Beyond a weak protest the day that I began work for Daskam & Howe the girl manager of the addressing department made no objection to my stopping work every day at four o’clock. That gave me time to eat a second cold lunch, and report at the West Side headquarters of the Suffrage Party by five. When applying for the position I told Miss Madeline Marks that I would be glad to be assigned to the tenement section of her district. Thereupon she assured me that she felt sure that I would be more useful on Riverside Drive and the adjacent side streets. So taking a list of voters to be seen, and a package of little yellow pledge-slips, I sallied forth.
The first voter on whom I called, like other individuals whom custom clothes in trousers, suffered from the hallucination of thinking himself a man. When I opened the conversation by saying that I had feared not finding him at home so early, five o’clock, he explained that, being a “gentleman of leisure,” he was always at home to charming ladies. Being aware that the race of fools had not been entirely exterminated, I allowed his explanation, along with the accompanying smirk, to pass unnoticed, and proceeded to business.
At the mention of suffrage his back stiffened and his eyes flashed green. When I offered him one of the yellow pledge-slips, asked him to sign it, he broke forth:
“You women!” he spit at me. “You’ve lost all sense of decency. Do you realize that our country is at war? Do you realize that men are dying? Do you realize it? Do you realize it?”
“I realize all of it,” I told him, rising to my feet, and I think my eyes flashed green. “Besides, I realize that every man at the front—fighting, dying, and dead—was brought into the world by a woman, who went through the jaws of death, suffered the pangs of hell, to give him birth.” I walked to the door of the drawing-room, then turned and glared at him, standing speechless beside his chair. “There’s something else I realize—the pity of it that a man like you has to be born of a woman, when you might just as well have been hatched out of a goose-egg.”
The footman, whom I had looked upon as an impassive piece of furniture, followed me out on the stoop.
“If you’ll give me one, lady,” he said, “I’ll be glad to sign it and send it in by mail.”