A Sharp Rebuttal to the 'Fireside' Creed
A female reader fires back at a young man's unsolicited advice on 'women's place' in society.
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.
Men have always taken the privilege of defining to women their position in this world, and have gone so far as to formulate infallible creeds to punish them, endlessly, in the next if they are not fully obeyed. A young man in the New Year's Post-Intelligencer essayed to give advice, indiscriminately, on the old scores. How does it look for this youth to give advice to Mary A. Livermore? She wrote and talked for human freedom before he was born. If Seattle can spare him, I would advise him to go to the 'man's rights' village between San Francisco and Omaha, where the wife meets the husband with a smile, the husband deals for the wives, and the women have to do is to stay among the children, cook, scrub, churn, wash dirty linen, spin, weave—and not deal in real estate. If there is a paradise for men, it is there. A WOMAN.
“Men have always taken the privilege of defining to women their position in this world.”
This letter-to-the-editor captures the intellectual friction of the suffrage era. The author’s demand that women be allowed to 'deal in real estate' rather than be confined to domestic labor directly challenges the patriarchal control of property that was so central to 19th-century Seattle.
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