I recently found a book in the library by John Erskine entitled “The Influence of Women and Its Cure,” dedicated to “The Men of America (Those Who Remain)”. The book is meant to mobilize men against those women organized and on the march and to counteract the influence women have when they “exercise in mass.” It’s actually an interesting case of a) fear of women’s rhetorical power and b) an attempt to isolate that power by arguing that women should only exercise it as individuals, not in groups.

Here’s what I learned from Erskine:

  • If women show up at congresses or other organized activities, it is most often because some man has furnished the funds directly, or because she has inherited money from a male ancestor. So men should just stop paying for women to go to these conventions, and that way they wouldn’t be so darned organized.
  • It is only the “women of leisure” who actually attend these congresses, because the competent housewives and working women of America don’t have time for such nonsense.
  • Women are likely to elect a female candidate based mainly on appearance.
  • Women have taken over education, and the result is that education for boys has become less manly. Instead, the male teachers “succumb to the fussy and enervating pedagogics which are the breath of life to women teachers” (71).
  • “It would be a good thing if the bridge-playing women of all the states remained away from the polls, and the idle men with them” (79).
  • “The meanest thing you could do to the women of America would be to give them what they pretend to want, equality with men” (127).