MOOSEHEART MAGAZINE
6
Aggie’s Mother On the Subject of Suffrage
o ne of Dr. Hart’s ‘6Conversations With Six Hundred Thousand”
easily? It’s you Anti’s. I’ve heard lots of men praise you for the way you got up meetings and appealed to public sentiment and organized.” My Dan says that if I handn’t made him a suffragist with a rolling pin fifteen years ago, he would have become one just out of admiration for those Antis.
“Look,” says he, “at those fine handsome women getting up these lively bite-your-head-off meetings to prove that women are not suited to appear and make arguments in public places.” He attended an Anti’s Annual Meeting once; and he said that his political club would pay big money if they could get some of those “parliamentarians” to come in and run their caucus. And Mrs. Downey got into the automobile and went and voted. To be sure, she watched me over the corner of the partition, fixing my ballot and then she fixed hers just the other way; but that was because she was an Anti, and not because she was a woman.
This duty of voting, however, is no joke. For it means that if enlightened people like you and me and Aggie get tired of voting, there are others that will keep it going. That’s what the Anti’s always said,—that women would neglect their privilege (which is exactly what the Anti’s said they were going to do but didn’t) while the ignorant and vicious would always be on hand. Of course that’s just as good an argument against a man’s vote as a woman’s vote. Anyhow we must all face the fact that if women want to get things done, things that interest them, things that are for the good of their children, if they want to have good schools and decent dancing places and the right kind of care for the sick and the helpless, if they want the things that we consider important in politics put over, they’ve got to form the voting habit. My husband brags that he has never missed an election in thirty years—that’s one reason why he stands a good chance of going to the legislature next time. The women in our polling place acted as though they liked to vote and had no idea of leaving their new privilege “to the ignorant and the depraved.”
Another thing that those Anti’s talked till they were red in the face (without knowing that was not a becoming color) was that woman’s suffrage wouldn’t mean anything because every woman would vote just as her husband did, and it would double the vote without changing the result. Somehow there have been lots of elections since suffrage came along that seem to show that the woman vote makes a big difference. Anyhow I noticed that none of the national parties were willing to risk pulling down the women’s vote against it if it stood out against equal suffrage.
Some women can’t turn round without asking their man. They do say that Martha Washington let her husband buy all her dresses. Dan and I, we never have lived that way. I keep away from suspenders and neckties so long as he has nothing to say about the length of my dresses. Yet somehow, our tastes in neckties and dresses is about the same. It will be just so in politics and elections. I voted the same ticket with my husband, pretty near; though I did scratch Municipal Judge Lyons, and so did enough other women voters to beat him, for reasons that the women understood, if the men didn’t. We take two newspapers in our house and atend two churches, but we are a united family.
To my mind the vote that doesn’t think is not a vote at all—it is just a chip—I mean a counter. If women are not going to think about the issues and the parties and the candidates, they might as well give up the vote. One thing we’ve got to make up our minds to is that real voting means work. Since I have voted I have learned a lot that my husband never thought important enough to tell me about the primaries and the conventions and the machine.
I used to think the machine was a printing press that manufactured the ballots; and I guess I was not far from right. We learned in the suffrage fight that you can’t get anywhere in politics without organization and leaders and conferences and private talks and telling people what you will do to them if they don’t fall into step. If the women voters will only put the same kind of life into their political parties that they do into their social clubs, they will need very little steering from the men.
In my suffrage talks I have often told people about MOOSEHEART and how in the Assemblies the girls have just the same right as the boys to say what they think is right and to vote when the question is put. When the Assembly votes, there are no girls and no boys, but just all members. MOOSEHEART is the children’s country; they all have a share in its benefits, and everybody has something to say about how the thing should go. That’s the way to steer an institution; that’s the way to steer a nation.
By PROFESSOR ALBERT BUSHNELL HART Harvard University------Mooseheart Governor
million women voters, there ought to be at least one woman among the ten members of the President’s Cabinet. Women are being put on juries now, though some crusty old judges apparently have not found that women are competent to vote or to think, let alone to serve on juries. How those old fellows will open their eyes when some day or other a woman is elected to the Supreme Court of some great state—and that’s just as sure to come as the suffrage was.
One privilege of the voter is to cast his or her vote in a decent, clean, orderly place. Dan hardly would let me walk out on the street on election day before equal suffrage came. When we got the school suffrage in Deledo and about eight ladies went to the polls in our ward, they found the place like a grove the day after a picnic—dirty and littered and toughs standing round. Why, my Dan, as good a man as ever lived, and intelligent enough to be my husband for twenty-five years, was picked up and thrown out of the window of a polling place a few years ago, because he wanted to vote the way he thought right. It wasn’t so the last election day. Husbands and wives, some of them with their sons and daughters all coming together, as free as going to church. No tobacco juice, no whiskey breaths, no guffawing at the sight of a woman with a ballot in her hand, no snarl about counting the votes. I tell you that woman’s suffrage has done more to clean up the voting place and the votes than all the men have done in fifty years.
Among the ladies that I brought to the polls was one that thought I couldn’t; and that was Mrs. Downey, who lives on our street, No. 49, top floor. She has been an awful Anti; and when the Eighteenth was passed and added to the Constitution, she sent out cards of condolence to the principal suffragists like me and Aggie with a black border, she did, and the words, “ON THE OCCASION OF THE DEMISE OF AMERICAN LIBERTY!” When election day came I allowed that I would demise her, and I just went over in the Ford and told her that there’d be a boycott on No. 49, top floor, unless she came down from her high horse and went to the polls with me.
I says to her, “Sister Downey, (I said ‘sister’ because she hates to be called sister by anybody), do you know who has brought about the enfranchisement of half the American race so quickly and so
Hey There! |
»
Going to Toledo? i
Well, you better.
Things going on.
You will enjoy.
One full week
of June 27th
Moose Convention
Anyway he’s elected, and my husband says that’s the main thing about the suffrage. Who’s elected? Why our Governor—the man that’s going to raise wages, reduce taxes, straighten out the railroads, lower the price of sugar and make the provision men eat out of his hand—goodness knows we don’t eat much out of their hands.
And we are the ones that did it. Everybody says that but for the elevated and moral and high-toned new voters, that other man would have got there, and then I suppose wages would have gone down and taxes would have gone up. My, I begin to understand those comic cartoons of a man that goes through lots of tribulation and finally comes out on the top of the smokestack and says, “Ain’t it a grand and glorious feelin’?” Our ward polled the biggest vote of any ward in Deledo, and all the neighbors say that if it hadn’t been for me hustling round and getting the women to the polls, like as not the whole election would have gone wrong.
We all learned a lot in the First Voters’ Conferences that were held all round in the school houses and halls; and men professors from the women’s colleges came and told us what a great privilege it was to be inscribed upon the rolls of free born American voters. I found out one funny thing. Our woman’s suffrage paper was always talking about the “glorious duties of full citizenship.” Professor Jones of Vasmith college, he says that all the women are citizens and have been ever since they were babies in arms; that we women were just as much part of the “we the people” that the Constitution of the United States was made for, as the men folks.
My daughter Aggie has got through high school and is freshman in the Junior College of Toledroit University, and she wasn’t afraid to speak right out and say, “Why haven’t we been also the ‘we the people’ that makes constitutions and laws?” “My dear young lady”, says the Professor, “the reason is that suffrage is a privilege confered upon a part of the people who exercise it for the benefit of all.” And he went on to tell us that lots of grown men can’t vote—tribal Indians and idots and lunatics— and in some states men that haven’t paid their taxes, or that haven’t enough grip to show that they can read and write.
On the other hand he says that in a good many states foreigners that haven’t become citizens yet, can vote if they have filed their first papers for naturalization. So far as I can see, they keep right on voting if they never get their second papers and never become truly citizens. But now, says the Professor, under the magnificent Eighteenth Amendment, whatever a man can do in the way of voting, a woman can do. And they can’t be shut out from voting about the same kind of things as the men. For legislatures and presidents and ward assessors, and senators of the United States and members of the council. That made me still more glad that I had got out of the company of the lunatics and feeble minded and convicts, and illiterates that used to be classed with the women as nonvoters.
Aggie put me on to one thing that nobody said much about in the First Voters’ Colleges. You see, she had learned a lot about politics and electioneering and all that in her Junior College, and she gathered up votes, enough to elect her president of her sorority. She says that except for some provisions about the age of senators and presidents and such things, in general any voter can run for any office, that he has the right to help elect. That means that since women can now vote for members of the legislature, a woman has a right to be a candidate for the legislature.
It appears to me that the men in this country have thought a good deal less about that than the girls in the sororities. When half the voters are women, how long are women going to be contented with one or two seats in the legislature of two hundred members? Or one of the fifteen or eighteen important officials elected on a Deledo city ticket? Women make good trustees for public institutions. About six hundred thousand women in this country are trusted by the people among whom they live to educate their children. You find any number of women as cashiers and buyers and managers in places of big business. Therefore we expect that we shall have a fair share of the responsible public offices. With something like sixteen