Nevada is offering us a most perfect example of the good woman's loss of influence by entering politics. The easy divorce laws of that state, in force until three years ago, were a national scandal. This was realized by certain women of the state, who in consequence brought their moral influence to bear upon the legislature for the repeal of these laws. Their efforts were successful and the laws were repealed. Woman suffrage was granted in Nevada last fall, and one of the very first acts of the legislature was to re-enact the easy divorce laws! These women again protested, but with no success. They were now voters, and the legislature knew perfectly well that plenty of women's votes could be secured to offset those of the protesting women. The moral influence of this minority of Nevada women who cared for social betterment was gone since the vote had been given to all women.
In her admirable anti-suffrage address before the Maine legislature at the recent hearing on suffrage, Mrs. J. F. A. Merrill said:
"What do men do when they want to bring about a reform?
"They do as the men of Portland did a short time ago, when a number of citizens became convinced that the moral conditions in Portland were not what they should be. And what did they do? Did they vote about it? Did they form party organizations? No; they resorted as nearly as they could, to what is known as 'women's methods,' and formed a non-partisan citizen's committee, just as detached as possible from politics. And why did they resort to women's methods? Simply because they had all had the vote since coming of age, and they all knew how useless it is as a means of accomplishing reform work.
"Gentlemen, in every community there are a handful of women who can be relied upon to carry on church and philanthropic and reform work; but we all know that the vast majority are indifferent, and that they neither help nor hinder. And then there is a third class, of women—the wrongminded. They do not hinder reform work now, because they cannot.
"But, gentlemen, when you give the ballot to all women your handful of earnest women in each community, who are willing to give their time and thought to reform work, will have only their handful of ballots to cast for reform measures; your great mass of indifferent women will be indifferent still, and will omit to cast their ballots, and your very considerable number of wrongminded women will have had a weapon put into their hands which they will not omit to use against your reform measures, because it is of importance to them to see to it that their way of life is not interfered with.
"So for the sake of reform which women have done in the past, and ought to be able to do in the future, we beg of you not to tie their hands and hamper them by giving suffrage to women!"
That is the matter in a nutshell—and proofs of the correctness of this statement are constantly multiplying. In an attempt to prove that woman suffrage will not lead women to neglect their homes, a writer signing herself "Annie Laurie" says in the San Francisco Examiner:
"I've been in Denver when a good man was being maligned and almost robbed by political enemies, and he needed the vote of every good woman in town to keep the good work he had done from being stultified. And do you think you could get a single woman out to vote for that man if she wanted to go to a 'tea' or to stay at home and knit socks for the new baby? You could not."
This is just what anti-suffragists maintain—that the great body of home-making women will not vote.