Women for Votes

By Elizabeth Hughes

New York E. P. Dutton & Company 1912

Copyright, 1912 BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

[1]

A Farce in Three Acts

Time: the present. The action of the play takes place in the City of New York during a week in November.

[2-3]

WOMEN FOR VOTES

ACT I

The drawing-room at the Tilsburys’ house in the City of New York, tastefully arranged, with a door at each end and a sofa against the wall, over which hangs a beautiful full-length portrait of the first Mrs. Tilsbury. When the curtain rises, Mrs. Brown is seen seated in an easy chair, turning over the pages of a magazine, while Cochon is asleep on the floor beside her. Enter Mrs. Tilsbury with her hat on, a contrast to Mrs. Brown who is in dinner dress.

MRS. BROWN. (Looking up as MRS. TILSBURY enters.) Well, was the meeting a success?

MRS. TILSBURY. Oh, a huge success. We were told of all sorts of horrors. Only fancy, Imogene, until 1857—or was it 1858? well, it doesn’t matter which—women were not allowed to testify on the witness stand about their husbands’ pedigrees.

MRS. BROWN. Why did they want to testify about their husbands’ pedigrees? If it were about their husbands’ descendants now, a second family sub rosa, there might be something in it. They might testify about their pets’ pedigrees might they not? I would be permitted to tell all about your pedigree on a horrid[4] old witness stand, wouldn’t I little tootsie-wootsie-tootsie? (Takes up pig and caresses it.)

MRS. TILSBURY. I don’t know, I am sure, why they should want to. The only time I ever took any interest in my husband’s pedigree was when I wanted to join the Society of Colonial Caudlers, and then I was told that my husband’s ancestors did not count, but that I must stand on my own.

MRS. BROWN. Stand on your own! Could you find their graves?

MRS. TILSBURY. No, that was the trouble. I haven’t any ancestors. I wouldn’t have wanted to use my husband’s if I had had any of my own, but it wasn’t any use.

MRS. BROWN. Well, if that is all they said at the meeting I think I passed a more profitable afternoon. See this purse that I won as a prize at the Bridge party.

MRS. TILSBURY. O, what a beauty! I do wish I could have gone. It is just what I want. Generally, Bridge prizes are some old thing that go from house to house as rapidly as a servant girl. Those tiresome suffrage meetings take up all my time. I never have a chance to do anything I like.

MRS. BROWN. Why do you go to them? I never do. I don’t want to vote, there are so many other things that are more amusing.

MRS. TILSBURY. I go with Mildred, she is so interested in Woman’s Suffrage.

MRS. BROWN. Well, you are a good—I don’t even like to say the word. It would be such a misnomer in your case.

[5]

MRS. TILSBURY. Stepmother, you mean. Oh, you needn’t mind saying it. I would be constantly reminded of it by that (looks up at portrait over sofa) even if it were not for other things.

MRS. BROWN. Yes, that too. It is so magnanimous of you to hang it there, to give such prominence to the first Mrs. Tilsbury.

MRS. TILSBURY. I suppose it is more respectable to succeed a wife who is dead than one who is divorced.

MRS. BROWN. Oh, by all means. Dead women tell no lies, nor the truth either, and sometimes divorcées delight in telling tales about their first husbands’ second wives. But, tell me, why do you take the trouble to go to all these tiresome meetings when you might be enjoying yourself? Can’t Mildred go alone or with some friend?

MRS. TILSBURY. Well, I suppose it is no harder way of making a living than any other. I was an artist before I married Mr. Tilsbury. My father lost all his money in the panic of 1893 and I had to do something to help mother.

MRS. BROWN. Making a living? You don’t mean to tell me that the Women Suffragists are forced to pay their audiences to make them come to the meetings?

MRS. TILSBURY. Oh, no! Not that of course; but I suppose I might as well make a clean breast of it, particularly as I want you to help me!

MRS. BROWN. Yes, do. I should love to help you. You have always been so kind to me. What do you want me to do?

MRS. TILSBURY. It’s this way, you see. Mildred’s[6] mother had all the money. George never had a cent of his own and he always spent whatever he could lay his hands on, so when Mrs. Tilsbury died she left a will bequeathing everything to Mildred except that old portrait there, which she gave to George as a token of her affection, and to show that she did not bear him any ill-will. The property is to belong to Mildred absolutely when she is twenty-five, or when she marries, if she should marry younger. Until either of these events happen, the estate is to be held in trust. The trustee appointed by Mrs. Tilsbury died a few days after she did, and George as Mildred’s father and nearest friend was made trustee. See?

MRS. BROWN. Yes. How clever you are. You talk just like a lawyer.

MRS. TILSBURY. Oh, my dear! I have heard it talked over so often that I have learned it by heart, but when I repeat those phrases, I feel just as if I had tight boots on. I am so glad to take them off and talk naturally again.

MRS. BROWN. I don’t see what all this has to do with Woman’s Suffrage. Did Mrs. Tilsbury make it a condition in her will that Mildred should be brought up to support “votes for women”?

MRS. TILSBURY. No, but when George first proposed to me, he told me all about the will, and said that it would be my duty if I married him to keep Mildred from marrying. He said that if she could be made to take an interest in other things and not marry until she was twenty-five, she would not be likely to marry at all, but would probably continue to live with us and leave the money in his hands; that it ran[7] in the family to marry early or not at all, that two of her aunts had eloped when in their teens, and that the others were all old maids. Sometimes I think that George only married me so as to have some one to look after Mildred. A paid chaperone would not have the same interest at stake. She would only have her salary and Mildred might pension her if she married, but George and I are utterly dependent on that young girl.

MRS. BROWN. Oh, don’t say that. Everybody knows how much George was in love with you. Why, he was positively foolish. It was to keep Mildred from marrying, then, that you influenced her to take part in the cause of Woman’s Suffrage?

MRS. TILSBURY. Yes, George and I talked it over and we decided that that would be the most absorbing interest for her. You see the speakers tell such awful stories about men, and the inequality of men and women before the law, and the dreadful laws against married women, that no self-respecting girl who heard them would want to talk to a man hardly, much less dare to marry one.

MRS. BROWN. Mildred made a speech this afternoon didn’t she?

MRS. TILSBURY. Yes, her first one, and she has been so busy and interested in writing it that she hasn’t given a thought to the other sex except to denounce their vices.

MRS. BROWN. You have just returned from the meeting now. What a long one it must have been.

MRS. TILSBURY. Endless; and then the ladies insisted upon Mildred’s waiting afterwards for congratulations and a cup of tea.

[8]

MRS. BROWN. You want me to help you, you say, but really, I have no time to go to these meetings. My time is so taken up. There is to-day for example. This morning I had my Auction Bridge class from nine until eleven, and that is most exhausting. The teacher keeps saying “ladies concentrate” just when I am concentrating on what stunning hands he has and so beautifully manicured.

MRS. TILSBURY. My dear, I knew a woman once—you would know her, too, if I told you her name—who fell so in love with an actor that she studied manicuring, found out where he went to be manicured, and got a job there just to hold his hand an hour every two or three days!

MRS. BROWN. Some women are so silly! What was I saying? Oh, yes, after the Bridge class, I went to the Chansons de Chiffons, and I wish you could have seen Mme. Duffoird who sang. Those opera singers never know how to dress, that is why they always want to be Brunhildas and Carmens. Why, in all the times I have gone to the opera, I have never obtained a fresh idea!

MRS. TILSBURY. I saw rather a pretty gown in Sappho once. Cavalieri wore it. That’s a modern opera.

MRS. BROWN. Oh, I saw that. It looked as if it were made in Germany. Well, as I was saying, from the concert, I went to a luncheon, then to the Bridge party, and now I am here for dinner. I have not even had the time to give Cochon the air. Mother didn’t even have time to take her little pet walking, did she tootsie-wootsie-tootsie? That’s why I brought him[9] here to-night. Your rooms are bigger than mine and he has more space to run around in.

MRS. TILSBURY. Oh, I didn’t intend to ask you to go to meetings. I have been obliged to give up so much to go to them myself that I would not ask it of any one else. It has been very hard. I was asked to be a manager in the “Unseen Blushers” and I had to refuse because I hadn’t the time.

MRS. BROWN. “The Unseen Blushers”? Oh, that’s the new artistic, musical, and literary society, isn’t it?—but why do they call it by such an odd name? I thought blushes were made to be seen. They are so becoming. I have always wondered that no one has ever invented a rouge that could be turned off and on like an electric light before and after a kiss. There are so many clever inventions nowadays.

MRS. TILSBURY. Oh, not that kind of a blush. “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,” you know. It means to blossom I think. This society is for the discovery of hidden genius. The old theory was that men and women of genius rose to the top as naturally as cream rises and that they produced their works of art as unconcernedly as a hen hatches her eggs, but now the psychologists and physicists believe in aiding nature. They find that they can get more cream by means of a separator, that it is all through the milk and needs to be forced out, and that incubators can hatch eggs better than hens. So this society has been formed to encourage artistic, musical, and literary talent that is hard to discover and is unable to find its way to the surface. You understand!

[10]

MRS. BROWN. I don’t! It is all Greek to me, but you are so clever, Josephine. Tell me about your art.

MRS. TILSBURY. I have been forced to give it all up because of Mildred, and my last picture was such a success too. It received the third prize in the impressionist class. It was a painting of a street cleaner—a White Wing. I got the idea from a cup of chocolate I upset. The whipped cream made almost all the figure, the white uniform, you know, and then a few drops of chocolate looked like the bronzed face of a swarthy Italian. I just copied the spill exactly. Near by the thick white paint looked precisely like the whipped cream, but if you stood six yards away every one said it looked just like a street sweeper bending over with his broom to sweep up the dust.

MRS. BROWN. How beautiful, and what an original idea!

MRS. TILSBURY. Yes, that is what everybody said. Nowadays, when there is so much interest taken in the Traffic Squad of police and the firemen, the men who save lives in a conspicuous and sensational manner, and every one wants to reward them and paint them and sculpture them and their horses, no one remembers the humble life-savers who protect us from deadly diseases and pestilences by keeping the streets clean. One woman wrote a poem about my picture, beginning, “Germ gatherer grovelling in the gritty gravel.” It was charming. It is published in the Unseen Blushers Review. I will send you a copy.

MRS. BROWN. Please do. I should love to have it and a photograph of your painting too.

MRS. TILSBURY. I will remember. Yes, my whole[11] career was just beginning when I had to give it all up to follow Mildred around to Woman’s Suffrage meetings only because there is more money in it. What does the artistic woman want of a vote? Art has always been open to both sexes, and the Unseen Blushers include both men and women.

MRS. BROWN. It is very hard on you when you have so much talent to leave it all unused, but since you don’t want me to go to meetings, what assistance can I be to you?

MRS. TILSBURY. I know you were very unhappy in your married life, and I want you to tell Mildred all about it.

MRS. BROWN. (Indignantly.) Really, Josephine, there are some things that one doesn’t talk about to a child.

MRS. TILSBURY. Mildred is eighteen, and the men are after her already. You have no idea what men will do to get a little money.

MRS. BROWN. I cannot lay bare the secrets of my married life. Besides, I don’t know but I might marry again. My experience was in some ways unfortunate to be sure, but one swallow doesn’t make a summer, nor one man matrimony.

MRS. TILSBURY. One man doesn’t make matrimony! To hear you, Imogene, one would think you were—not a Mormon but the other thing; what is it they call it?—oh, yes, I remember, a polyanthus.

MRS. BROWN. I did not mean more than one husband at a time. I meant that if a woman is unfortunate in her first choice and is left a widow, she might from her increased experience be able to select a second husband[12] better. It is very lonesome to be a widow. It is all very well in the daytime when the men are down-town but the evenings are so long. There are so many jokes about widows that a man is afraid to be left alone with one. If I should talk a lot against marriage and then suddenly marry again, my inconsistency would do more harm to your cause than if I should keep silence in the first place.

MRS. TILSBURY. I don’t know about that. I used to have a beau when I was a girl who always kept repeating, “Inconsistency, thy name is woman.” He said it so often that I have never been able to forget it since.

MRS. BROWN. How is any one to know I want to marry again if I talk against matrimony? The men will all fly from me. No, Josephine, I must say how lonely I am and how nice it is to have a man come home at five o’clock and to make him comfy beside the fire, and how I love the odor of a cigar, and how strong men are beside us weak women, and that I wish I had some one to help me with my business which I find so difficult to understand. No, I can’t run down men to Mildred like a peevish old maid or a disappointed wife even to help you.

MRS. TILSBURY. But every one knows how jealous your husband was of you.

MRS. BROWN. Well, I worked awfully hard to make him so. I don’t think I will stay for dinner, Josephine, after all. You are too personal to-day. (Rises to go.)

MRS. TILSBURY. Don’t be peeved, Imogene; stay, and talk about whatever you choose. If you would only help me it would be to your advantage if you[13] really are thinking about marrying again. You would meet ever so many men here. They are indeed like flies about a honey pot.

MRS. BROWN. Fortune hunters! I am not looking for that kind. I need to find a snug little fortune myself. You know Mr. Brown left me his money only on condition that I did not marry again.

MRS. TILSBURY. Yes, I know, dear. He was always very jealous. You should tell Mildred about that will.

MRS. BROWN. And be rewarded by being shown off to her fortune hunters.

MRS. TILSBURY. Some of them have money.

MRS. BROWN. Yes, and want more to add to it. I know that sort. A man without a cent might marry a poor girl and work for her, but a man with a little money wants to gather in a little more when he marries, just like an old china collector.

MRS. TILSBURY. There are exceptions.

MRS. BROWN. The men who want to control their wives through their purse. Don’t think the exception improves the rule, Josephine.

MRS. TILSBURY. You are almost as bitter against men as the suffragists.

MRS. BROWN. Oh, no. I like men, only I know the faults of some of them. Who is coming here to-night?

MRS. TILSBURY. A Mr. Becker and a Mr. Van Tousel. They have both been rushing Mildred for the last three weeks, but fortunately she has been so interested in her speech that she has hardly noticed them.

MRS. BROWN. Why did you ask them to dinner?

MRS. TILSBURY. Mr. Van Tousel fairly asked[14] himself. His attentions to Mildred have been so costly that I could not refuse him when he suggested coming after the meeting this afternoon, and then I invited Mr. Becker so that we might play Bridge and protect Mildred from a tête-à-tête.

MRS. BROWN. What are they like?

MRS. TILSBURY. Mr. Becker is a lawyer, and Mr. Van Tousel is old family.

MRS. BROWN. Does he find it lucrative?

MRS. TILSBURY. Find what lucrative?

MRS. BROWN. Being old family?

MRS. TILSBURY. Well, it furnishes him with conversation. That is something in these days.

MRS. BROWN. He must be an awful bore. What about Mr. Becker?

MRS. TILSBURY. I told you he is a lawyer.

MRS. BROWN. That is not very descriptive.

MRS. TILSBURY. It is in his case. George says that points of law are sticking out all over him so that he is as prickly as a hedgehog.

MRS. BROWN. Where does he come from?

MRS. TILSBURY. From up state somewhere. He is a rising man.

MRS. BROWN. I have met so many rising men but they never seem to arrive. They remind me of an elevator that gets stuck between floors.

MRS. TILSBURY. Without any passengers on board, I hope.

MRS. BROWN. Oh, they usually are weighted down with a family.

MRS. TILSBURY. Mr. Becker is a bachelor and George says he is making a very good income.

[15]

MRS. BROWN. Well, that is satisfactory. There is the door-bell now.

MRS. TILSBURY. So you see, Imogene, both of these men are exceptions to your remarks.

KATY. (Announcing.) Mr. Van Tousel!

MRS. TILSBURY. Oh, Mr. Van Tousel! I was just thinking of you and saying to Mrs. Brown that there are some men who are exceptions to the common run of selfish, self-centred New York men and that you were one of these exceptions. Mr. Van Tousel is so broad-minded. He believes in “the cause.”

MRS. BROWN. Indeed!

MR. VAN TOUSEL. I think it is a disgrace, madam, to ask women to pay taxes, to contribute their share to the maintenance of the government, and then to refuse them a single vote in the management of that same government.

MRS. TILSBURY. Isn’t he generous!

MRS. BROWN. (In a low voice.) People generally are with what isn’t their own.

MR. VAN TOUSEL. How is Miss Mildred? I was at the meeting this afternoon and saw her sitting on the platform. What a noble sight it is to see a beautiful young girl, far removed from the struggle for existence, take up the cause of her less fortunate sisters.

MRS. BROWN. I thought from what you just said that you believed only taxpayers ought to vote. Of course, you know Mildred pays large taxes.

MR. VAN TOUSEL. Oh, Mrs. Brown, how could you so misunderstand me! I believe in the franchise for all women.

[16]

MRS. TILSBURY. Here is Mildred now. She went to change her gown for dinner, but we were so late in returning from the meeting that Mrs. Brown was already here, and so I did not take the time to change mine. I hope you will both excuse me.

(Mildred enters.)

MRS. BROWN. You look charming, Josephine, as you always do. How do you do, Mildred?

MILDRED. How do you do, Mrs. Brown. How do you do, Mr. Van Tousel? (Shakes hands with both, and then turns towards the pig.) How is Cochon?

MRS. BROWN. He has been alone all day, poor little beastie. That is why I brought him here to-night.

MR. VAN TOUSEL. Ah, Mrs. Brown, what a dear little dog. What breed is he, may I ask?

MRS. BROWN. Pig, Mr. Van Tousel, common pig.

MR. VAN TOUSEL. Do you mean to say he is only a pig?