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These things could no longer be fought for. In 100 years U. S. women had won the vote and had disproved the anti-suffragette scientist who in 1907 warned that women's desire for the vote came from their "katabolic" condition, which, if unchecked, would unsex them and depopulate the cradle. They had won positions in U. S. educational, political and economic life—present were Mrs. Roosevelt, Dean Virginia Gildersleeve, Judge Florence Allen, Minister to Norway Mrs. J. Borden Harriman, many another woman who had made a name in public service. But votes for women had failed to clean up graft, make legislatures more intelligent, or lift democracy to new heights. This last item gave most speakers at last week's Congress an idea.
New Crusade? Most of them felt that the greatest danger to women was totalitarianism because it condemns women to domestic life and destroys their civil rights. That the women's movement was no longer exclusively feminist was implicit via the fact that totalitarianism in destroying civil rights seldom discriminates between men and women. Nor did the Congress face the paradox that in at least one totalitarian country, Russia, women have relatively more freedom than in the U. S., are permitted to marry and divorce without fuss, to work in steel mills, dig canals, manage collective farms, drive tractors, serve in the GPU, make parachute jumps, act as ships' officers, and are frequently elected to Congress.
But beyond the question of whether democracy could be made into a woman's crusade was the still bigger question whether U. S. women of 1940 could be fired by a spirit such as that which fired Elizabeth Stanton and Lucretia Mott. To make a good crusade, the crusaders have to be underdogs, preferably an abused minority. In Washington last week the Census Bureau revealed that the excess of males over females in the U. S. is declining, that by 1945 there should be a female majority in the U. S. for the first time.
Even this did not dismay Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, 81-year-old veteran suffrage leader. "We have got our rights," she said. "Well, what are we going to do with them? We have got to re-establish rights for men."
*They also made umbrellas, shoes, snuff, gloves, caps, hose and lamps; wove hair, washed clothes, packed tobacco, etc.