Today -100: September 20, 1913: Votes for Women and Chastity for Men!

Max Blanck, one of the two owners of the Triangle Shirt Waist Company, 146 of whose employees burned alive 102½ years ago because the exits were locked, is charged with... wait for it... locking the exits of his new factory. His lawyer, the same high-priced shyster who got him off last time, will argue that the locks are necessary to prevent theft. The judge will fine Blanck $20 and apologize to him for having to do that.

The family of Princess Sophia of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, still claiming that she died of heart disease (at 25) rather than from blowing her brains out, hurriedly cremates her, the first female royal ever to be cremated.

The Mexican Congress shows some cojones, rejecting Huerta’s nomination for minister of public instruction for being too Catholic.

Woodrow Wilson broke with the tradition of sending black ambassadors to Haiti, and the NYT claims that Haiti actually prefers it that way because many of the “better class of Haitians” have French as well as black blood, and therefore have “French sensitiveness to slights, real or apparent.” It’s all in the blood, you know.

Speaking of things found in the blood, the NYT notes that there is a debate within the British Women’s Social and Political Union, without making it clear what the hell it’s talking about. Christabel Pankhurst has been publishing articles in The Suffragette which “state in the plainest language facts not usually found outside medical works.” Were 1913 readers able to intuit that the words the NYT is unable to bring itself to print are venereal disease? I don’t know. The LAT says Christabel has been talking about “certain phases of the social problem” and “has been calling spades by something even more distinctive than the plain word spades,” but the last two words of the article are “white slavery,” which gets near the topic.

In Miss Pankhurst’s “Great Scourge” articles (here’s a link to the American edition of the book form of these articles), she ascribes the spread of VD entirely to male promiscuity, and asserts that there is only one cure: “Votes for Women and Chastity for Men.” Indeed, she is now charging that the real reason men oppose women’s suffrage is “sexual vice.”

Mary Winthrop Turner is being sued by Arthur Bender for $5,000 for libeling his dog, Countess Toots. Ms Turner contends her dog, Champion, the Dollar Princess (I don’t know if that’s a name or a title), is a better dog.

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