Beauty and the Beast, and Tales of HomeTaylor, Bayard
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Beauty and the Beast, and Tales of Home
Taylor, Bayard
Short stories; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
There was a motion made to expel Nelly Kirkpatrick, and perhaps it
might have succeeded--but the railroad hands, all over the State, made a
heroine of her, and her party was afraid of losing five or six thousand
votes; so only a mild censure was pronounced. But there was no end
to the caricatures, and songs, and all sorts of ribaldry, about the
occurrence; and even our party said that, although Mrs. Whiston was
really and truly a martyr, yet the circumstance was an immense damage
to THEM. When she heard THAT, I believe it killed her. She resigned her
seat, went home, never appeared again in public, and died within a year.
“My dear friend,” she wrote to me, not a month before her death, “I have
been trying all my life to get a thorough knowledge of the masculine
nature, but my woman's plummet will not reach to the bottom of that
chaotic pit of selfishness and principle, expedience and firmness
for the right, brutality and tenderness, gullibility and devilish
shrewdness, which I have tried to sound. Only one thing is clear--we
women cannot do without what we have sometimes, alas! sneered at as THE
CHIVELRY OF THE SEX. The question of our rights is as clear to me as
ever; but we must find a plan to get them without being forced to share,
or even to SEE, all that men do in their political lives. We have
only beheld some Principle riding aloft, not the mud through which her
chariot wheels are dragged. The ways must be swept before we can walk in
them--but how and by whom shall this be done?”
For my part, _I_ can't say, and I wish somebody would tell me.
Well--after seeing our State, which we used to be proud of, delivered
over for two years to the control of a party whose policy was so
repugnant to all our feelings of loyalty, we endeavored to procure, at
least a qualification of intelligence for voters. Of course, we didn't
get it: the exclusion from suffrage of all who were unable to read and
write might have turned the scales again, and given us the State. After
our boys came back from the war, we might have succeeded--but their
votes were over-balanced by those of the servant-girls, every one of
whom turned out, making a whole holiday of the election.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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