City and town life -- Fiction; Southern States -- Fiction; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- Fiction
In witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal this the
3d day of April, 1914.
[Seal]
SARAH HAYDEN MOSELY.
Signed and sealed by the above named Sarah Hayden Mosely as her last
will and testament, and by us in her presence and at her request
subscribed as witnesses.
ENOS CANN.
MARY CANN.
In a brief paragraph beneath this extraordinary document the editor
added that in an interview Judge John Regis admitted that all the
trustees had accepted, that they were confident of carrying out the
terms of the will, but that the board was not ready now to give
information concerning its plans.
No woman had ever been "interviewed" in Jordantown by a newspaper
reporter. This may have accounted for the fact that Carter did not call
upon either Mrs. Walton or Selah Adams before going to press. Besides,
the sixteen-hundred-dollar mortgage on the _Signal_ was now owned by the
Co-Citizens' Foundation. He could not trust himself even in the presence
of these powerful women. The very form of his question, his manner,
might betray his secret feelings and do incredible damage.
In fact all domestic conversation in Jordantown was now censored as
carefully both by the men and the women as if they belonged to opposing
armies. Every man regarded his wife with suspicion, and he was at the
same time conscious of a strange cheerful indifference on the part of
his wife that was unnatural and offensive. Half the clinging-vine love
with which women entwine their husbands is not love at all, but a
nameless anxiety due to their sense of helplessness. Transpose the
conditions of each and the same beseeching look so often seen in women's
faces will be ludicrously mixed with the whiskers on the faces of their
lords. The only ineradicable difference between men and women is gender.
They are singularly alike in every other particular. Give a woman
liberty, and she will go a man one better in license. Take a man's
liberty from him, and he surpasses any woman in timidity. If men have
more strength, women have more endurance. If the one is more active, the
other is the more persistent. And it depends entirely upon the emergency
which will show the most courage. Place them side by side under the
same conditions to accomplish the same thing, and while each will go
about the business in a different manner, the same proportion of both
sexes will succeed at the job.
The difficulty is that men and women neither live nor work under the
same conditions. The former have the overwhelming advantage, owing to
the fact that they create their own public opinion and hold the balance
of power, prestige, and influence.
This was precisely the balance which had been destroyed in Jordantown.
The women now had all the advantage. It was monstrous and called for the
exercise of all the furnace language of which men are naturally capable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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