What the women accomplished in Chicago before they got the vote makes a much more impressive showing. It is to them, says the Chicago Tribune, that Chicago owes the kindergarten in the public school, the juvenile court and detention home, the small park and playground movement, the vacation school, the school extension, the establishment of a forestry department of the city government, the city welfare exhibit, the development of the Saturday half-holiday, the establishment of public comfort stations, the work of the Legal Aid Society, and the reformation of the Illinois Industrial School. This is a long and brilliant list of women's achievements, not to be matched by the voting women of any state. Chicago women were working together when these things were accomplished—now they are fighting each other in rival political parties.
Henry M. Hyde, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, which has long supported the woman suffrage movement, wrote over his own signature his impressions of last spring's election in Chicago, and the part women played in it. He says:
"The first mayoralty campaign in which women voters participated failed to develop the refining and elevating influence which the sex was expected to exert. When one sees a woman of dignified presence and cultivated appearance greeted with torrents of hisses and insults from the frenzied lips of both men and women; when one sees her finally driven from the platform with no chance of speaking a word, one is tempted to retire to some quiet spot for a moment and meditate on what it all means.
"When one watches a venerable lady trying to quell the tumult by waving a flag and almost dancing to the same rhythm, while 1,200 shrieking men and women order her to 'sit down and chase herself,' one remembers his own grandmother, and makes a feeble effort to blush. One is almost tempted to pick that discarded and discredited old relic once known as masculine chivalry out of the scrap heap, and see how many people would recognize it."
These references are to a woman's political mass meeting, which was described in a Chicago despatch to the Boston Herald as follows:
"A demonstration approaching a riot marked the women's political meeting here today, and was ended only when the managers of the theatre where the meeting was held dropped the steel curtain and a spectator sent in a riot call for the police."
Does this sort of thing tend to increase woman's influence in uplifting and benefiting her community?
A suffrage writer said recently that the son who grows up to find his mother a voter will have a broadened respect for womanhood. With these scenes in Chicago in mind, do you think he will? Suppose she has just voted for Bath-House John, the notorious candidate who got a majority of the women's votes in his ward, or in favor of saloons, as thousands of women have done—will he have added respect for her? This same writer says: "It might be a new and stimulating experience for a man to have to explain to his wife just why he was voting on the side of a corrupt boss, in favor of the liquor traffic, or against the suppression of child labor." But if she had just done those things herself—and in Chicago the women voted just as the men did—why should the experience be a stimulating one?
Jane Addams, while on her foreign mission of "Peace—with suffrage" said in London, on May 12, 1915:
"I am a strong supporter of woman suffrage, and, although I hope to see the women of England enfranchised, I see around me endless opportunities for social work which could be usefully performed while the vote is being won."