32. The Woman Voter
THUS THERE is not the slightest
chance that the enfranchised women of Protestantdom, once they
become at ease in the use of the ballot, will give any heed to
the ex-suffragettes who now presume to lead and instruct them in
politics. Years ago I predicted that these suffragettes, tried
out by victory, would turn out to be idiots. They are now
hard at work proving it. Half of them devote themselves to
advocating reforms, chiefly of a sexual character, so utterly
preposterous that even male politicians and newspaper editors
laugh at them; the other half succumb absurdly to the
blandishments of the old-time male politicians, and so enroll
themselves in the great political parties. A woman who joins one
of these parties simply becomes an imitation man, which is to
say, a donkey. Thereafter she is nothing but an obscure cog in an
ancient and creaking machine, the sole intelligible purpose of
which is to maintain a horde of scoundrels in public office. Her
vote is instantly set off by the vote of some sister who joins
the other camorra. Parenthetically, I may add that all of the
ladies to take to this political immolation seem to me to be
frightfully plain. I know those of England, Germany and
Scandinavia only by their portraits in the illustrated papers,
but those of the United States I have studied at close range at
various large political gatherings, including the two national
conventions first following the extension of the suffrage. I am
surely no fastidious fellow--in fact, I prefer a certain
melancholy decay in women to the loud, circus-wagon brilliance of
youth--but I give you my word that there were not five women at
either national convention who could have embraced me in camera
without first giving me chloral. Some of the chief stateswomen on
show, in fact, were so downright hideous that I felt faint every
time I had to look at them.
: The reform-monging suffragists seem
to be equally devoid of the more caressing gifts. They may be
filled with altruistic passion, but they certainly have bad
complexions, and not many of them know how to dress their hair.
Nine-tenths of them advocate reforms aimed at the alleged
lubricity of the male--the single standard, medical certificates
for bridegrooms, birth-control, and so on. The motive here, I
believe, is mere rage and jealousy. The woman who is not pursued
sets up the doctrine that pursuit is offensive to her sex, and
wants to make it a felony. No genuinely attractive woman has any
such desire. She likes masculine admiration, however violently
expressed, is quite able to take care of herself. More, she is
well aware that very few men are bold enough to offer it without
a plain invitation, and this awareness makes her extremely
cynical of all women who complain of being harassed, beset,
stormed, and seduced. All the more intelligent women that I know,
indeed, are unanimously of the opinion that no girl in her right
senses has ever been actually seduced since the world began;
whenever they hear of a case, they sympathize with the man. Yet
more, the normal woman of lively charms, roving about among men,
always tries to draw the admiration of those who have previously
admired elsewhere; she prefers the professional to the amateur,
and estimates her skill by the attractiveness of the huntresses
who have hitherto stalked the game. The iron-faced suffragist
propagandist, if she gets a man at all, must get one wholly
without sentimental experience. If he has any, her crude
manoeuvres make him laugh and he is repelled by her lack of
pulchritude and amiability. All such suffragists (save a few
miraculous beauties) marry ninth-rate men when they marry at all.
They have to put up with the sort of cast-offs who are almost
ready to fall in love with lady physicists, embryologists, and
embalmers.
Fortunately for the human race, the campaigns of
these indignant viragoes will come to naught. Men will keep on
pursuing women until hell freezes over, and women will keep
luring them on. If the latter enterprise were abandoned, in fact,
the whole game of love would play out, for not many men take any
notice of women spontaneously. Nine men out of ten would be quite
happy, I believe, if there were no women in the world, once they
had grown accustomed to the quiet. Practically all men are
their happiest when they are engaged upon activities--for
example, thinking, gambling, hunting, business, adventure-- to
which women are not ordinarily admitted. It is women who seduce
them from such celibate doings. The hare postures and gyrates in
front of the hound. The way to put an end to the gaudy crimes
that the suffragist alarmists talk about is to shave the heads of
all the pretty girls in the world, and pluck out their eyebrows,
and pull their teeth, and put them in khaki, and forbid them to
wriggle on dance-floors, or to wear scents, or to use lip-sticks,
or to roll their eyes. Reform, as usual, mistakes the fish for
the fly.
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"In Defense Of Women" by H. L. Mencken, 1922