Judge — June 28, 1913 — page 15: what you’re looking at

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

%e MODERN} Suffragette HE anti-suffragists take pleasure in trying to frighten women by saying that, if they get the franchise, wives will lose the sacred right of dower. They have already been so fortunate as to lose it in over half the States, without any regard to the suffrage, and in every instance the new statute has made much more liberal provision for them. Where is the logic in a statement that, if women can help elect law- makers and make laws, their legal position will be worse than it is now? The anti-suffragists have a valuable recruit in Abdul Ha- mid, ex-Sultan of Turkey. Now that he is out of a job, if only he could speak English he might come over here and take that side in debates. It is practically impossible to get an American man to do it. It used to be the custom for a Legislature to pass a suffrage bill, discover a misplaced com- ma, and declare its action null and void, Thatof New Jersey, however, finding it had used “or’’ instead of *‘and,’’ calmly got together and passed the cor- rected bill. It looks as if the time has come when woman suffrage can’t be downed by a grammatical error. Two women have been ad- mitted to practice law in Cairo, Egypt, but the Russian Duma and the Georgia Legislature, U.S. A., still refuse this privilege. The members can’t help it, because they are made that way. o From every university in the country comes the report, usual at this season, of the very large proportion of women who carry off the honors. And yet it is a matter of recent memory that the chief argument against admitting women to the higher education was their incapacity for it. Now this is the argument em- ployed against allowing them to pa ticipate in government. And when the By IDA HUSTED HARPER opportunity comes, they will prove its fal- lacy just as they have done in the colleges. In order to prove that the women of New York State do not want the ballot, the Anti-Suffrage Association is making a post-card canvass—it will require only two million and a half of postals—and THE LIBERTY BELLE when the results are tabulated they will be furnished to the voters, many of whom will then proceed to vote exactly as the party bosses tell them to. It was bad enough for Secretary of the Interior Lane to appoint a woman re- ceiver of the land office at Leadville, Colo., without adding insult to injury by saying, ‘‘It is an established fact that money can be handled more safely by women than by men."’ Haven't men been very careful from the beginning of time to see that women didn’t have a chance to establish that fact? pshots The ‘‘antis’’ will not accept men in their association, and then accuse the suffragists of sex antagonism when they have always welcomed men with open arms, (This is a figure of speech.) The women of Great Britain are mak- ing a lot of fuss because, now that the members of the House of Com- mons have voted themselves salaries, the women, through their taxes have to help pay them. American women have been doing this for more than ahundred years, and about four times as large salaries as are paid over there. In addition, they help pay the salaries of members of the Legislatures in forty-eight States, whom they have not been allowed to help select, and are specifically tax- ed without being represented. } An Eastern judge writes of the thrills he experienced on visiting the big court house in Seattle and finding in every court about as many women as men sitting on the juries, What astonished him most of all was je calm way in which this in- novation was accepted — no earthquake, no excitement, © nothing turned upside down. When he had recovered his equilibrium, he was told that women were quite as well fitted for jury service as men, paid much stricter attention to the evidence, elevated court procedure, and made gentlemen out of witnesses and even out of lawyers! Then he went home wondering how people could so long have been frightened by scarecrows. While men of prominence in London are proposing that the suffragettes should be severely ‘‘birched,’? the park commis- sioner of New York invites the suffra- gists to Central Park, to plant a number of beautiful birches, and dedicates them to the cause. And then Englishmen won- der why there is no militant movement in this country! comicbooks.com