Woman's World Column - July 2, 1885

In 1885, Catt (Carrie Lane) resigned from her position as superintendent of schools in Mason City, Iowa, and married Leo Chapman, editor of the Mason City Republican, a weekly newspaper. She became co-editor of the newspaper and started the column “Woman's World,” which she wrote would be “devoted to the discussion of such questions as purport to the welfare, the social, political and intellectual position of women.”

In Philadelphia, recently, a book-keeper in one of the large establishments, was discovered to be a woman in man’s attire. She had a pitiful tale to tell, which accounts for her strange dress. Her husband had been obliged to give up his employment on account of ill-health and it had become necessary for her to find work. Her father had been a merchant and had taught her to keep books, so naturally so sought employment as a book-keeper. She met with rebuff at every place, because they did not hire women as book-keepers. She, therefore, bought a cheap suit of men’s clothes and again sought work and this time with success. Whatever, may be said of the plan she adopted, it shows the cruel injustice to which the working-women of the large cities are subjected in the matter of employment and wages.

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Mrs. Livermore in a recent letter to Our Message, the organ of the Massachusetts W.C.T.U., says that in her winter’s travels she met an intelligent brewer and held much converse with him regarding the temperance reform. Among other things he said: “Let me tell you how thing are here in Nebraska. If to-morrow we were compelled to choose between a woman suffrage or prohibitory amendment to our Constitution, we should take the latter. For you can get around any prohibitory amendment that men can make. With the aid of good lawyers, you can pick flaws in the evidence and break down the witnesses, and all the while, if you are smart, you can do business on the sly, until you worry your prosecutors clear out and they’ll give up trying to enforce the law. But when you give women the right to vote, a prohibitory amendment is sure to follow, and women haven’t had a grain of sense on the temperance question. They are crazy fanatics on that subject and they wouldn’t stop till the whole liquor business was destroyed, root and branch. that is why we shall never give women the ballot in Nebraska.”

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The Weekly Magazine contains the following on the relations of women to money: “Times have greatly changed within the last ten years in general relation of women to money matters. The control of money is a power which is more and more coming into their hands, and for which they should feel a deep moral responsibility. An earnest observer of the progress of social organization has remarked that the increasing responsibility thrown upon women in pecuniary matters more than any other agency is educating them out of weakness, vacillation and unreliability, into strong, reasonable, reliable members of the social structure. It is the testimony of many bankers and business men that honorably disposed women are among their best and most desirable customers. This speaks volumes of encouragement and perhaps fully offsets the occasional woman upon whom business cares have fallen, who seem utterly incompetent to comprehend the nature of a business engagement or business transaction; who expect all sorts of immunities and privileges in business on the ground of being a woman. No more disagreeable customer to have any business transaction with can be found than such a person. Women of this character discredit not only themselves but their sex, upon which they bring the reproach of their own weakness and want of perception of the true relation of things. They are among the worst stumbling-blocks in the path of woman’s progress; and none feel this more keenly than good and honorable women whose ambition is to be just and generous in their business dealings and to have their word as good as their bond and their bond worth one hundred cents on the dollar.”

Chapman, Carrie Lane. 1885. “Woman’s World.” Mason City Republican, July 2.

PDF version, courtesy of Mason City Public Library