Today -100: April 8, 1914: Of constitutions, more dry counties, and French marriages

The few voters who turned out for the NY special election support holding a state constitutional convention next year.

The Republican National Committee plans to reduce Southern representation at the National Convention: instead of there being two delegates from each Congressional district, districts where there are fewer than 7,500 votes for a Republican for Congress will just get one delegate.

After serving 26 days of her six-month sentence for her attack on Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus, Mary Richardson is released temporarily on medical grounds under the Cat and Mouse Act. While she has been hunger-striking and has been forcibly fed, the medical grounds are actually appendicitis. She will have an operation for that in July and will then come under the general amnesty at the start of World War I, so she won’t be returning to Holloway Gaol.

Women vote in Chicago elections for the first time, but none of the 9 female candidates for city council is elected. Throughout Illinois, 16 counties vote in prohibition, although Springfield went from dry to wet. Everyone attributes this to the women’s vote, but 30 counties were already dry.

The London County Council will fire any women doctors employed by the Public Health Department if they get married.

The French supreme court rules that women do not already have the vote, that in fact women have no political rights, political responsibilities, or political privileges.

In the court hearings into the murder of Le Figaro editor Gaston Calmette, it finally comes out that Calmette acquired Joseph Caillaux’s personal letters from his ex-wife. Caillaux’s own testimony demonstrates that early 20th century French political marriages were no more romantic than, say, Newt Gingrich’s:

M. Caillaux said he had offered to Mme. Gueydan [his 1st wife] the alternative of a divorce or a reconciliation, but on condition that the letters taken from his desk be returned to them. An agreement, however, was made to burn them, which was done in the presence of his wife, himself, and his secretary.

Except her sister had already photographed the letters.

A reconciliation ensued, but later he and Mme. Gueydan were divorced.

Translation: he waited to dump her and marry his mistress until after a particularly close parliamentary election (and after she divorced her husband, of course).

Don't see comments? Click on the post title to view or post comments.