Feminism -- Fiction; Sex role -- Fiction; Women's rights -- Fiction
Cyrenus Presly always loves to talk, and he always looks on the dark
side of things, and he riz up and said “he didn’t believe nothin’ could
be done, for by all he’d read about ’em, the men had tried everything
possible to keep wimmen down where they ort to be, they had turned deaf
ears to their complaints, wouldn’t hear one word they said, they had
tried drivin’ and draggin’ and insults of all kinds, and breakin’ their
bones, and imprisonment, and stuffin’ ’em with rubber tubes, thrust
through their nose down into their throats. And he couldn’t think of a
thing more that could be done by men, and keep the position men always
had held as wimmen’s gardeens and protectors, and he said he thought
men might jest as well keep still and let ’em go on and bring the world
to ruin, for that was what they wuz bound to do, and they couldn’t be
stopped unless they wuz killed off.”
Phileman Huffstater is a old bachelder, and hates wimmen. He had been
on a drunk and looked dretful, tobacco juice runnin’ down his face, his
red hair all towsled up, and his clothes stiff with dirt. He wuzn’t
invited, but had come of his own accord. He had to hang onto the seat
in front of him as he riz up and said: “He believed that wuz the best
and only way out on’t, for men to rise up and kill off the weaker sect,
for their wuzn’t never no trouble of any name or nater, but what wimmen
wuz to the bottom on’t, and the world would be better off without ’em.”
But Philander scorfed at him and reminded him that such hullsale doin’s
would put an end to the world’s bein’ populated at all.
But Phileman said in a hicuppin’, maudlin way that “the world had
better stop, if there had got to be such doin’s, wimmen risin’ up on
every side, and pretendin’ to be equal with men.”
Here his knee jints kinder gin out under him, and he slid down onto the
seat and went to sleep.
I guess the members wuz kinder shamed of Phileman, for Lime Peedick
jumped up quick as scat and said, “It seemed the Englishmen had tried
most everything else, and he wondered how it would work if them
militant wimmen could be ketched and a dose of sunthin’ bitter and
sickenin’ poured down ’em. Every time they broached that loathsome
doctrine of equal rights, and tried to make lawmakers listen to their
petitions, jest ketch ’em and pour down ’em a big dose of wormwood or
sunthin’ else bitter and sickenin’, and he guessed they would git tired
on’t.”
But here Josiah jumped up quick and said, “he objected,” he said, “that
would endanger the right wimmen always had, and ort to have of cookin’
good vittles for men and doin’ their housework, and bearin’ and
bringin’ up their children, and makin’ and mendin’ and waitin’ on ’em.
He said nothin’ short of a Gatlin gun could keep Samantha from speakin’
her mind about such things, and he wuzn’t willin’ to have her made sick
to the stomach, and incapacitated from cookin’ by any such
proceedin’s.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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