are!”
We know how women are. But nobody knows why they are as they are.
Please let me make myself clear on one point: As an institution, and as individuals, I am for women. They constitute, and deservedly too, the most popular sex we have. Since away back
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yonder I have been in favor of granting them suffrage. For years I have felt it as a profound conviction that the franchise should be expanded at one end and abridged at the other—made larger to admit some of the women, made smaller to bar out some of the men. I couldn’t think of very many reasons why the average woman should want to mix in politics, but if she did wish so to mix and mingle, I couldn’t think of a single valid reason why she should not have full permission, not as a privilege, not as a boon, but as a common right. Nor could I bring myself to share, in any degree, the apprehension of some of the anti-suffragists who held that giving women votes would take many of them entirely out of the state of motherhood. I cannot believe that all the children of the future are going to be born on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Surely some of them will be born on other dates. Indeed the only valid argument against woman suffrage that I could think of was the conduct of some of the women who have been for it.
To myself I often said:
“Certainly I favor giving them the vote. Seeing what a mess the members of my own sex so often make of the job of trying to run the country,
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I don’t anticipate that the Republic will go upon the shoals immediately after women begin voting and campaigning and running for office. At the helm of the ship of state we’ve put some pretty sad steersman from time to time. Better the hand that rocks the cradle than the hand that rocks the boat. We men have let slip nearly all of the personal liberties for which our fathers fought and bled—that is to say, fought the Britishers and bled the Injuns. Ever since the Civil War we have been so dummed busy telling the rest of
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