XIV
THE TRUE FUNCTION OF THE NORMAL WOMAN
MRS. HORACE A. DAVIS
Anna Hallowell Davis, wife of Horace Davis; was educated in Boston private schools and is a graduate of Radcliffe College; was a member of Local School Board No. 46, New York City, for eight years; is a member of Brookline Civic Society, the North Bennett Street Industrial School Association, and of the Massachusetts Peace Association.
J. A. H.
The whole question of suffrage and anti-suffrage is significant chiefly as it affects the married woman with children and a home; for if there is any elemental fact on which to plant our feet, it is that the normal woman is a wife and mother and home-maker. But is not the contention of the suffragists fundamentally based upon the circumstances of the woman who is not leading this normal life,—who is unmarried, who has no children, or who is not making a home and bringing up her children herself? It is in planning for these exceptional women, as I think they do, that the suffragist leaders tend to ignore the truly representative women—the majority. Do we not suspect, indeed, that they are turning to new ideals, because they have never tried the old? As Chesterton says: "The ideal house, the happy family, is now chiefly assailed by those who have never known it, or by those who have failed to fulfil it. Numberless modern women have rebelled against domesticity in theory, because they have never known it in practice."
"But," the suffragists ask, "granting that your woman of 'normal' life is in the majority, and doesn't want the vote, oughtn't she to want it? Casting a ballot takes next to no time, and that is all she needs to do. Most men do no more than that."