| Sonnet |
| From the book Are Women People? by Alice Duer Miller, 1915 |
About this book Index for this book
Sonnet
("Three bills known as the Thompson-Bewley cannery bills have been advanced to third reading in the Senate and Assembly at Albany. One permits the canners to work their employ seven days a week, a second allows them to work women after 9 p.m. and a third removes every restriction upon the hours of labor of women and minors."- Zenas L. Potter, farmer chief cannery investigator for New York State Factory Investigating Commission.)
LET us not an unrestricted day
Impediments admit. Work is not work
To our employs, but a merry play;
They do not ask the law's excuse to shirk.
Ah, no, the canning season is at hand,
When summer scents are on the air distilled,
When golden fruits are ripening in the land,
And silvery tins are gaping to be filled.
Now to the cannery with jocund mien
Before the dawn come women, girls and boys,
Whose weekly hours (a hundred and nineteen)
Seem all too short for their industrious joys.
If this be error and be proved, alas
The Thompson-Bewley bills may fail to pass!
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About this book: In 1915, the state-by-state battle for suffrage had won a few battles. Supporters of woman suffrage had multiplied, which also brought anti-suffrage sentiments to the surface to counter the suffrage arguments.
The author of this volume of feminist humor and satire, Alice Duer Miller, wrote many of the pieces for her column in the New York Tribune, "Are Women People?" She also wrote a sequel, published in 1917, Women Are People!
Also on this site:
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- Woman Suffrage - Cast of Characters
- Woman Suffrage Articles and Links
- Woman and the Republic: An Anti-Suffrage Argument by Helen Kendrick Johnson, 1897, with later additions: the classic arguments against woman suffrage
Part of a collection of etexts on women's history produced by Jone Johnson Lewis. Editing and formatting © 1999-2003 Jone Johnson Lewis.
