The Pittsburgh Press (February 23, 1946)
Ferguson: Propaganda, and women
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
You may wish to debate the charge of Michigan’s Congressman Shafer, who said recently that New Deal propaganda was being spread by means of women’s clubs. And debate is your privilege. But surely no one will deny that propaganda of one kind or another is dished up regularly to all groups.
Are we naive enough to believe, for example, that labor unions don’t propagandize in favor of their cause – or industrialists in favor of theirs?
Most of us want our news slanted a little, if the truth were told. And all get it that way unless we take pains to read and hear arguments from those who disagree with us. Every person who stands for anything is prejudiced. You can’t get around that fact. Prejudice, after all, is only a conviction run wild. Tamed, it becomes an opinion and democracy exists only where people have strong opinions and express them.
Those who say they have no prejudices are as mistaken as the husbands and wives who insist they’ve lived together half a lifetime without a cross word. Nobody believes them, which is just as well.
The honest person admits his prejudices.
I think it must also be confessed that women are more susceptible than men to propaganda.
The average woman accepts a man’s opinions as true while doubting most of those expressed by her own sex. And what’s worse, she will often drop an honest personal conviction in favor of a dishonest one offered by demagogs.
Being both busy and idealistic, she also is apt to fall more quickly for impractical schemes. On the whole, women expect “happy endings” to their political experiments as well as their fiction stories.