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“A PLEA FOR SUFFRAGE” (1915) miss m. m. [marianne moore] (1887–1972) Modernist poet Marianne Moore majored in history, economics, and politics. While at Bryn Mawr (1905–1909) and during Pennsylvania’s 1915 suffrage referendum campaign, Moore attended suffrage lectures, distributed leaflets, and marched in suffrage parades. She also wrote propaganda. This pseudonymously signed “Letter to the Editor,” published in a Carlisle, Pennsylvania, newspaper, is almost definitely by Moore, whose personal letters from Autumn 1915 mention delivering suffrage “notices” to the local papers.18 Like her poetry, this letter demonstrates Moore’s modernist technique of quoting familiar clichés and sentiments in order to question or reframe them. 239 R To the Editor of the Sentinel, Sir:— The following has appeared as a suffrage argument in some papers, and I should like to see it in The Sentinel: “Among unthinking citizens, the antisuffrage slogan, “Woman’s place is in the home,” is regarded as a clinching reason for not giving her the vote. When one stops to analyze that catch phrase, however, the fact which it sets forth—that woman’s place is in the home—makes it one of the strongest possible reasons for giving her a voice in the government. For during the past fifty years the home interests have been projected into politics in so many different ways that to deny woman the protection of the ballot is to deprive her of the most effective weapon that exists for preserving the onslaughts of the corrupt and the vicious. “There may be those who will deny that there is any direct association between politics and the home, but they, again, are the unthinking ones. Every sane and fairminded citizen knows that politics comes into our homes every hour of the day and every day of the year. Let us consider just a few of the ways that politics enters: “Politics comes in with the butcher when he brings the meat for dinner. This meat, instead of being butchered and cured on our own property, as was done in the days of our great-grandparents, has been prepared for us by the big“beef trust,” under conditions controlled by politics, and if politics are corrupt or careless the treacherous texts 240 chances are that we are getting tainted meat that will bring sickness to some members of the family. “Politics comes into the home with every pipe line of water. When we turn on the water spigot a whole stream of politics flows into our home. Having no voice in politics, the women cannot say whether it shall be a clean stream or a dirty stream, but if it is a dirty stream and brings typhoid germs to the children, it is up to the mother to nurse them through the fever—and sometimes to see them die. “But that is not all. “Politics comes into our homes with every ready-made garment manufactured in some city factory and possibly finished in a tenement sweatshop by some child suffering from scarlet fever, measles or even tuberculosis. If there be those who consider that this danger is exaggerated it may be interesting for them to learn that the United States Public Health Service, which has just finished an investigation of conditions in New York shops where garments are made, found only two percent of the 3,000 workers examined free from physical defects or disease. Are mothers not vitally interested in such matters? “Why, then, continue to deny them a voice in the making of the laws that control such conditions?” Miss M. M. Source: Miss M. M.,“A Plea for Suffrage,” Carlisle Evening Sentinel, 8 October 1915: 2. ...

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