“Women’s Rights,” Salem Daily Capital Journal, October 10, 1912, 6
-Transcription
“Women’s Rights”
Editor Journal:
There are over 100,000 women in Oregon. The majority of them do not want to vote. A small proportion in any given community is asking for the ballot. Is that not true in your town? What do the rest want?
Many of them are actively opposed. To put upon these women a responsibility from which they have hitherto been exempted and which they do not wish to assume is not “Women’t Rights.”
Many of them are indifferent. The indifferent male voter is one of the serious problems of the present electorate. Would you add to it a large body of votes avowedly indifferent?
The demand for woman suffrage is the demand that woman shall assume an equal share with men in the government of the city, the state, the nation. It means she shall enter with him the political arena. For it is an arena. Politics is not a conflict of opinions. It is a conflict of wills. It carries with it public meetings, public debates, public marchings and counter-marchings, public discussions of public questions, and of the character of public candidates, and all other incidents of a campaign.
It is not democratic, nor just, nor fair to draft this large body of women into this campaign against their wills.
This is the sixth time voters of Oregon have been asked to vote upon this question in spite of the fact that every two years the opposition to it has increased so that in 1910 suffrage carried in only one county in Oregon, and in that one by five votes, the total vote being 35,270 for suffrage, the smallest vote for it since 1900, and 59,665 against, a majority of 23,795.
The Oregon State Association Opposed to the Extension of the Suffrage to Women asks that you give this amendment your earnest consideration, and that you defeat it this time by so great a plurality that the suffragists, local and imported, must bow before the will of the people of Oregon, and acknowledge that the majority rules in America.
The Oregon State Association Opposed to the Extension of the Suffrage to Women.
Mrs. Francis James Bailey, Pres.