THE WOMAN’S EDITION.
To raise twenty-five-hundred dollars for an annex to the hospital, the ladies of Oil City, on February twelfth, 1896, issued the “Woman’s Edition” of the Derrick. It was a splendid literary and financial success, realizing nearly five-thousand dollars. This apt poem graced the editorial page:
Oh! sad was her brow and wild was her mien,
Her expression the blankest that ever was seen;
She was pained, she was hurt at the plain requisition:
“We expect you to write for the Woman’s Edition.”
Her babies wept sadly, her husband looked blue,
Her house was disordered, each room in a stew;
Do you ask me to tell why this sad exhibition?
She was trying to write for the Woman’s Edition.
Oh, what should she write? she had nothing to say;
She pondered and thought all the long weary day;
The question of woman, her life and her mission,
Must all be touched up in the Woman’s Edition.
But what could she do—oh, how could she write?
She could bake, she could brew from morning to night;
She had even been known to get up a petition:
But now she must write for “The Woman’s Edition.”
She felt that she must; her sisters all did it,
Would she fall behind? The saints all forbid it!
If the rest of her life should be spent in contrition,
She felt she must write for the Woman’s Edition.
She did it, she wrote it, now read it and ponder;
She treated a subject a little beyond her,
But that was much better than total omission
Of her name from the list on the Woman’s Edition.
Now her home is restored, her husband has smiled,
But, alas! that pleased look on his face was beguiled
By her cheerful assent to his simple condition:
That she’ll not write again for a Woman’s Edition.