Today -100: February 21, 1915: Woman in politics is the last thing a real woman wants

The Lusitania arrives in New York. It didn’t fly the American flag this time, but neither did it fly the Royal Naval Reserve flag Capt. Dow is entitled to fly, and usually does.

A U-boat sinks a steamer off the Welsh coast without warning, and a Norwegian ship is sunk by a mine off the Danish coast.

Germany and Austria complain that submarines are, they say, being built for Britain in the US and shipped in pieces via Canada.

Britain and France claim to have successfully bombarded the Turkish forts guarding the entrance to the Dardanelles, silencing their guns. Turkey, of course, claims the forts haven’t been damaged.

Carranza arrests 180 native priests (i.e., not the Spanish priests Villa hates so much) for non-payment of a 500,000 peso levy on them, supposedly to be used for the poor.

Sarah Bernhardt on her forthcoming leg amputation: “I would rather be mutilated than powerless.”

The NYT prints another batch of letters on women’s suffrage:

Elizabeth Goldsmith says “It sometimes seems as if the suffragist had ceased to think of man and woman as two halves of a whole” and cites the “law of unity and polarity” in nature. You know, man the active principle, woman the passive principle, like fire and water, day and night, etc. Since woman is “the passive, the acted upon,” if she has the vote “she will do nothing original with it, nothing creative.”

Florence Howe Hall says that far from coarsening women in the states that have it, women’s suffrage has refined men.

Helen Glover, vice president of the Connecticut Anti association, says “The hysterical, emotional way in which women are clamoring for the ballot, without rhyme or reason, only shows how unfitted they are for it, and of how little use it would be in their hands if they had it. Woman in politics is the last thing a real woman wants”.

Henrietta Wheatley says “Men and women were created to co-operate – not to compete.”

Frederic Almy replies to the original editorial: “You say that women must work as men work in order to vote as men vote. I do not want them to vote as men vote, but differently.”

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