There have been many reasons given, first and last, why women should not
vote, but I desire to say, in the full light of a ripe experience, that
some of them are fallacious. I refer more particularly to the argument
that it will degrade women to go to the polls and vote like a little man.
While I am not and have never been a howler for female suffrage, I must
admit that it is much more of a success than prohibition and speculative
science.
My wife voted eight years with my full knowledge and consent, and to-day I
cannot see but that she is as docile and as tractable as when she won my
trusting heart.
Now those who know me best will admit that I am not a ladies' man, and,
therefore, what I may say here is not said to secure favor and grateful
smiles. I am not attractive and I am not in politics. I believe that I am
homelier this winter than usual. There are reasons why I believe that what
I may say on this subject will be sincere and not sensational or selfish.
It has been urged that good women do not generally exercise the right of
suffrage, when they have the opportunity, and that only those whose social
record has been tarnished a good deal go to the polls. This is not true.
It is the truth that a good full vote always shows a list of the best
women and the wives of the best men. A bright day makes a better showing
of lady voters than a bad one, and the weather makes a more perceptible
difference in the female vote than the male, but when things are exciting
and the battle is red-hot, and the tocsin of war sounds anon, the wife and
mother puts on her armor and her sealskin sacque and knocks things
cross-eyed.
It is generally supposed that the female voter is a pantaloonatic, a half
horse, half alligator kind of woman, who looks like Dr. Mary Walker and
has the appearance of one who has risen hastily in the night at the alarm
of fire and dressed herself partially in her own garments and partially in
her husband's. This is a popular error. In Wyoming, where female suffrage
has raged for years, you meet quiet, courteous and gallant gentlemen, and
fair, quiet, sensible women at the polls, where there isn't a loud or
profane word, and where it is an infinitely more proper place to send a
young lady unescorted than to the postoffice in any city in the Union. You
can readily see why this is so. The men about the polls are always
candidates and their friends. That is the reason that neither party can
afford to show the slightest rudeness toward a voter. The man who on
Wednesday would tell her to go and soak her head, perhaps, would stand
bareheaded to let her pass on Tuesday. While she holds a smashed ballot
shoved under the palm of her gray kid glove she may walk over the
candidate's prostrate form with impunity and her overshoes if she chooses
to.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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