The Pittsburgh Press (June 9, 1941)
WOMEN AND POLITICS
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
I have before me a nice little bit of masculine reasoning of a timely subject – women’s political skills. The gentleman says:
Look up the lectures and speeches on politics and see who makes the most of them; the men do. I think this shows that women are not capable of running the government. There are many intelligent women but not to compare with men in the world of politics.
If the women are intelligent enough to run the government, why don’t they get into politics? They can elect women to government offices if they want to because they will have a majority of the votes. But I think women are not capable, because there are only a few who even try to run for office.
My Dear Sir, it seems to me your last argument disproves your point. The very fact that women are uncertain about their political abilities makes it clear that they might be more capable than men, who are much too sure of themselves.
And about what? If they could show us a sane civilization, a smoothly-running political system, a sensibly-managed world, we would not utter a single howl. But instead, after having had the entire management of the globe since the beginning of organized society, the men present us not with a political system, but with bedlam – with a mad orgy of waste and wanton destruction that doesn’t make sense any way you look at it.
Yet a good many now cry:
Don’t blame it on us! We can’t help it.
They know, and we know, theirs must be the blame because theirs is the power. If the average intelligent man were one-third as concerned about the way his country is run as he is about the way his business is conducted, we might not be living in utopia but we wouldn’t be in our present hell.
We also know that if women had conducted the business with which they are entrusted by society – the management of the home and the details of office matters – with as much inefficiency and waste as men display in government, we would all be slapped into the insane asylum.