To The Times Editorials

From the book Are Women People? by Alice Duer Miller, 1915

To The Times Editorials

("The grant of suffrage to women is repugnant to instincts that strike their roots deep in the order of nature. It runs counter to human reason, it flouts the teachings of experience and the admonitions of common sense."- N. Y. Times, Feb. 7, 1915.)

LOVELY Antiques, breathing in every line
The perfume of an age long passed away,
Wafting us back to 1829,
Museum pieces of a by-gone day,
You should not languish in the public press
Where modern thought might reach and do you harm,
And vulgar youth insult your hoariness,
Missing the flavor of your old world charm;
You should be locked, where rust cannot corrode
In some old rosewood cabinet, dimmed by age,
With silver-lustre, tortoise shell and Spode;
And all would cry, who read your yellowing page:
"Yes, that's the sort of thing that men believed
Before the First Reform Bill was conceived!"

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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:

• About Alice Duer Miller

• Alice Duer Miller Quotations

• 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 

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