Women -- Massachusetts; Women -- Suffrage -- United States; Women's Anti-Suffrage Association of Massachusetts
Will it be believed that an English magazine of fine literary quality,
in which the work of Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett has often appeared,
has printed an article by a woman pleading for a public sentiment in
favor of irregular unions? "Women will go a step further toward freedom
than men have dared to go," says Mrs. Walter Gallachan. "I believe that
if there were some open recognition of these partnerships outside of
marriage, not necessarily permanent, there would be many women who would
be willing to undertake such unions gladly; there would even be some
women, as I believe, who would prefer them to the present system that
binds them permanently to one partner for life."
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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