VIII
WOMAN SUFFRAGE VS. WOMANLINESS
MRS. THOMAS ALLEN
Alice Ranney Allen, wife of Thomas Allen; member of the Woman's Municipal League, in which she was the organizer of the Department of Streets and Alleys; member of the Woman's Education Association; reader of the Committee on Selection of Fiction for Libraries; Chairman of Boston Committee on the work of District Nursing in the mountains of North Carolina; a well-known speaker against woman suffrage.
J. A. H.
To me the chief reason why political duties should not be imposed on women is the effect that this preliminary dip into politics, this struggle for votes-for-women, is having on the women themselves. It is surely not making them any more lovely, or pleasant in their lives. They grow bitter, aggressive, and antagonistic, liking the excitement of campaigning and finding their natural, proper duties "flat, stale, and unprofitable."
Speaking from platforms and being constantly in the public eye, does not improve women. We anti-suffragists have taken part in a political campaign to keep ourselves out of politics for the rest of our lives, and to keep our daughters out of politics, but we know that in a proper division of duty we have better work to do along civic, sanitary, and philanthropic lines, and in our homes, than to be, as our Western sisters are, out campaigning for candidates, and engaged in struggles for political supremacy.
Anyone may gauge the bitterness of the recent campaign if he remembers the abuse heaped on the anti-suffragists by the President of the National Suffrage Association; and we must judge every movement by its leaders. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, at a hearing before the Senate Committee at Washington, said: