Baltimore Evening Sun (3 May 1913): 6.

Look out for Anderson, gents! He is hatching some fresh deviltry!

THE CONVERT

I want to say that friendship in politics and graft, or attempted graft, must be eliminated. That is where I stand, and I am going to carry that out as long as I am in the City Hall.--The Hon. the super-Mahon.

In a few weeks Back River will be open again, and the pious Towel will resume the greasing of the Hon. Joe Goeller.--Adv.

The estimable Maryland Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage is seeking to inflame the rabble with a pamphlet entitled “The Wage-Earning Woman and the State,” in which the thesis is maintained that the working girl doesn’t need the vote. According to this pamphlet, her interests are so well looked after by the male voters that she couldn’t possibly do better for herself. In all but three States, one of which is an equal suffrage State, there are laws “for the protection of women who earn, which laws are distinct from and in addition to the laws protecting all wage-earners, men and women alike.” Basking in the sunshine of these humane enactments, she is a favored and coddled creature, the pet of sentimental and amorous man, the darling of the gods. No act of her own could ever make her lot more soft and rosy.

With all due respect to a camorra of earnest and pious ladies, Bosh my dears! No one denies that such laws are on the statute books: the thing denied is that such laws, as they stand, are worth a hoot. In point of fact, two-thirds of them are full of snakes, and the rest of them are not enforced. In every Southern State, I daresay, there is a law solemnly regulating the labor of women, and particularly of immature women, and yet every sane man knows that little girls slave away in the cotton mills, and that their slavery converts them into anemic invalids, and that their invalidism makes them bad mothers for the Southerners of tomorrow.

And so in all directions. Here in Maryland, if I make no mistake, we have in impressive body of law for the protection of the woman worker--and yet, no further back than two months ago, three little girls came to The Sun office to ask me to help them in a strike. One of them, a puny, sickly little thing, said that she was 13 years old. Imagine a girl of 13 on strike! On strike for a better workroom, a reasonable lunch hour, bearable hours of labor, fair wages! Where were the humane laws of Maryland? Where were the benign enactments of the impeccable males–i. e., of the ward heelers, barroom bravos and professional job holders--at Annapolis? Of what value to these little girls were the statutes “for the protection of women who earn * * * distinct from and in addition to the laws protecting all wage-earners, men and women alike”?

But here, of course, my objection may show unsoundness: it is perfectly possible that laws passed by women would be ineffective, too. Even so, however, our present system is full of injustice and evil. Why should the woman worker, laboring just as diligently as the man worker and just as painfully, and just as reluctantly--why should this woman worker have to go to the man worker, her rival and enemy, for her rights? Why should she have to beg, as a suppliant, what she has a clear right to demand? Why should she have to content herself with what is doled out to her, unwillingly and patronizingly? Why should she be kept from making that fair and equal bargain with the world which men make? Why should she be treated as a ward and an inferior? Why should the laws affecting her be framed in the spirit of the laws prohibiting cruelty to animals?

This conception of women as inferior creatures was sound enough when they were inferior creatures--when they were the mere slaves and parasites of men. In return for their docility and stupidity they were given valuable immunities; it was considered indecent to burden their minds with the more bitter problems of civilized society. They were protected, at least in some measure, from the struggle for existence. When they faced the world, it was from behind a sturdy rank of protecting males. They did not fall at the first fire. They were not tortured with the incessant dilemmas of tactics and strategy. Even the enemy tried to be kind to them.

But that arcadian day is no more. The average, the typical woman of today is a working woman, and she has to work hard and faithfully to get a living. The struggle for existence is no longer a tale from afar, brought to her by her protector: she is in the midst of it. The harshest problems of life are before her. She must be wary if she would survive and more than wary if she would get ahead. That little girl who came to see me was but 13 years old, but she was giving as much hard thought to a problem in political economy as ever Adam Smith gave to it, and her conclusion about it ten years hence will be just as much worth hearing.

Here, indeed, is the crux of the matter: our laws dealing with the woman laborer should not be based upon what some sociologist or political economist or ward heeler thinks would be good for her, but upon what she herself thinks would be good for her. She pays the piper in blood and sweat; she should have a free right to dance as she pleases. It is not alone benevolence that she demands, nor even chiefly, but freedom--the equal rights of a free citizen under a democracy--the right to make her own bargains, to get what she can for herself, to protect her own jaw in the clinches.

Men have fought for this right in the past, disdaining with great contempt the philanthrophy offered in place of it. There were Factory Acts in England as long ago as 1802, and by 1825 they filled a large book, but that didn’t keep the workingmen of England from demanding the vote as well. Sop after sop was thrown to them; the Factory Acts were revised and mellowed in 1833, 1844, 1845, 1847, 1860, 1862, 1863, 1864, 1867, 1870, 1871, 1874 and so on down the years. But they kept on fighting for the vote--i. e., for the right to make Factory Acts themselves--and finally, in 1885, after two partial victories, they got it. The workingmen of England still have to work, and work is still unpleasant: the possession of the vote has not brought them the millenium. But they now have a direct and equal voice in the regulation of their work. They do not have to depend upon charity; they can fight for themselves, and on a reasonably fair field.

Boil your drinking water! Help the boozehounds to rescue besotted Baltimore! Watch Harry become a refomer!