Women -- Canada; Women -- Conduct of life; Women -- History; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
It is usually done in a vacant room in a school or the vestry of a
church, or a town hall. No drunken men stare at you. You are not
jostled or pushed--you wait your turn in an orderly line, much as you
have waited to buy a ticket at a railway station. Two tame and
quiet-looking men sit at a table, and when your turn comes, they ask
you your name, which is perhaps slightly embarrassing, but it is not as
bad as it might be, for they do not ask your age, or of what disease
did your grandmother die. You go behind the screen with your ballot
paper in your hand, and there you find a seal-brown pencil tied with a
chaste white string. Even the temptation of annexing the pencil is
removed from your frail humanity. You mark your ballot, and drop it in
the box, and come out into the sunlight again. If you had never heard
that you had done an unladylike thing you would not know it. It all
felt solemn, and serious, and very respectable to you, something like a
Sunday-school convention. Then, too, you are surprised at what a short
time you have been away from home. You put the potatoes on when you
left home, and now you are back in time to strain them.
In spite of the testimony of many reputable women that they have been
able to vote and get the dinner on one and the same day, there still
exists a strong belief that the whole household machinery goes out of
order when a woman goes to vote. No person denies a woman the right to
go to church, and yet the church service takes a great deal more time
than voting. People even concede to women the right to go shopping, or
visiting a friend, or an occasional concert. But the wife and mother,
with her God-given, sacred trust of molding the young life of our land,
must never dream of going round the corner to vote. "Who will mind the
baby?" cried one of our public men, in great agony of spirit, "when the
mother goes to vote?"
One woman replied that she thought she could get the person that minded
it when she went to pay her taxes--which seemed to be a fairly
reasonable proposition. Yet the hardy plant of prejudice flourishes,
and the funny pictures still bring a laugh.
Father comes home, tired, weary, footsore, toe-nails ingrowing, caused
by undarned stockings, and finds the fire out, house cold and empty,
save for his half-dozen children, all crying.
"Where is your mother?" the poor man asks in broken tones. For a
moment the sobs are hushed while little Ellie replies: "Out voting!"
Father bursts into tears.
Of course, people tell us, it is not the mere act of voting which
demoralizes women--if they would only vote and be done with it; but
women are creatures of habit, and habits once formed are hard to break;
and although the polls are only open every three or four years, if
women once get into the way of going to them, they will hang around
there all the rest of the time. It is in woman's impressionable nature
that the real danger lies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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