Anti-Suffrage Essays

by Unknown

This theory was first popularized by the Woman's Journal, in a notable series of articles by Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an associate editor, which appeared weekly in 1904, and of which the central thought was, "The woman should be in the home as much as the man is, no more." She urged women to "come out of their little monogamous harems," promised that "when all women are in industry, the conditions of industry will be compelled to suit the conditions of maternity," and predicted the time when "a man would no more think of having a woman become his house servant than a woman would think of marrying her butler and retaining him in that capacity." Mrs. Gilman summarized these ideas, again, in a lecture in New York last year: "The home of the future is one in which not one stroke of work shall be done except by professional people who are paid by the hour."

This theory meets so well the anti-suffrage argument that the woman, while spending most of her time within the home, cannot be expected to attain outside it a degree of efficiency equal to that of the man, that it naturally becomes part of the creed of the logical and consistent suffragist. Miss Henrietta Rodman—a wife who, like Miss Fola La Follette, retains her maiden name, because taking that of a husband "dwarfs individuality"—gave to a reporter of the Boston Herald last year her opinion that "a house is as demoralizing a place to stay in all day as a bed," and assured him that the ideal feminist apartment-house, with its co-operative nursery on the top floor, had its plans actually drawn, its site chosen. "Trained staffs are to relieve women of the four primitive industries—care of houses, clothes, food and children." "By real motherhood," said Miss Rodman, "I do not mean washing the baby's clothes, preparing its food, watching over its sleep, nursing it through its baby illnesses, nor, in later years, darning the children's stockings, making or even mending their clothes, preparing their food or supervising their education. All these things can be done better by experts."

No one can follow the utterances of this group of suffragists without noting the constant slight cast on "domestic drudgery," and the eagerness to prove other lines of activity better adapted to women. "There is rising revolt among women," wrote Miss Edna Kenton, in The Century for November, 1913, "against the unspeakable dullness of unvaried home life. It has been a long, deadly routine, a life-servitude imposed on her for ages in a man-made world."

General Rosalie Jones, of "hiking fame," who is now breaking into the automobile business, says: "There are idiot asylums in every state whose inmates are expert at darning and mending. Any one of those idiots sitting by the fireside could do the family mending, while the woman of education, ingenuity and common sense, could utilize her faculties to the betterment of her family and the country.... After suffrage is granted, women will no longer be content to waste their brains in this manner." Miss Inez Boissevain's "Ten Minutes-a-Day Housekeeping" is well known, as is her declaration to the reporter that she "should go crazy if she had to do housework one whole day." "Young children," she admitted, "need their mother. But," she added hopefully, "the age at which they can be left with others is much less than it was formerly supposed to be." Mrs. Rheta Childe Dorr, Mrs. Pankhurst's closest companion on her last United States tour, says: "Men are not yet used to seeing their wives in the role of wage-earners. They'll have to get used to it, that's all.... I don't say that every married woman must go to work outside her home. I should commit suicide if I had to spend my life doing housework, but some women probably like to do it. Let them do it then. All I ask is that every woman, married or single, should be allowed to choose the work in which she finds the most pleasure."

"To choose the work in which she finds the most pleasure"—there is the real individualistic note, sounded so often by the radical suffragists. It is struck still more clearly when to the reporter's question: "What about the argument that the wife with a business career is apt to deprive her husband of the joys of fatherhood?" Mrs. Dorr replies: "No one but the individual woman herself has any right to decide whether or not she shall have children. That is a question which she alone is entitled to settle."

In the same tone of contempt for the domestic round in which the average wife and mother has been accustomed to find her fair share of human satisfaction, Mrs. Susan Fitzgerald wrote in the opening number of "Femina": "Of course, some women don't want to do independent work; some prefer the quiet routine and detail of the home and are satisfied to make a profession of its many little refinements, even as many men have not the ambition to go into business for themselves.... But the creative artist, whether in a profession or business, gets most of the joy of living out of the satisfaction that comes to him in his work, and so I say, do away with the prejudice against married women working outside their homes."

Miss Alyse Gregory—who has campaigned for suffrage in Connecticut and New Jersey with striking success—says: "Girls should be self-supporting up to the time of their marriage, and after marriage up to the time when they begin to bear children. During the child-bearing period there might be some provision made for mothers by the State, as is now done in France; then all women who have reared families and who again find themselves with leisure on their hands, should again be self-supporting." This, of course, is the Socialist view, and Miss Gregory, like so many of the younger suffragists, is presumably a Socialist.

Another pronounced advocate of economic independence is Mrs. Havelock Ellis—an English suffragist much fêted on her visits to this country—of whom an admirer writes in the Chicago Herald, that "she has never accepted a penny from her husband since they were married." It will be noticed that all these women are in professional work, in which their earnings may reasonably be expected to provide "expert" care for their children. Incidentally, does not that support the anti-suffrage claim that the suffrage movement is gauged to the talents and habits of exceptional, rather than average, women, and that its principles are not those under which the average woman's life finds its best development?

This tendency away from domestic life fosters the very evils which conservative suffragists hope to remedy by the vote. Even more startling is the tone taken in the discussion of "sex problems." Interviewed on the subject of "war babies" last summer by an enterprising syndicate which spread her views all over the country, Mrs. Rheta Childe Dorr said: "There are always war babies at a time when normal restraints are removed and slackened. After a great religious revival in any town there is an increased number of illegitimate children.... The government endowed immorality when it entered the war.... The government made war, the war made war babies—then let the government take care of them."

To the same interviewer, Miss Eleanor Gates, of the Empire State Campaign Committee, said: "It's unfortunate that the parents of these babies did not take out licenses to be parents.... But more unfortunate, to my mind, than an omission of the license, is the fact that motherhood should ever be counted a crime.... And, when all is said and done, I, myself, respect the unmarried woman with a child more than I do the married woman with a poodle."