sex solidarity impossible. And, of course, added to that is the woman who requires three or
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four men to make her happy, one to marry and support her, and one to take her to the theater and to luncheon at Delmonico’s, and generally fetch and carry for her, and one to remember her as she was at nineteen and remain a bachelor and have a selfish, delightful life, while blaming her. This makes masculine stock still higher, and as there are always buyers on a rising market, competition among women—purely unconscious competition—flourishes.
So men hang together, and women don’t. And men are the stronger sex because they are fewer!
Obviously the cure is the elimination of that sixth woman, preferably by euthanasia. (Look this up, Irvin. It’s a good one.) That sixth woman ought to go. She has made men sought and not seekers. She ruins dinner parties and is the vampire of the moving pictures. And after living a respectable life for years she either goes on living a respectable life, and stays with her sister’s children while the family goes on a motor tour, or takes to serving high-balls instead of afternoon tea, while wearing a teagown of some passionate shade.
It is just possible that suffrage will bring women together. It is just possible that male opposition has in it this subconscious fear, that their superiority is thus threatened. They don’t really want equality, you know. They love to patronize us
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a bit, bless them; and to tell us to run along and not bother our little heads about things that don’t concern us. And, of course, politics has been their own private maneuvering ground, and—I have made it clear, I think, that they don’t always want us—here we are, about to drill on it ourselves, perhaps drilling a mite better than they do in some formations, and standing right on their own field and telling them the mistakes they’ve made, and not to take themselves too hard and that the whole game is a lot easier than they have always pretended it was.
They don’t like it, really, a lot of them. Their solidarity is threatened. Their
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