Nellie L. McClung

“ We acknowledge in sorrow that we have followed strange gods, and worshiped at the worldly altar of wealth and cleverness, and believed that these things were success in life. Now we have had before our eyes the spectacle of clever men using their cleverness to kill, maim and destroy innocent women and children; we have seen the wealth of one nation poured out like water to bring poverty and starvation to another nation, and so, through our tears, we have learned the lesson that it is not wealth or cleverness or skill or power which makes a nation or an individual great. ”

“ Of course, people tell us, it is not the mere act of voting which demoralizes women—if they would only vote and be done with it; but women are creatures of habit, and habits once formed are hard to break; and although the polls are only open every three or four years, if women once get into the way of going to them, they will hang around there all the rest of the time. It is in woman's impressionable nature that the real danger lies.
Another shoot of this hardy shrub of prejudice is that women are too good to mingle in everyday life—they are too sweet and too frail—that women are angels. ”

“ If I go to my neighbor's house, and break her furniture, and smash her pictures, and bind her children captive, it does not prove that I am fitter to live than she—yet according to the ethics of nations it does. I have conquered her and she must pay me for my trouble; and her house and all that is left in it belongs to my heirs and successors forever. That is war!
War twists our whole moral fabric. The object of all our teaching has been to inculcate respect for the individual, respect for human life, honor and purity. War sweeps that all aside. ”

“ The world has suffered long from too much masculinity and not enough humanity, but when the war is over, and the beautiful things have been destroyed, and the lands laid desolate, and all the blood has been shed, the poor old bruised and broken heart of the world will cry out for its mother and nurse, who will dry her own eyes, and bind up its wounds and nurse it back to life once more. Perhaps the old earth will be a bit kinder than it has ever been to women, who knows? Men have been known to grow very fond of their nurse, and bleeding has been known to cure mental disorders! ”

“ So full of love and tenderness and pity, so full of ambition and high resolves and noble impulses, he is dead—dead already—and in his place there stands "private 355" a man of hate, a man of blood! Many a time the knitting has to be laid aside, for the bitter tears blur the stitches.
The woman who knits thinks of all this and now she feels that she who brought this boy into the world, who is responsible for his existence, has some way been to blame. Is life really such a boon that any should crave it? ”

“ Among the people of the world in the years to come, we will ask no greater heritage for our country than to be known as the land of the Fair Deal, where every race, color and creed will be given exactly the same chance; where no person can "exert influence" to bring about his personal ends; where no man or woman's past can ever rise up to defeat them; where no crime goes unpunished; where every debt is paid; where no prejudice is allowed to masquerade as a reason; where honest toil will insure an honest living; where the man who works receives the reward of his labor. ”

“ How glorious it would have been if this war could have been settled by somebody taking the Kaiser out behind the barn! There would seem to be some show of justice in a hand-to-hand encounter, where the best man wins, but modern warfare has not even the faintest glimmering of fair play. The exploding shell blows to pieces the strong, the brave, the daring, just as readily as it does the cowardly, weak, or base.
War proves nothing. To kill a man does not prove that he was in the wrong. Bloodletting cannot change men's spirits, neither can the evil of men's thoughts be driven out by blows. ”

“ Marriage means more to a woman than to a man; she brings in a larger contribution than he; often it happens that she gives all—he gives nothing. The care and upbringing of the children depend upon her faithfulness, not on his. Why should she not have the privilege of choosing?
Too long has the whole process of love-making and marriage been wrapped in mystery. "Part of it has been considered too holy to be spoken of and part of it too unholy," says Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Innocence has been esteemed a young girl's greatest charm, but what good has her innocence done her? ”

“ Why should people enjoy the contemplation of evil rather than good? Is it because it makes their own little contribution of respectability seem larger by comparison?
We have missed a great deal of the joy of life by taking ourselves too seriously. We exaggerate our own importance, and so if the honor or distinction or the vote of thanks does not come our way, we are hurt! Then, too, we live in an atmosphere of dread and fear—we fear poverty and hard work—we fear the newspapers and the neighbors, and fear is hell! ”

“ It is a hard matter, I know, to protect people from themselves; and there can be no law made to prevent women from making slaves of themselves to their husbands and families. That would be interfering with the sanctity of the home! But the law can step in, as it has in some provinces, and prevent a man from leaving his wife with only "her keep." The law is a reflection of public sentiment, and when people begin to realize that women are human and have human needs and ambitions and desires, the law will protect a woman's interest. ”

“ I could not help but think that if there had been women in the German Reichstag, women with authority behind them, when the Kaiser began to lay his plans for the war, the results might have been very different. I do not believe women with boys of their own would ever sit down and wilfully plan slaughter, and if there had been women there when the Kaiser and his brutal war-lords discussed the way in which they would plunge all Europe into bloodshed, I believe one of those deep-bosomed, motherly, blue-eyed German women would have stood upon her feet and said: "William—forget it!" ”

“ If women would only think, they would not serve liquor to their guests, in the name of hospitality, and thus contribute to the degradation of mankind, and perhaps start some young man on the slippery way to ruin. If women would think about it, they would see that some mother, old and heartbroken, sitting up waiting for the staggering footsteps of her boy, might in her loneliness and grief and trouble curse the white hands that gave her lad his first drink. Women make life hard for other women because they do not think. And thinking seems to come hardest to the comfortable woman. ”

“ The world has never been partial to the thinking woman—the wise ones have always foreseen danger. Long years ago, when women asked for an education, the world cried out that it would never do. If women learned to read it would distract them from the real business of life which was to make home happy for some good man. If women learned to read there seemed to be a possibility that some day some good man might come home and find his wife reading, and the dinner not ready—and nothing could be imagined more horrible than that! ”

“ Looking into the sky one sees the dark clouds and foretells rain, and the picnic spoiled; another sees the rift of blue and foretells fine weather. Looking out on life, one sees only its sad grayness; another sees the thread of gold, "which sometimes in the patterns shows most sweet where there are somber colors"! Happiness is a condition, and if you are not happy now, you had better be alarmed about yourself, for you may never be.
There was a woman who came with her family to the prairie country thirty-five years ago. ”

“ The prairie, with its peace and silence, calls to the troubled nations of Middle Europe, whose people are caught in the cruel tangle of war. When it is all over and the smoke has cleared away, and they who are left look around at the blackened ruins and desolated farms and the shallow graves of their beloved dead, they will come away from the scenes of such bitter memories. ”

“ Here and there, there have been doubters among women who have said: "If it be true that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, how comes the liquor traffic and the white slave traffic to prevail among us unchecked? Do women wish for these things? Do the gentle mothers whose hands rule the world declare in favor of these things?" Every day the number of doubters has increased, and now women everywhere realize that a bad old lie has been put over on them for years. The hand that rocks the cradle does not rule the world. ”

“ It is in order to keep the white-winged angel of peace hovering over the home that married women are not allowed to vote in many places. Spinsters and widows are counted worthy of voice in the selection of school trustee, and alderman, and mayor, but not the woman who has taken to herself a husband and still has him.
What a strange commentary on marriage that it should disqualify a woman from voting. Why should marriage disqualify a woman? Men have been known to vote for years after they were dead! ”

“ Queen Victoria, in her palace of marble and gold, was able to retain her virility of thought and independence of action as clearly as any pioneer woman who ever battled with conditions, while many a tradesman's wife whose husband gets a raise sufficient for her to keep one maid, immediately goes on the retired list, and lets her brain and muscles atrophy.
The woman movement, which has been scoffed and jeered at and misunderstood most of all by the people whom it is destined to help, is a spiritual revival of the best instincts of womanhood—the instinct to serve and save the race. ”

“ To look abroad upon a peaceful field drowsing in the sunshine, lazily touched by a wandering breeze, no one would suspect that any struggle was going on in the tiny hearts of the flowers and grasses. The lilies of the field have long ago been said to toil not, neither spin, and the inference has been that they in common with all other flowers and plants lead a "lady's life," untroubled by any thought of ambition or activity. The whole world of nature seems to present a perfect picture of obedience and peaceful meditation. ”

“ They were no doubt worn as a protest against the new movement among women, which has for its object the larger liberty, the larger humanity of women. The hideous mincing gait of the tightly-skirted women seems to speak. It said: "I am not a useful human being—see! I cannot walk—I dare not run, but I am a woman—I still have my sex to commend me. I am not of use, I am made to be supported. My sex is my only appeal."
Rather an indelicate and unpleasant thought, too, for an "honest" woman to advertise so brazenly. The tight skirts and diaphanous garments were plainly a return to "sex." ”

“ But for all their quiet innocent ways, every plant has one ambition and will attain it by any means. Plants have one ambition, and therein they have the advantage of us, who sometimes have too many, and sometimes none at all! Their ambition is to grow—to spread—to travel—to get away from home. Home is their enemy, for if a plant falls at its mother's knee it is doomed to death, or a miserable stunted life.
Every seed has its own little plan of escape. ”

“ It is a quiet war with no blare of trumpets to keep the soldiers on the job, no flourish of flags or clinking of swords to stimulate flagging courage. It may not be as romantic a warfare, from the standpoint of our medieval ideas of romance, as the old way of sharpening up a battle axe, and spreading our enemy to the evening breeze, but the reward of victory is not seeing our brother man dead at our feet ”

“ The nimble fingers of the knitting women are transforming balls of wool into socks and comforters, but even a greater change is being wrought in their own hearts. Into their gentle souls have come bitter thoughts of rebellion. They realize now how little human life is valued, as opposed to the greed and ambition of nations. They think bitterly of Napoleon's utterance on the subject of women—that the greatest woman in the world is the one who brings into the world the greatest number of sons ”

“ What does it matter if there is a family north of the track living on soda biscuits and turnips? War hardens us to human grief and misery.
War takes the fit and leaves the unfit. The epileptic, the consumptive, the inebriate, are left behind. They are not good enough to go out to fight. So they stay at home, and perpetuate the race! Statistics prove that the war is costing fifty millions a day, which is a prodigious sum, but we would be getting off easy if that were all it costs. The bitterest cost of war is not paid by us at all. ”

“ No woman is so unpopular as the noisy woman who protests against these things.
The knitting women know now why the militant suffragettes broke windows and destroyed property, and went to jail for it joyously, and without a murmur—it was the protest of brave women against the world's estimate of woman's position. It was the world-old struggle for liberty. The knitting women remember now with shame and sorrow that they have said hard things about the suffragettes, and thought they were unwomanly and hysterical. ”

“ The knitting women wish now that there had been "crazy" women in Germany to direct the thought of the nation to the brutality of the military system, to have aroused the women to struggle for a human civilization, instead of a masculine civilization such as they have now. They would have fared badly of course, even worse than the women in England, but they are faring badly now, and to what purpose? The women of Belgium have fared badly. After all, the greatest thing in life is not to live comfortably—it is to live honorably, and when that becomes impossible, to die honorably! ”

“ The young and pretty woman, well dressed and attractive, can get all the chivalry she wants. She will have seats offered her on street cars, men will hasten to carry her parcels, or open doors for her; but the poor old woman, beaten in the battle of life, sick of life's struggles, and grown gray and weather-beaten facing life's storms—what chivalry is shown her? She can go her weary way uncomforted and unattended. People who need it do not get it. ”

“ Children do not need their mother's care always, and the mother who has given up every hope and ambition in the care of her children will find herself left all alone, when her children no longer need her—a woman without a job. But, dear me, how the church has exalted the self-sacrificing mother, who never had a thought apart from her children, and who became a willing slave to her family. ”