He felt that American women were not ready to
exercise the privilege intelligently and that their mental attitude was
against it.
Forthwith he said so in his magazine. And the storm broke. The
denunciations brought down upon him by his attitude toward woman's clubs
was as nothing compared to what was now let loose. The attacks were
bitter. His arguments were ignored; and the suffragists evidently
decided to concentrate their criticisms upon the youthful years of the
editor. They regarded this as a most vulnerable point of attack, and
reams of paper were used to prove that the opinion of a man so young in
years and so necessarily unformed in his judgment was of no value.
Unfortunately, the suffragists did not know, when they advanced this
argument, that it would be overthrown by the endorsement of Bok's point
of view by such men and women of years and ripe judgment as Doctor
Eliot, then president of Harvard University, former President Cleveland,
Lyman Abbott, Margaret Deland, and others. When articles by these
opponents to suffrage appeared, the argument of youth hardly held good;
and the attacks of the suffragists were quickly shifted to the ground of
"narrow-mindedness and old-fashioned fogyism."
The article by former President Cleveland particularly stirred the ire
of the attacking suffragists, and Miss Anthony hurled a broadside at the
former President in a newspaper interview. Unfortunately for her best
judgment, and the strength of her argument, the attack became intensely
personal; and of course, nullified its force.
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