The story of Don Miff : $b as told by his friend John Bouche Whacker: a symphony of lifeDabney, Virginius
History
The story of Don Miff : $b as told by his friend John Bouche Whacker: a symphony of life
Dabney, Virginius
Richmond (Va.) -- Fiction; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Fiction
Let us take the legal profession for an example. Excluding the male
lawyer of the period, as an interested witness, who can fail to see how
much would be gained were our judges, our counsel, and our jurymen all
women? As things actually stand, the law’s delay has passed into a
proverb. But what delay could there be in a trial wherein all the
witnesses could be examined simultaneously, without a word being lost on
the jury; where the learned (and lovely) counsel could sum up side by
side (like a pair of well-matched trotters), neither of them getting in
the first word, neither (what fairness!) being allowed the last? Again.
Instead of a drowsy Bench, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, you would
have an alert Sofa, capable of lending one ear to the plaintiff’s
counsel, one to the defendant’s; taking in, with one eye, every
convolution of the jury’s back-hair (should such things be), while with
the other, she—the Court—estimated the relative good looks of the
litigants, preparatory to instructing the jury and laying down the law.
And so of the other professions, did space allow.
But this is not the worst of the matter. Already have advanced thinkers
begun dimly to see that, with the approaching extinction of war, the
time will come when courage will be worse than useless; while, in the
rapid multiplication of labor-saving machinery, there is discernible the
inevitable approach of an era when superior strength will be a
disadvantage. For is not strength assimilated food? And in the Struggle
for Existence will not She, requiring less food, and being therefore
Fittest, survive? So that, with Seer’s eye, I seem to behold the day
when my sex, excluded from every avocation, shall perish from off the
face of that earth over which we have so long and so haughtily lorded.
The truth is, my dear lad (would that you were a girl!), I shudder when
I think of your fate and that of your brother males, three hundred years
from now. Preserved here and there in the zoological gardens of the
wealthy and the curious, along with rare specimens of the bison of the
prairie, skeletons of the American Indian and the dodo; exhibited in
mammoth moral shows, and meeting the stare of the unnumbered female of
the period with a once wicked, but now, alas! futile wink, you will rue
the day when your ancestors, mistaking might for right, excluded woman
from that haven of rest, the ballot-box. Why, it was but the other day
that I saw a boy with a basketful of pups, which he was going to drown;
and on my asking him why he condemned them to this fate, he answered, in
the simplest way, “Oh, they are nothing but _she’s_.”
Yet we are never tired of boasting of our nineteenth century!
How the world is to be kept wagging when once the custom is established
of drowning all the boy-babies (except specimens for menageries and
preserves), is a problem for the science of the future. It suffices that
I have recorded my views upon this burning question.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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