he tightly-skirted
women seems to speak. It said: "I am not a useful human being--see! I
cannot walk--I dare not run, but I am a woman--I still have my sex to
commend me. I am not of use, I am made to be supported. My sex is my
only appeal."

Rather an indelicate and unpleasant thought, too, for an "honest" woman
to advertise so brazenly. The tight skirts and diaphanous garments
were plainly a return to "sex." The ultra feminine felt they were
going to lose something in this agitation for equality. They do not
want rights--they want privileges--like the servants who prefer tips to
wages. This is not surprising. Keepers of wild animals tell us that
when an animal has been a long time in captivity it prefers captivity
to freedom, and even when the door of the cage is opened it will not
come out--but that is no argument against freedom.

The anti-suffrage attitude of mind is not so much a belief as a
disease. I read a series of anti-suffrage articles not long ago in the
_New York Times_. They all were written in the same strain: "We are
gentle ladies. Protect us. We are weak, very weak, but very loving."
There was not one strong nourishing sentence that would inspire anyone
to fight the good fight. It was all anemic and bloodless, and
beseeching, and had the indefinable sick-headache, kimona,
breakfast-in-bed quality in it, that repels the strong and healthy.
They talked a great deal of the care and burden of motherhood. They
had no gleam of humor--not one. The anti-suffragists dwell much on
what a care children are. Their picture of a mother is a tired, faded,
bedraggled woman, with a babe in her arms, two other small children
holding to her skirts, all crying. According to them, children never
grow up, and no person can ever attend to them but the mother. Of
course, the anti-suffragists are not this kind themselves. Not at all.
They talk of potential motherhood--but that is usually about as far as
they go. Potential motherhood sounds well and hurts nobody.

The Gentle Lady still believes in the masculine terror of tears, and
the judicious use of fainting. The Jane Austin heroine always did it
and it worked well. She burst into tears on one page and fainted dead
away on the next. That just showed what a gentle lady she was, and
what a tender heart she had, and it usually did the trick. Lord
Algernon was there to catch her in his arms. She would not faint if he
wasn't.

The Gentle Lady does n