Points of Friction
unreasonable violence of these women. The great body of American suffragists repudiated their action, and the anti-suffragists used them to point stern morals and adorn vivacious tales. But was it quite fair to permit them in the beginning a liberty which would not have been accorded to men, and which led inevitably to licence? Were they not treated as parents sometimes treat children, allowing them to use bad language because, "if you pay no attention to them, they will stop it of their own accord"; and then, when they do not stop it, punishing them for misbehaving before company? When a sympathetic gentleman wrote to a not very sympathetic paper to say that the second Liberty Loan would be more popular if Washington would "call off the dogs of war on women," he turned a flashlight upon the fathomless gulf with which sentimentalism has divided the sexes. No one dreams of calling policemen and
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