Josiah Allen on the Woman Question

by Marietta Holley

But Uncle Simon Bentley always hears my prognostics with respectful sympathy, and he said after I come out of my meditations, and asked him agin how he would feel to take a woman's name, he sez:

"Thanks to a kind and protectin' Providence, I hain't married. But never! whilst I have the sperit of manhood in me would I, Simon Bentley, ever be called Miss Polly Brown. No, I would cover that alter with my goar, before I would submit to it." And to comfort me he sez, "Josiah, mebby it won't take place in our day."

But I sez, "Simon, I see it jest ahead on us if this infringin' can't be stopped, and I don't see no way to stop it."

But sez Simon in his comfortin' way, "Your book, Josiah, that great work, you forgit that. I believe it will work wonders for our poor strugglin' sect."

"No, Simon," sez I, "I don't forgit that great work for a moment of time; it is the anchor throwed out into the heavin' water of woman's revolt that is a risin' all round us. Sometimes I hope the anchor will touch the solid bottom of man's supremacy, and hold, and then I feel boyed up. But my feelin's ebbs and flows like the mighty ocean to which I have before fittin'ly compared my emotions. We both on us heave up, and heave down. To-day I am a heavin' down. Oh, how deprested and dubersome I do feel," but I went on in tremblin' axents, "I am bound to make this tremenjous effort, and if you and I, Uncle Sime, and the rest of our sect have got to lay down in the dust to be trod on by the feet of underlin's, whilst layin' there under them high heels, I will have the conscientiousness that I have did what I could for my downtrod sect."

My feelin's overcome me so here that I took out my bandanna and wiped my eyes, and Uncle Sime hisen. He looked as cast down as I did, as we both realized our danger from the turrible doin's round us, and instinctively we took holt of hands and sot there sympathizin' for quite a spell.

But anon Uncle Sime had to go home. He lives with his niece and she sez, "if she has to support him, he has got to be promp to his meals, or go without," so he hastened off.

And I summoned up the brave dantless sperit of manhood and walked upright through the kitchen (we'd been settin' on the back stoop). I trod with a firm bold step and braved Samantha's onsympathizin' demeanor as she stood fryin' nut cakes, and retired into the welcome seclusion of the corner sacred to my literary pursuits.

Mekanically I run my hands through the dish-pan heaped with Betsy's poetry. Oh, how sad, when a man has to turn to another female (and one he has always detested) for the sympathy and understandin' denied him on his own hearthstun. And though I despise Betsy Bobbett Slimpsey as a human bein' and a female, yet when torn and wownded from infringin' and cold remarks from my own pardner, I do draw a little mite of comfort from that granny iron dish-pan, and runnin' my hand through the poetry heaped up in it, and read how she looks up to my sect, and the becomin' and reverent views she takes on us, and me in petickular. And how it has always been the goal of her life and should be to every womanly female to be united by hook or by crook to one on us, it soothed me, it brought back the dear old days when man's supremacy wuz onquestioned and he wuzn't infringed on.

And I read how she despises and looks down on the encroachments of the inferior sect to which she belongs, and how she loathes the great tide of the Feminist movement that is risin' up all over the world, threatenin' to sweep us strong males away, as frothy water, if there is enough on't will uproot giant oaks.