It wuz a burnin’ hot day, and many who’d always argued that women hadn’t strength enough to lift a paper ballot, had prophesied that woman wuz too delicately organized, too “fraguile,” as Betsy Bobbet would say, to endure the strain of the long march in the torrid atmosphere.
But I told Josiah that women had walked daily over the burning plow shares of duty and domestic tribulation, till their feet had got calloused, and could stand more’n you’d think for.
And he said he didn’t know as females had any more burnin’ plow shares to tread on than men had.
And I sez, “I didn’t say they had, Josiah. I never wanted women to get more praise or justice than men. I simply want ’em to get as much—just an even amount; for,” sez I, solemnly, “‘male and female created He them.’”
Josiah is a deacon, and when I quote Scripture, he has to listen respectful, and I went on: “I guess it wuz a surprise even to the marchers that of all the ambulances that kept alongside the Parade to pick up faint and swoonin’ females, the only one occupied wuz by a man.”
Josiah denied it, but I sez, “I see his boots stickin’ out of the ambulance myself.” Josiah couldn’t dispute that, for he knows I am truthful. But he sez, sunthin’ in the sperit of two little children I hearn disputin’. Sez one: “It wuzn’t so; you’ve told a lie.”
“Well,” sez the other, “You broke a piece of china and laid it to me.”
Sez Josiah, “You may have seen a pair of men’s boots a-stickin’ out of the ambulance, but I’ll bet they didn’t have heels on ’em a inch broad, and five or six inches high.”
“No, Josiah,” sez I, “you’re right. Men think too much of their comfort and health to hist themselves up on such little high tottlin’ things, and you didn’t see many on ’em in the Parade.”
But he went on drivin’ the arrow of higher criticism still deeper into my onwillin’ breast. “I’ll bet you didn’t see his legs tied together at the ankles, or his trouses slit up the sides to show gauze stockin’s and anklets and diamond buckles. And you didn’t see my sect who honored the Parade by marchin’ in it, have a goose quill half a yard long, standin’ up straight in the air from a coal-scuttle hat, or out sideways, a hejus sight, and threatenin’ the eyes of friend and foe.”