Judge — April 29, 1922 — page 20: what you’re looking at

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

“This is your job, girls!” EDITORIAL By Witiiam ALLEN WHITE SIDE TALKS WITH VASSAR HE WORLD has been fairly well made ‘over since Matthew Vassar started the college which made his brewery famous. But, of all the changes that have come to the civilized world, none is so marvelous as the change which has come in the relation of women to their environment. And it is not that women have ceased to be rather nondescript human things and have become citizens. Citizenship is, upon the whole, one of the lesser blessings which women have found in the sixty years last past. Woman in Christendom to-day is accepted under law, in custom and in the common parlance of the world as man’s equal. Not that she is the same gregarious jackass that man is; identity is not the phase of her equality. She is different, but equally important. It is odd how the change has come. Forty years ago the Vassar graduate—indeed, any well-educated woman—was more or less of a byword. She was supposed to be a creature without sex or feeling. Her opinions were re- ceived with hooting. Her husband was generally sup- posed to have married for money. Slowly that ghost was laid. She was your grandmother, girls, and she had rather a difficult time. For she, the shameless thing, was sup- posed to know that the doctor did not bring the babies in his black bag; that there are several simple physical reasons why some families are large and others small; and that if you cut straight into the human figure at the waist line you will come to the digestive paraphernalia and not just straight meat all the way through. This knowledge set her apart from the other girls, who were sent out of the room when any ailment more complicated than a tooth- ache was discussed’ by her elders. And now a whole group of public questions are being set apart in govern- ment for the consideration of women: questions affecting the home, its food supply, its water, sewers, streets, sani- tation and safety; questions affecting women in industry, their hours of service, wages, and working conditions; questions affecting the business of child-bearing and rear- ing, education, hygiene, infectious diseases, and questions affecting the relations of men and women. This is your job, girls. It was your privilege before the ballot, and under the ballot it is your burden. You, whose grand- mother was baggage, going through the world something like the bird dog, the race horse, the cow and the canary— following the master—now are a full partner in the men- agerie. And in your short journey as a partner you have traveled fast and far. Matthew Vassar certainly opened a queer box of grief for his brothers when he started that college, and let the educated woman loose to prey upon the wrongs of the world. In an easy-going, unctuous and rather wicked world, you came crashing through our econo- mic laws, our social institutions and our established order, a Carrie Nation, with your hatchet sheathed in your smiles. You surely have smashed an awful hole in our shimmering yesterdays to let in a to-morrow which makes us shudder. Was it an accident that Vassar and Volstead both begin their names with a “V"? So did that other Brobding- nagian joker, the elder Samuel Weller. BROTHER HARDING'S COALS OF FIRE ROTHER WARREN G. HARDING, the editor of our esteemed contemporary, The Marion Star, is eat- ing coals of fire as a rather steady diet these days, the same being administered by the agricultural bloc. Five months ago he spanked the bloc in public, and now the bloc seems to be about ready to uphold the President’s position