Girls on Coney Island from YouTube Silent Film.
One thing the suffragists, suffragettes and anti-suffragists agreed upon in 1910 was that women were superior to men. Girls were sugar and spice and everything nice (unless they dared misbehave) and boys were snips and snails and puppy dog’s tails (brutally severed with an axe just for fun.)
I found a 1912 report in the Montreal Gazette which confused me a bit – because I now know too much about the era. Had I read it, say, five years ago, I would have taken it at face value.
Professor McNaughten of McGill gave a talk to the Women’s Canadian Club in Montreal – in favour of women’s suffrage. This is the same man who authored The American Suffrage Association pamphlet I have on hand because Edith saved it, from 1908 – and which figures in my book Flo in the City.
The report says that MacNaughten is for women getting the vote.
This man, a professor of Greek, was a vocal supporter of women suffrage, but clearly not of the militant suffragettes.
This is a ritzy club, The Canadian Club, the guests that rainy night included a Greenshields, a McLennan, and others from Montreal’s elite families. Guests totalled 250. Also attending was Barbara Wiley, who was visiting Montreal as a guest of the Montreal Council of Women. Mrs. Leacock was there too. I assume that is Stephen Leacock’s wife.
The report says that MacNaughten is for women getting the vote “but it would be a thousand pities if in the process of gaining them they should do anything to lose their hold upon the quiet and gentle forces which are the secret of their influence in the world. They are now and always have been a mighty power even in the state without votes….There is a natural division of labour between the sexes, he say, and there are some things for which women have always accepted responsibility.What are they? ‘First PURITY. That is always a woman’s central concern.’ (See, I wasn’t exaggerating in my earlier blogs.) When women are pure you have the good times of history. When they are not, all goes wrong. Second, as purity cannot be without it: sensitiveness to the more delicate aspects of the world. Beauty, good manners and all the other things which cannot be eaten. (Now remember who is in the audience..) He continues “On this continent and in this city, where we are threatened with the most brutal forms of materialism, of insolent, vulgar wealth and the slavish admiration of it, it is the women, above all, who have stood for the finer and sweeter things.”
I could spend a life time deconstructing this speech in the context of the times. And what nerve. He lambasts the rich, and that’s who is in the audience. And he takes aim at Barbara Wiley, a guest from England, for she was, indeed, a militant suffragette. Upon arriving in Montreal she was asked about the hurling of an axe at Mr. Asquith. She replied, that it did him no harm and if it had hit him, it might have knocked some sense into his head.
