“'Side Talks with Men' helped, and 'The Man's Corner' did a little, but
the editorial page did the most of it. It was given over wholly to the
advancement of certain Xanthippian ideas, which were very offensive to
my women readers, and which found no favor among the men. She wants to
change the whole social structure. She thinks men and women are the same
kind of animal, and that both need to be educated on precisely the same
lines--the girls to be taught business, the boys to go through a course
of domestic training. She called for subscriptions for a cooking-school
for boys, and demanded the endowment of a commercial college for girls,
and wound up by insisting upon a uniform dress for both sexes. I tell
you, if you'd worked for years to establish a dignified newspaper
the way I have, it would have broken your heart to see the suggested
fashion-plates that woman printed. The uniform dress was a holy terror.
It was a combination of all the worst features of modern garb. Trousers
were to be universal and compulsory; sensible masculine coats were
discarded entirely, and puffed-sleeved dress-coats were substituted.
Stiff collars were abolished in favor of ribbons, and rosettes cropped
up everywhere. Imagine it if you can--and everybody in all Hades was to
be forced into garments of that sort!”
“I should enjoy seeing it,” I said.
“Possibly--but you wouldn't enjoy wearing it,” retorted the machine.
“And then that woman's funny column--it was frightful. You never saw
such jokes in your life; every one of them contained a covert attack
upon man. There was only one good thing in it, and that was a bit of
verse called 'Fair Play for the Little Girls.' It went like this:
“'If little boys, when they are young,
Can go about in skirts,
And wear upon their little backs
Small broidered girlish shirts,
Pray why cannot the little girls,
When infants, have a chance
To toddle on their little ways
In little pairs of pants?'”
“That isn't at all bad,” said I, smiling in spite of poor Boswell's woe.
“If the rest of the paper was on a par with that I don't see why the
circulation fell off.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account