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Hellraisers Journal – Monday August 2, 1909
“True respect for women is mostly confined to the working class.”
From the Spokane Industrial Worker of July 29, 1909:
THE WOMEN WORKERS OF THE WORLD
True respect for women is mostly confined to the working class. Strange as it may sound to the unthinking, and the unobserving, a woman or girl is safer from insult in any crowd of workingmen, however plain and rough, than in any crowd of idlers, however well-dressed and worthless. To take the modern miniature of Sodom, Spokane for example: decent women may pass up and down Stevens street-even among the spiritless slaves who are saying mass to the job signs of the employment sharks, and not a man who would breathe a word of offense.
How many women do not look down and feel nervous and apprehensive as they pass the crowd of loafers at the corner of Howard and Riverside streets, and these loafers are the very cream of Spokane society-yes, more, they are the refined cream, the Limburger cheese of the town. The same thing is true in all cities; it is the workingmen who are chivalrous, and the loafers who are curs.
The sharpest quote in the battle hymns of all nations has been the call to defend “wife, home and children,” but how could this affect our modern American employing class? What a task! “To defend wife?” Which wife? Which one of the modern employing class concubines could stir the spirit of bravery in the breast of a spaniel? The task is too great; too much responsibility! Love of home and wife may do well enough for a plain workingmen, but our advanced employers, with their plural marriages, have not bravery and “love” enough to go ’round.
In all ages, women, from their comparative bodily weakness, have been treated as inferiors. St. Paul says that “It is a shame for a woman to speak in the church.” Paul was right. It is a shame not only for women, but for men to speak in the church, which has been and is, one of the chief influences used to keep the female sex in submission. “Let her ask her husband at home”-for information, says Paul. Fancy a woman asking an A. F. of L. scab, with a broken back, for “information!” Men have fought and bled for religious liberty for themselves, and have thought to win real freedom by gaining the baubles of suffrage and theoretical “political” rights. The modern suffragette agitation among women may cause some of the men to smile, but they are following where the political “socialist” saints have trod-the ballot is the way, the truth and the life!
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