RUTHLESS RHYMES FOR MARTIAL MILITANTS (1914)
Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes.
The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
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To celebrate Women’s Suffrage, we harken back to a day when women suffragettes were pilloried in Brooklyn – publicly – and could not even vote!
RUTH-LESS
Some would argue that it is worse now than it was even back before women had “rights.” But what was it like back then? How high was that glass ceiling? How did Brooklyn treat its women suffering for their rights and the rights of other women?
It is not likely that there was much difference between Manhattan and Brooklyn – or Brooklyn and Cleveland, for that matter. It was merely the details that were different – the players, the events, the locations.
Brooklyn, though, seemed to have started its anti-suffragette campaign in earnest by having a lark of it in 1914, joking about the movement while sticking the knife in, so to speak, and twisting it with a sort of sinister glee.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, that year, published a series of cartoons by one of its more able cartoonists, Nelson Harding, called “Ruthless Rhymes for Martial Militants.” The cartoons not only showed women in a demeaning light, but they poked fun about their fight for their rights – as well as their chances for success.
The cartoons, though clever, were accompanied by some middling (and often witty) poems, both of which caused the reader to take the suffragette’s plight less seriously than he or she might have otherwise. In these cartoons, when women weren’t being presented as buffoons who thought only of the vote, then they were bomb-throwers in market-places, causing disruption in a man’s world.
MARTIAL
“Most women are happy. When they are not, then they are suffragettes,” went the old joke, told usually by a man with a sense of self-importance, in a room full of other men.
“A suffragette has been described as a woman who wants to be a man and is no lady. As a matter of fact, a suffragette is usually a woman who has been so disappointed in one man that she wants to take it out on the whole race.”
MILITANTS
After humor, though, came surprise – when the “militants” actually started making headway. This was followed by disgust, and finally by anger, as these women came closer and closer to their goal.
And then, when it happened – women achieved the right to vote – men suddenly took another tack:
“We could really care less they have the vote, except they don’t know the first thing about politics.”
Ironically, these reactions to women demanding their rights all mirror the “five stages of addiction,” which many addicts – and the people around them – experience when confronted with the prospect of getting sober.
Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.
Some men, though, would never reach that final stage.
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