THE PENNSYLVANIA ASSOCIATION FOR WOMAN SUFFRAGE DISAVOWS VIOLENCE
IN the April CENTURY, in an editorial article, “The Silent Suffragists of America,” we called upon the official organizations in the United States advocating woman suffrage to abandon their passive and tolerant attitude toward the methods of the English militants, a plea which we had also made in the number for November last.[23] We have received letters of approval of this article from representative women on each side of the suffrage question. It is a matter of sincere gratification to us to publish at the first opportunity the letter which follows from Miss Eleanor Cuyler Patterson of Chestnut Hill (Philadelphia):
I have read with interest the temperate and wise opinion printed in “Topics of the Time” in the April number of THE CENTURY MAGAZINE. It gives me great pleasure to send you the resolution on this subject passed by the executive committee of the Pennsylvania Association for Woman Suffrage on March 7, 1913.
“Although we do not pass judgment on the methods of other organizations, we disclaim all connection with militant organizations, and do not indorse or intend to use militant methods, but shall continue to employ educational methods as in the past.”
Here at last we have from an official suffrage organization in America a sober-minded expression of opinion on this burning subject. It ought to be the beginning of a sincere effort to rescue the whole woman movement from the shallow thinking and super-emotionalism that are likely to wreck it.
That this sort of protest is much needed is shown from the following passage from a letter to “The New York Times” from a leading advocate of the suffrage, Mrs. Eunice Dana Brannan, which is the first public expression of what we must regard as a very unfortunate, not to say shocking, frame of mind on the part of many refined and well-educated American women:
The suffragists in America are agreed in their belief that militant action is not called for. Injustice to women is not so evident nor so general as in England, and the attitude of the majority of American men is certainly fairer and more honestly chivalrous. But, in spite of these amiable differences, it is quite possible that if the Eastern States continue to deny enfranchisement to their women, while the Western States continue to grant it, the women thus discriminated against would find the political anomaly of their position so impossible to bear that even militancy would seem to them justifiable.
The words we have italicized are deplorably significant. They mean, for instance, that the immunity of New York City from similar outrages is to be dependent only upon the granting of the suffrage by the State. “Militant action is not called for”—yet, but will be called for if the voters of the East, however conscientiously, shall deny the suffrage to women!
In striking contrast is this extract from an open letter, printed in “The New York Times” of April 14, from Mrs. Helen Magill White (Mrs. Andrew D. White) of Ithaca, New York, addressed “To the Treasurer of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.” After recording her friendly attitude toward the movement, Mrs. White closes her letter with these downright words:
I never until lately admitted to myself the possibility of our essential inferiority—such that, in matters of government, we could without outrage be classed with children, with idiots and insane, and with criminals.