"This young gentleman is a Dane, and he has been very fluent and somewhat contemptuous in giving reasons why American women should not be allowed to vote." The statement was, as usual, spread broadcast through the suffrage columns of the Massachusetts newspapers; and doubtless my opponents indulged the hope that in the wave of national feeling which was then beginning to rise, anybody thus branded as a foreigner would be badly discredited. As a matter of fact, I was born in Brooklyn, N. Y. (If I had chosen to imitate Miss Blackwell's method of controversy, I might have retorted that my father, who was born in Denmark, but who came to America in 1855, fought as a volunteer officer in the Navy of the United States in the Civil War, at a time when Miss Blackwell's father was engaged in a safer occupation.) The repellant impression made upon men by the suffragists' misstatements and personal abusiveness was deepened by their support of militancy and feminism. As to the unethical character of the latter, Mrs. Foxcroft's essay in this book presents startling and irrefutable testimony. As to militancy, it may be said that this furnished the most glaring (though not the only) evidence of the evil effect of political activity on women. Much is usually made of the fact that Mrs. Pankhurst and her accomplices in crime destroyed a large amount of valuable property. But the greatest injury she and her American idolizers did was to lower man's ideal of woman. They tried to make the virago a heroine. They did not succeed; but the more Mrs. Pankhurst's apologists glorified her, the more men were determined not to endorse a party that tempted women to abandon real womanliness for mock masculinity. ERNEST BERNBAUM CAMBRIDGE, MASS. _February, 1916_ N. B.-- To prevent misunderstanding, it should be said that though the following essays represent in general the views of Massachusetts anti-suffragists, the responsibility for the facts and opinions given in the various essays rests with the individual writers alone. CONTENTS. PAGE INTRODUCTION--ERNEST BERNBAUM ix WHO THE MASSACHUSETTS ANTI-SUFFRAGISTS ARE 21 MRS. JOHN BALCH ESSAY I SUFFRAGE FALLACIES 24 MRS. A. J. GEORGE II THE BALLOT AND THE WOMAN IN INDUSTRY 31 MRS. HENRY PRESTON WHITE III A BUSINESS WOMAN'S VIEW OF SUFFRAGE 38 EDITH MELVIN IV SOME PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF THE QUESTION 43 ELLEN MUDGE BURRILL V HOW MASSACHUSETTS FOSTERS PUBLIC WELFARE 53 MONICA FOLEY VI MASSACHUSETTS COMPARED WITH SUFFRAGE STATES 62 CATHERINE ROBINSON