VIBRIGHAM YOUNG ENDORSES WOMAN SUFFRAGE
“I’ve got a job for you that’s some assignment. You sayyoualways have to suggest the subjects for these interviews with the shades. Well, here’s one for you that I thought of last night all by myself. Interview Collector Brigham Young on woman suffrage.”
“Collector Young? I can’t quite recall on the moment. Let’s see: what did he collect?”
“Wives. Had one of the largest modern collections on record. When they were young used to call ’em his souvenir spoons. You may have a tough time getting him to talk, but if you succeed it ought to be hot stuff. I can imagine what Brigham Young would think of woman suffrage.”
But my usually infallible city editor was wrong on both points. Collector Young was not averse to talking for publication, and his views on woman suffrage were quite different from those he might have been presumed to hold.
“Take a seat. Glad to see you,” he exclaimedwith all the affability I had been accustomed to receive during my adventures in interviewing illustrious spirits. “Thought I mightn’t wish to talk for publication? Why, I’ll talk for anything. Mighty glad of the opportunity. I talk now on the slightest provocation. Sometimes when there’s nobody else to talk to I talk to myself. Do you realize, young man, what it was to have forty-nine wives, simultaneously, and just about how much chance a husband had to get in an occasional remark edgewise? And as for getting the last word in a more or less animated discussion! Why, it always looked as if there never were going to be any last word.
“But after my extensive and varied matrimonial experience, as I have said, you can imagine the amount of pent-up opinions, the quantity of suppressed conversation I still have in my system. For thirty-two years my principal rôle in life was that of silent listener. Think of having to sit still and listen to forty-nine separate and distinct, and largely contradictory, reports of the meeting of the Mount Zion Missionary and Sewing Society! Think of listening every Sunday afternoon to forty-nine individual criticisms, chiefly destructive, of the feminine fashions observed in the congregation! Imagine the position of a so-called head of the house who could never utter a word withoutinterrupting somebody or other! But the most maddening experience I had to undergo was when they all came down with the crocheting craze at the same time—or else the knitting mania—another form of feminine insanity—it’s all one to me. When the spell was on they wouldn’t talk to anyone else or let anyone else talk to them. It put them out of their count, they said. But they’d sit there in the front parlor—the whole regiment of them—and knit away, muttering some mysterious words to themselves. And never condescending to explain to a mere man what it was all about. They declared that would be ‘casting purls before swine.’ The click-click-click of the needles, forty-nine pairs of them all going at once, would sound like a knitting mill running full blast. And they always knitted in the evening, the time they insisted on my being at home. Said it made them nervous to be left alone in the house at night. Why, the forty-nine of them could have talked an ordinary burglar to death in half an hour and robbed him of his tools. But they thought they ought to have a man’s protection.”
“That reminds me, Mr. Young, of something I wanted to ask you before I knew you were going to be so courteously communicative. You will pardon me, I know, but I have often wonderedhow certain things were managed in such a-er-er—such a numerous establishment. For instance, the average husband with only one wife expects to be asked where he has been when he returns home late at night, but if he had forty-nine matrimonial partners, why, er-er—”
“You want to know whether they would all ask him at once? No, sir. That wasn’t the arrangement. We had committees for all such matters. Otherwise there would have been intolerable confusion. It would never have done in the world. A husband might inadvertently give twenty or thirty different—er-er—explanations of his unavoidable tardiness, and then when they got to comparing notes there would have been trouble. As I have said, we had committees. There was a committee on late returns and excuses, a committee for seeing that husband wore his rubbers to the office, a committee for reminding him to get his hair cut, a committee on new hats and gowns for summer and other seasons, a committee to get him to put on the screen doors in May, a committee to remind him about birthdays one week in advance, a committee for—oh, everything you can imagine. It was like a Legislature or Congress—except that instead of one there were forty-nine Speakers in the House.”
“Very interesting, Mr. Young, I am sure. But I was instructed to get your views on woman suffrage. Do you approve of women voting?”
“I don’t quite like the form of your question. Put it this way: do I object to women voting? I do not, for two reasons: first, I know better, after my extensive experience, than to object to anything women want to do, since it can do no good; and second, since women run things, anyway, to suit themselves, the act of voting is merely a symbol or ceremony of registration of their power. They were the real rulers before they got the ballot, and the vote isn’t going to change the situation any. The only hitch I see will come if the women can’t make up their minds as to just what and whom they want to vote for. I suppose in states where women have never voted before there may be a little trouble with those who have changed their minds after casting their ballot and want to get it back for a minute to add a postscript. But on the whole I don’t see why any man—any married one at least—should object to woman suffrage. Since the average voter gets his instructions from a political boss, anyway, it might be more convenient to have that boss in the family. Woman is assuming new duties and responsibilities every day. The hand that usedto roll the baby carriage now rolls the cigarette.”
“You have spoken, Mr. Young,” I remarked as I rose to depart, “as if the wife were always the ruler, the autocrat of the home. Are you aware that the Census Bureau now officially recognizes the husband as the head of the house?”
Brigham smiled sadly as he replied: “Yes; but they only take a census once in ten years.”
And I tiptoed silently from the pathetic presence of one who had married not wisely, but too much.