To many women these views seem so shocking that they cannot believe them to be widespread. I can only say that such women are leading "sheltered lives." Said a conspicuous young feminist in an interview given to a Boston Sunday paper, "It is both cruel and foolish (eugenically and ethically) to prevent people from trying more than once to find their ideal comrade for race propagation." The fiction of today is full of the disgusting experiences of young persons trying to find their ideal comrades. And an appalling number of these books bear marks of brilliant talent, utterly unconscious of moral standards, "studies of adolescence," many of them are. Illicit relations are entered on in the most casual way and dropped as casually, and yet glorified as marking new eras of "development."
I know, of course, the answer made by thoughtful, conscientious suffragists who believe as strongly as I do in the integrity of the home, when facts like these are brought to their attention. "All suffragists are not feminists. All feminism is not of this extreme sort. Feminism is nothing but a theory, anyway."
Each of us must judge from her own observation; but it should be observation, not merely of the lives of one's personal acquaintance, but of current thought and tendency. Many of us are convinced that an increasing and influential number of suffragists are feminists, that a great deal of feminism is of this extreme sort, and that it is a "theory" which, through channels direct and indirect, is poisoning our literature and our social life.
IMPORTANT ANTI-SUFFRAGE PUBLICATIONS
(For pamphlets and leaflets on the various aspects of the question address the Secretary of the Women's Anti-Suffrage Association, Kensington Building. 687 Boylston Street, Boston.)
BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS
James M. Buckley, The Wrong and Peril of Woman Suffrage. (Fleming H. Revell Co., New York.) Not a recent book, but contains a good deal of permanently useful matter not found elsewhere.
Helen Kendrick Johnson, Woman and the Republic. (25c; The Woman's Protest, 237 West 39th Street. New York.) Especially valuable for its information about the history of woman suffrage in relation to the political and social development of the nineteenth century.