Civic improvement; Urban women; Women in public life
In explanation of their conduct, the women of Seattle stated that Mayor
Gill pleaded with them for a chance to redeem himself in the eyes of his
neighbors and friends and in the eyes of the citizens of his city among
whom his family had to live and where his son must suffer from the
opprobrium in which his father would be held forevermore unless this
chance was given. Mayor Gill testified that he had thought a wide-open
town was what the people wanted and what would pay best. He found it was
not what the people wanted, least of all the women who now were voters,
and he would bow to their will for their sakes and for the sake of his
family whose respect he must regain. The women claimed that there seemed
more security with Mayor Gill under such pressure and in view of his
knowledge of women’s actual power if he failed to make good this time;
that a big point of view required them to give him a chance to redeem
himself. They gave him the chance and Mayor Gill is carrying out the
wishes of the women during his present administration.
The women of California undertook a similar campaign in San Francisco in
April of 1913. When a police magistrate reduced the bail which another
judge had fixed for a prisoner accused of attacking a young girl and the
prisoner immediately fled when released on the reduced bail, the women
went to work and soon secured the necessary signatures to a petition for
the recall of the magistrate. In the recall election, the erring
magistrate was defeated and an able young lawyer with a wider view of
this grave social problem took his place.
Miriam Michelson, in the _Sunset Magazine_, tells the story:
Now this threatened recall of a police judge is undertaken, I should
say, not because the women believe this particular judge to be
unique in flagrant adherence to a police court system of leniency in
sex-crimes; not because they think him the worst of his type that
San Francisco has known; but because they consider him a type and
because they consider the police court system one that must be
changed. This recall presents something definite, something to do,
which feminine hands have been aching for.
* * * * *
You may talk to women of the futility of figuring social sex sins,
but they seem to be congenitally incapable of believing you. I heard
a man talk to an audience in behalf of this measure, and when he
touched upon that old, old text—_it always has been; it always will
be_—there came a curious resemblance in every woman’s face within my
vision; for every face had hardened, stiffened, was marked with the
family likeness of rebellion. The lecturer was addressing himself to
deaf ears, to eyes determined not to see.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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