she had written with her husband?

That according to a recent dispatch from London, many hospitals, since the outbreak of hostilities, have asked women to become resident physicians, and public authorities are daily endeavoring to obtain women as assistant medical officers and as school doctors?

Interviews With Celebrated Anti-Suffragists

"Woman's place is in my home."—Appius Claudius.

"I have never felt the need of the ballot."—Cleopatra.

"Magna Charta merely fashionable fad of ye Barons."—King John.

"Boston Tea Party shows American colonists to be hysterical and utterly incapable of self-government."—George III.

"Know of no really good slaves who desire emancipation."—President of the United Slaveholders' Protective Association.

Another of Those Curious Coincidences

On February 15, the House of Representatives passed a bill making it unlawful to ship in interstate commerce the products of a mill, cannery or factory which have been produced by the labor of children under fourteen years.

Forty-three gentlemen voted against it.

Forty-one of those forty-three had also voted against the woman suffrage bill.

Not one single vote was cast against it by a representative from any state where women vote for Congressmen.

The New Freedom

"The Michigan commission on industrial relations has discovered," says "The Detroit Journal," "that thousands of wives support their husbands."

Woman's place is the home, but under a special privilege she is sometimes allowed to send her wages as a substitute.

To the Great Dining Out Majority

The New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage is sending out leaflets to its members urging them to "tell every man you meet, your tailor, your postman, your grocer, as well as your dinner partner, that you are opposed to woman suffrage."

We hope that the 90,000 sewing machine operatives, the 40,000 saleswomen, the 32,000 laundry operatives, the 20,000 knitting and silk mill girls, the 17,000 women janitors and cleaners, the 12,000 cigar-makers, to say nothing of the 700,000 other women and girls in industry in New York State, will remember when they have drawn off their long gloves and tasted their oysters to tell their dinner partners that they are opposed to woman suffrage because they fear it might take women out of the home.