Weeks and months before election in Wyoming, the party with the longest
purse subsidizes the most livery stables and carriages. Then, on the
eventful day, every conveyance available is decorated with a political
placard and driven by a polite young man who is instructed to improve the
time. Thus every woman in Wyoming has a chance to ride once a year, at
least. Lately, however, many prefer to walk to the polls, and they go in
pairs, trios and quartettes, voting their little sentiments and calmly
returning to their cookies and crazy quilts as though politics didn't jar
their mental poise a minute.
It is possible, and even probable, that a man and his wife may disagree on
politics as they might on religion. The husband may believe in Andrew
Jackson and a relentless hell, while his wife may be a stalwart and rather
liberal on the question of eternal punishment. If the husband manages his
wife as he would a clothes-wringer, and turns her through life by a crank,
he will, no doubt, work her politically; but if she has her own ideas
about things, she will naturally act upon them, while the man who is
henpecked in other matters till he can't see out of his eyes, will be
henpecked, no doubt, in the matter of national and local politics.
These are a few facts about the actual workings of female suffrage, and I
do not tackle the great question of the ultimate results upon the
political machinery if woman suffrage were to become general. I do not
pretend to say as to that. I know a great deal, but I do not know that.
There are millions of women, no doubt who are better qualified to vote,
and yet cannot, than millions of alleged men who do vote; but no one can
tell now what the ultimate effect of a change might be.
So far as Wyoming is concerned, the Territory is prosperous and happy. I
see, also, that a murderer was hung by process of law there the other day.
That looks like the onward march of reform, whether female suffrage had
anything to do with it or not. And they're going to hang another in March
if the weather is favorable and executive clemency remains dormant, as I
think it will.
All these things look hopeful. We can't tell what the Territory would have
been without female suffrage, but when they begin to hang men by law
instead of by moonlight, the future begins to brighten up. When you have
to get up in the night to hang a man every little while and don't get any
per diem for it, you feel as though you were a good way from home.
The Sedentary Hen.
Though generally cheerful and content with her lot, the hen at times
becomes moody, sullen and taciturn. We are often called upon to notice and
profit by the genial and sunny disposition of the hen, and yet there are
times in her life when she is morose, cynical, and the prey of consuming
melancholy. At such times not only her own companions, but man himself
shuns the hen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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