New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1917-02-25
East Side Feminisrn

what for are these judges and these
Albanies?"
1t is the cry of the feminist movement
awakening on the East Side. Woman's
place is the home inevitably, when there
are many children to be cared for and
no money for nursemaids, but the per-
Torrance Of home-making necessitates
going out of the home at least for the
short space of time required to do the
daily marketing. Small fats without re-
frigerators and shops without delivery
systems make the going out of the nome
as inevitable as the staying in it. The
police official who told the women TO stay
in their homes if they didn't want to get
hit was as ignorant as he was insolent'
This going to market and feeding the
children is the whole business of being a
woman on the East Side. If cultivated
minds could accomplish the task in a few
hours, with time left over for interior dec
Grating and voice culture, the average
mind of the East Side cannot. The feml-
mist argument that women are built Tor
something nobler than cooking runs
straight up against the blank wall of the
fact that most women do not and can not
do anything nobler than cooking. Mar
keting and feeding may be lowly as com
pared with the careers which figure in
feminist lectures, but they are The whole
lifework of these women, and if the women
fail in their lifework. it is disgrace.
1t is an interesting phase of the fem
mist movement which Miss Helen Todd has
discovered in her visits to the homes OF
the submerged tenth. Civilization rolled
over these women for years. They knew
nothing of woman suffrage, nothing of pol
itics, nothing even of labor unions and
strikes. If the man Of the family was
working, he brought home his pay enve-
lope. 1t was not for woman to UNDER
stand or to criticise its amount or the
way in which it was acquired. 1t was
hers to buy with it what she could, IN
food. rent and shoes. If the man didn't
bring it home, it was his fault; if he did,
and she could not take care of the family
with it, the fault was hers
1t is the disgrace of pallid, whining chill
dren. the sense of having fallen down on
their jobs, which has reused these women
this and the infammable temper of I'M
taught minds, which has driven them to
rioting. Something is wrong when honest
money won't buy food enough for the chill
dren, and the women are setting out TO
find out where the trouble lies. They are
inquiring, What for arc these judges and
these Albanies?" whom they find mixed up
somehow in their trouble.
Their experience bears an illuminating
resemblance to the stories of the Fifth
Avenue women assembled at recent
meeting to confess how they became con-
verted to woman suffrage. 1t was be-
cause in their attempts to effect social
legislation, to better housing and food CON
ditions, they, too, found these judges and
these Albanies mixed up with their trou-
bles. The essence of the suffrage move
ment lies not in the actual remedy which
may result from women's votes-that is
a highly problenatical question-but III
the fact that women once aroused to the
fact of their present helplessness turn TO
the obvious relief that offers itself.
The women of the East Side will not DE
able to effect an immediate reform IN the
food problem of so complicated city as
New York, neither will the women OF
Fifth Avenue reform the social problems
in which they are interested; but that does
not mean that it is not a good thing for
the men to have their help or that the
whole collective intelligence Of the com
munity may not accomplish more than
half the collective intelligence, and it is
to be hoped that when the women lose
the first freshness of their enthusiasm and
find that they can't accomplish everything
in minute, they will find comfort in re-
eactino that the men couldn't do it, either