Volume 14 , Issue 42

If The Women Voted Alone

Have you heard about the Woman, Jane Addams, famous head of Hull House and leader in the Suffrage Movement, in 1912, who wrote of a hypothetical Society where the men were asking for the ballot and Jane Addams gave the arguments the women could very properly use against the men? Would that same"Hyporthetical Society" and the questions be asked of the men today?

In The Day Book, dated 5 February 1912, Chicago, Illinois, Jane Addams ask you to consider a society, a hypothetical society, where the women were the voters and the men the disenfranchised. This is supposing that the men were asking for the right of the ballot and using every argument at their command to obtain the consent of the women.What might the women say to their masculine petitioners?

1. "Our most valid objection to extending the franchise to you is that you are so fond of fighting and you always have been ever since you were little boys. You would be likely to forget that the real object of the state is to nurture and protect life and, out of sheer vainglory, you would be voting away huge sums of battleships, one of which could last only a few years, and yet would cost $10,000,000."
2. Could you not say to disenfranchised men, "We have carefully built up a code of factory legislation for the protection of the workers. We know you men have always been careless in housekeeping affairs and if you were made responsible for factory legislation it is probable you would let the workers in the textile mills contract tuberculosis through needlessly breathing the fluff, or the workers in machine ships inhale metal filings, both of which are now carried off by an excellent suction system which we women have insisted upon, but which is almost impossible to have installed in a man-made state, because the men think so little of dust and its evil effects.
3. We have also heard that in certain states, in order to save the paltry price of a guard which would protect a dangerous machine, men legislators allow careless boys and girls to lose their fingers and sometimes their hands, thereby crippling their entire future."
4. "You have always been so eager to make money, what assurance have we that, in your desire to get the largest amount of coal out of the ground in the shortest possible time, you would not permit the mine supports to decay and mine damp to accumulate until the percentage of the accidents among miners would be simply heart-breaking."
5. "Worse than anything else we have mentioned is the fact that in every man-ruled city a great army of women are so set aside as cast outs, that it is considered a shame to speak the very name which designates them, because their very existence is illegal. They may be arrested whenever any police captain chooses, they may be brought before a magistrate, fined and imprisoned. The men whose money sustains their houses, supplies their tawdry clothing, and provides them with intoxicating drinks are never arrested, not, indeed, considered lawbreakers."

It was reported in 1912, one hundred and nine months ago, these wise women governing the state with the same care they have always put into the government of their families would further charge men who are seeking for the franchise that men do not really know how tender and delicate children are. They might put them to work in factories, as indeed they have done in man-made states ever since the beginning of the factory period.

If the enfranchised women would speak thus to the disenfranchised men, the latter would at least respect their hesitation, in regard to an extension of the ballot to them.   |  View or Add Comments (0 Comments)   |   Receive updates ( subscribers)  |   Unsubscribe

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