A Local Woman's Wit on the Suffrage Debate
A satirical letter to the editor uses the 'woman question' and local chores to expose the absurdity of the disenfranchisement of women.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Dear Journal: I have been to the dictionary to find out what the word 'woman' meant. It said an adult female of the human race. I heard some men say that women were not citizens, so I determined to find out—a woman for a wonder—and I sort of trembled for fear old Webster put them down as critters or sardines. But Webster seemed to think that women amounted to about as much as men. Those men give women the dickens, said all the Lord intended them for was to look after house and children: that they were never intended to vote. My Pa, when he wants me to split stove wood, leaves his wife so much without wood that she can cut wood as good as he can. Then he got drunk on election day, sold his vote for whiskey, and it took him all day and half the night to get his vote in the ballot box.
“I heard some men say that women were not citizens, so I determined to find out—a woman for a wonder—and I sort of trembled for fear old Webster put them down as critters.”
This letter captures the height of the struggle for women's suffrage in Washington Territory, where the right to vote was granted and then rescinded by courts. It uses humor to highlight the hypocrisy of men who were 'qualified electors' while denying women the same standing.
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