Judge — September 21, 1912 — page 17: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

T H E Lectures by Emma Caustic. THE SPHERE JUMPER. Y DEAR sisters, we all admire the average man—for his nerve—and when he boasts of his great reasoning powers, we are eager to be instructed in the mysteries of masculine logic, espe- cially when it is brought to bear on questions that affect our sex. And so to-day, in dealing with my subject, the woman wage-earner—called by man the Sphere Jumper (because she has leaped from the home, woman’s sphere, out M O D E RN Again man snubs the Jumper because, in vulgar vernacular, he accuses her of swiping his work. It is absurd for her to point accusingly at male cooks and dressmakers and to assert that she’s only following her own spinning, weav- ing, baking, tailoring, soap and candle making and accounts keeping out of the home into the offices and factories whither man removed them. Lacking reason, she does not realize the subtle distinction between masculine and femi- nine work. Neither kind nor place into the din of the public mart)—I shall try to give you glimpses of his wonder- ful intellectual processes, At regular intervals man lifts up his bass and howls at the Sphere Jumper, complaining that in abandoning the his- toric chores of her sex she has forced him to abandon his poetic thoughts of her. How true this is! No longer, as for generations back, does she haunt his twilight dreams in her three roles of the Goddess of Grub, the Champion of Cleaning, the Race Raiser—now rising dimly out of steam and smoke, with a smutch on her nose and a frying pan in her hand; now looming through swirling dust and ammonia fumes, clutching a broom and a duster, and now floating in wrapper-clad majesty, fondling shriek- ing infancy or flogging rampant youth. Alas! for these beautiful and tender visions, with their artistic background of stove and washtub, the Sphere Jumper to-day substitutes the prosaic picture of a trim, shirt-waisted crea- ture, silhouetted against a blackboard, counter or desk, with her eyes lifted ecstatically to a sordid pay-roll. Truly, it is with reason that man deplores the passing of the Ancient Order of Hearth- huggers. Another reason man gives for reviling the Sphere Jumper is that she ought to be running some home. Ignoring with sublime unconcern the maid and the spinster, the widow whose spouse has callously risen heavenward and left her offspring, those who haven't acquired domiciles and those who have lost them, man rises above petty conditions and facts to the grand heights of abstract Principle. And before this airy disre- ard of the practical and the real let us bow in awestruck reverence. LOU ROGERS A MODERN WOMAN'S TASK. makes it, but cash. Work for work’s sake is woman's; work with a pay en- velope attachment is man’s. The last reason advanced for judging the Jumper is that, not content with mobbing the mart, she lifts up her soprano and shrieks for adequate wages. How indelicate! Knowing in her secret soul that after a decade or two chivalry will attend to the matter, why disgrace her sex by howling? If she has to shiver in a hall bedroom, scrub her lingerie, dine on tea and toothpicks, what does it matter? A hundred years from now it will be forgotten. Even if she fades away from insufficient sustenance, what can be more poetic than a slow decline into the grave. But, as man fittingly WwW OM A N observes, gone is the spirit of the old- time martyrs from the Sphere Jumper’s soul. She prefers beefsteak to a halo, a harem skirt to a shroud. Let us, with him, repudiate this coarse, material creature. And now, in conclusion, let us be thankful that, though the laws of evolu- tion may push us forward toward the abyss wherein the Sphere Jumper lies, we can be saved by hanging on witha deathlike grasp to the mighty reason that springs eternal from the brain of man. Orla W. Harb. The Vote in Ohio. The vote on woman suffrage in the Ohio election was by no means discour- aging. Early returns from 2,569 pre- cincts of the State—about one-half— showed a vote of 105,083 for and 160,- 745 against the proposal to permit women to vote. The constitutional amendment pro- posing the initiative and referendum apparently was carried by a large vote, and the women of the State, it is said, will rely upon these new provisions to gain another vote. The progress of woman suffrage in this country has been little short of marvelous, and no one affirmatively in- terested in the cause will be cast down by the result in Ohio. There are coming other years and other elections, and the workers in the cause will eventually win in this State, it is believed, as they have in other States and as they promise to do in still others in which the question is to be submitted to the people. The Connecting Link. Soliloquy of a discontented wife: “The connecting link between the ani- mal and the human is man. It needs no biological research work to find —he is already too much in evidence.’’ To a Budding Suffragette. Some day, sweet Isobel, when you are grown, ' You, too, may go where cobblestones are thrown; And in your nicest frock (pray, don’t be vain!) With aim unerring break a window- pane. comicbooks.com