Page:Olive Malmberg Johnson - Woman and the Socialist Movement (1908).djvu/36

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That so great and sudden economic changes and the corresponding changes in woman's position as took place with the introduction of capitalism should bring forth womanly abnormalities is not surprising. Some, drunk with their newly acquired freedom of action, were bound to make themselves ridiculous, over-bearing and domineering. They denounced all mankind and roundly upbraided man for what they termed his tyranny and oppression.

Artemus Ward, America's greatest humorist and satirist in the days of the breaking up of the old régime and the beginning of the new, has turned his pen to caricature the "Woman's Rightsist," as he caricatured and upbraided every sham and upstart in society. As "a wandering showman" he frequently runs across her and once when he has had an exceptionally hard tilt with numbers of the "Bumkumville Female Moral Reformin' & Wimin's Rite's Associashun" he exclaims: "O, woman, woman! you are a angle when you behave yourself; but when you take off your proper appairel & (mettyforically speakin')—get into pantyloons—when you desert your firesides, & with your heds full of wimin's rites noshuns go round like roarin lyons, seking whom you may devour someboddy—in short, when you undertake to play the man, you play the devil and air an emfatic noosance."

For some time this sort of a woman was very much in evidence. Woman imagined herself trampled upon and abused by man, but invariably when this sort of woman's rights were sifted down, they were inspired by a desire to rule and domineer, themselves. Some went so far as to deck themselves out in most ridiculous costumes, oftenest in imitation of man which went to prove that what they most desired was the place of him whom their envy caused them to abuse.

Not to quote against this woman only the man satirist I quote here also upon the same subject one of the foremost intellectual women of our day, the great actress Olga Neth-