The Republican journal., 1913-08-21

listed the oldest and ablest speakers that
the movement offered, or we drew on
the able young mothers and home max
ers OF our local clubs, or. as on one occa-
sion, we imported suffragist undergradu-
ates from various Massachusetts col
leges to make five minute speeches. The
veterans of the movement spoke with a
real oratorlcal quality; the matrons were
practical and concrete; the college girls
were peculiarly brilliant fluent, concise,
logical, unafraid. But always we were
presented to the public by the newspa-
pers in our comic aspect. This happened
year after year; and year after year the
Massachusetts Legislature turned our
petition down. 1t is still doing it for
that matter.
could see that we were not making an
inch of progress, and it did not seem to NE
that the movement, as whole, was gain
ing Roadway could not see how we could
ever accomplish it. Nest politicians do
not want women to be enfranchised. We
were compelled, therefore, to beg the
franchise from the people who were
most interested not to give it to US. |
have never before or since known any
abstract emotion like my despair OF those
days. 1t seemed to me that this fifty
yearold movement, to which so many
noble-hearted and big-minded men and
women had given their whole lives, was
doomed. Little detached bands were
working here and there, but our signal
fires were too weak to flash from CONT
nent to continetnt, or even from State
to State.
But all the time of course, although
did not suspect it, that fire was creeping
underground, was welding the entire sex.
For suddenly the militants appeared in
England. We may criticize the militants
as much as we please, but we must al
ways admit that they turned theory in
to movement. In an incredibly short
time, groups of suffragists all over the
world were working shoulder to shoulder
must confess, after those years in which
we knocked fruitlessly at the door of the
Massachusetts Legislature, that when
the first English militant fired the first
stone my heart went with it.
But ir the meantime, of course, l had
been studying this problem from every
point of view, studying it from the wider
| aspect of my maturity, my college life,
my experience as writer of fiction and
from the swiftly widening scope of the
problem itself. l began to shed some of
those raw early convictions-I mean in
particular in regard to the Tyrant Man.
began to see that, although men are a
| little to blame in regard to this condition
| of the subsection of women, they are not
| entirely or even much 10 blame, that
| woman's position in the past has been
the result of development in the human
race, and that, as Gertrude Anterior SO
sapiently points out. if civilization were
to be destroyed, we should have to GO
through this process all over again-man
to work outside the home fighting the
| destructive forces of nature, woman to
| stay in the home developing the family.
, But | also realize that now the time has
| come for women not to destroy the home,
! but to enlarge it until it covers the whole
world; not to neglect the family, but to
| increase it until it embraces the entire
human race. Many women see that
certainly all the progressive and radical
wonderland few men. We have yet
| to convince the conservative woman,
the reactionary woman, and most men.
| For years and years, | have been cast
ing about me for the best fiction form in
which to embody my ideas on this sub
| ject. l cannot count now, l suppose,
the suffrage novels that have planned
and rejected. Then one day one of the
things that had learned in college came
back to me and with new force-that
the fable-form is the most telling way of
convincing the unconvinced. Esop in
ancient times, Maeterlinck and Rostand
in modern times, have all used this meth
cd. Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" has
taught some of US more about the hui
man kind than all the histories, homilies
| and essays ever written. One day the
idea came to me of putting men and
women on an uninhablted island in the
| South Pacific, there to let them work
out this problem in primitive conditions.
CANCEL Island" was the result.