"We are not afraid of the body of women who are going up and down the land opposing suffrage. They are just enough in number so that by holding out their skirts they can make a screen for the men operating dens of vice and iniquity and prostitution to hide behind."
In an interview printed in the New York Sun, Dr. Shaw referred to the anti-suffrage leaders as "vultures looking for carrion."
As important a person as Dean Thomas, of Bryn Mawr College, in an appeal for funds for the National American Woman Suffrage Association in February, 1913, said:
"The ballot for women is the greatest of all the modern reforms. We urge those who are today contributing to other causes to withdraw or curtail their contributions until the ballot for woman is secured." This seems to us anti-suffragists extremely narrow, as we know that woman suffrage is not a reform, but an experiment in legislation only.
In a public resolution passed by the New England Women's Suffrage Association at its forty-seventh annual meeting, the anti-suffragists were referred to as using "pole-cat" tactics—why, we do not know. These are only a few of the many evidences of the bitterness of feeling in this political campaign.
The whole ideal of womanhood seems to be changing. The wife of an editor of our most important New England magazine said to me:
"What use is it for you to oppose the suffrage movement, when it is only the first step in this larger movement for the emancipation of women that is sweeping over the world?" And I said: "Then we will do our best to stop the first step," for I remembered the doctrines of the suffrage leaders preached from their platforms. Mrs. Ida Husted Harper has said: "There is not a single forward step of woman that has not been blocked by the words 'wifehood' and 'motherhood'."
Dean Thomas, in an address to women at Mount Holyoke College, is quoted in Mr. Martin's book, The Unrest of Women, as saying: "Women may have spent half a lifetime in fitting themselves for a scholar's work, and then may be asked to choose between it and marriage. No one can estimate the number of women who remain unmarried in revolt before such a horrible alternative."
Dr. Stanton Coit is reported as saying from a suffrage platform: "Wifehood has all the characteristics of slavery—work without wage; no specified hours; no right to change employers."
We find constantly the evil influence that this first step of suffrage is having on the young women of our day; and, to me, the gist of the whole matter seems summed up in a paragraph from a pamphlet written by Mr. Joseph Pyle: