Sexism; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
The latest and greatest fruit of this feminine talent for combat is the
extension of the suffrage, now universal in the Protestant countries,
and even advancing in those of the Greek and Latin rites. This fruit
was garnered, not by an attack en masse, but by a mere foray. I believe
that the majority of women, for reasons that I shall presently expose,
were not eager for the extension, and regard it as of small value
today. They know that they can get what they want without going to the
actual polls for it; moreover, they are out of sympathy with most of
the brummagem reforms advocated by the professional suffragists, male
and female. The mere statement of the current suffragist platform, with
its long list of quack sure-cures for all the sorrows of the world, is
enough to make them smile sadly. In particular, they are sceptical of
all reforms that depend upon the mass action of immense numbers of
voters, large sections of whom are wholly devoid of sense. A normal
woman, indeed, no more believes in democracy in the nation than she
believes in democracy at her own fireside; she knows that there must be
a class to order and a class to obey, and that the two can never
coalesce. Nor is she susceptible to the stock sentimentalities upon
which the whole democratic process is based. This was shown very
dramatically in the United States at the national election of 1920, in
which the late Woodrow Wilson was brought down to colossal and
ignominious defeat—the first general election in which all American
women could vote. All the sentimentality of the situation was on the
side of Wilson, and yet fully three-fourths of the newly-enfranchised
women voters voted against him. He is, despite his talents for
deception, a poor popular psychologist, and so he made an inept effort
to fetch the girls by tear-squeezing: every connoisseur will remember
his bathos about breaking the heart of the world. Well, very few women
believe in broken hearts, and the cause is not far to seek: practically
every woman above the age of twenty-five has a broken heart. That is to
say, she has been vastly disappointed, either by failing to nab some
pretty fellow that her heart was set on, or, worse, by actually nabbing
him, and then discovering him to be a bounder or an imbecile, or both.
Thus walking the world with broken hearts, women know that the injury
is not serious. When he pulled out the Vox angelica stop and began
sobbing and snuffling and blowing his nose tragically, the learned
doctor simply drove all the women voters into the arms of the Hon.
Warren Gamaliel Harding, who was too stupid to invent any issues at
all, but simply took negative advantage of the distrust aroused by his
opponent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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