If woman is going in for this sort of thing, of course she needs
the ballot. If she intends to manage corporations and do business
generally, she ought to have a voice in the framing of the laws
which manifest the policy of the state. But to earn one’s living as
a college professor, nurse, typewriter, saleslady, or clerk, or to
sit on boards of charity, education, or hygiene, is a far remove from
becoming bank presidents, merchants, judges, bankers, or members of
Congress. The one affords the means by which single women can earn a
decent and independent livelihood, or devote their energies to work
useful to society; the other would necessitate an absolute revolution
in the habits, tastes, interests, proclivities, and nature of woman.
The noble army of teachers, typewriters, nurses, and salesladies are in
the heels of their boots hoping to be married some day or other. They
have merely thrown an anchor to windward and taken up a calling which
will enable them to live reasonably happy if the right man does not
appear, or passes by on the other side. Those who sit on boards, and
who are more apt to be middle-aged, are but interpreting and fulfilling
the true mission of the modern woman, which is to supplement and modify
the point of view of man, and to extend the kind of influence which
she exercises at home to the conduct of public interests of a certain
class.
Now, some one must keep house. Some one must cook, wash, dust, sweep,
darn, look after the children, and in general grease the wheels of
domestic activity. If women are to become merchants, and manage
corporations, who will bring up our families and manage the home?
The majority of the noble army referred to are not able to escape
from making their own beds and cooking their own breakfasts. If they
occupied other than comparatively subordinate positions they would
have to call Chinatown to the rescue; for the men would decline with
thanks, relying on their brute force to protect them, and the other
women would toss their heads and say “Make your own beds, you nasty
things. We prefer to go to town too.” In fact the emancipation of
women, so far as it relates to usurpation of the work of man, does
not mean much in actual practice yet, in spite of the brave show and
bustle of the noble army. The salesladies get their meals somehow,
and the domestic hearth is still presided over by the mistress of
the house and her daughters. But this cannot continue to be the case
if women are going to do everything which men do except lift weights
and fight. For we all know that our mothers, wives, and sisters,
according to their own affidavits, have all they can do already to
fulfil the requirements of modern life as mothers, wives, and sisters
in the conventional yet modern sense. Many of them tell us that they
would not have time to vote, to say nothing of qualifying themselves
to vote. Indisputably they cannot become men and yet remain women in
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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