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By 1902 membership in the clubs constituting the General Federation of Women's Clubs had reached two hundred thou-sand. This remarkable growth occurred despite relentless ridicule and hostility from the press. Men were clearly aware of the threatening implications of women organizing, even in this most genteel way. Of even greater significance than the numerical growth of the club movement was its change in direction. No longer a mere resting place for the middle-class matron, the women's clubs were paying more and more attention to current events and to civic improvements in their com-munities. That this change was a self-conscious one was amply demonstrated at the biennial convention in 1904. Not only did a discussion of suffrage take place for the first time, but a woman voter, Sarah Platt Decker of Colorado, was elected president.
As a matter of fact, it was not a healthy environment, in a way. There was a great deal of homosexual relations going on there, and we had a terrible tragedy in our class that nobody had coped with. There was a girl who was a very masculine type of girl, head of the basketball program, and another who was a very beautiful, sweet, delicate, typically feminine girl. The two of them lived together. The one girl loved boyfriends and dancing, and she went up to Dartmouth a great deal. A boy in Dartmouth fell in love with her, but her roommate was determined to break that up. That summer during our junior year the roommate persuaded her to cancel the engagement; she had found out that the mother of this perfectly brilliant, gifted young boy had been in a mental institution.
MURDER AND SUICIDE
Senior at Smith College Shot for Breaking Her Engagement
Northampton, Mass., April 29.—Enraged because she had broken her engagement with him and refused to renew It, Porter Smith, of Chicago, who was graduated from Dartmouth College, last year, today shot and fatally wounded Miss Helen Ayer Marden, a senior at Smith College, and then committed suicide. Miss Marden Is a daughter of Frank Marden. of Somerville. She died shortly before noon today.
that a I didn't know what to think! As soon as the women had the vote, they just quit. It's one of the tragedies of the whole era slump took place. Women stopped seeking higher degrees in college, they stopped trying to be better educated. Many young women left school for marriage and many went to work to help husbands secure degrees. Over the years this custom has become commonplace-a strange reaction to the fire and the drama of the fight for woman's suffrage.
Maybe we needed new issues. Alice Paul was right. She began immediately to plan to introduce to the Congress the equal rights amendment. Although she had helped to secure woman's suffrage, she still believed that woman's suffrage alone was not going to give women everything they wanted and needed. They had only secured the right to vote. Even now the U.S. Supreme Court has stated that the only status women have in our government is as voters. Any state today can still pass any law they'd like against women, and they have no recourse except perhaps to vote against them. There are now a thousand very bad laws on the records of state legislatures against women. This is added proof that Alice Paul is a woman with a profound mind. Getting woman's suffrage was not enough, it was just the first...
After 1922, when Maynard had his first heart attack, he was not well enough to do very much. It was enough to be going around doing all the lecturing and all the writing. And then, from 1924 until 1932 we were absorbed in the anti-evolution fight. That took up all the energy either of us had.
Maynard founded the Evolution or Science League because one state after another began having these anti-evolution bills.
He had written to every scientific and scholarly organ you can think of and they all answered that "yes, somebody should do it, but it wasn't their line." Finally, in despair, when he was doing a long lecture series, at the end of one of them he out-lined the situation and we started right there. That night we collected eleven dollars and nineteen members, and that was the beginning. This was before the Scopes trial. In fact, most of the witnesses for Scopes were our members. We were very, very select. We had practically every well-known scientist in the country, but we didn't have an awful lot of them.
We had a secretary who was supposed to do the office work, but his salary got so far in arrears that he had to get a job some-where and I did most of it from that time on. We organized branches in Los Angeles and San Diego and Sacramento and we'd take organizing tours. Sometimes I went along, sometimes I didn't.
At one time we had something like a thousand members, not all scientists, of course. Anybody who wanted to could join. I remember there was an old man in Nevada who hadn't any money and he used to send rabbits he'd kill. Once a rabbit arrived on Saturday, when we weren't there, and when we opened the door Monday morning, it was horrible. It was like a grave. There was another old man, in Georgia, an old Spanish War veteran who would sometimes be paid five dollars for someone to sleep in his bed while he slept on the floor. He'd send us the
five dollars, which was very touching. The League lasted until 1932, when Maynard's health got so bad that he couldn't go on with it. We just had to let it go, and by that time it was long after the Scopes trial. About this
1. Iconic film actress, "---ty Davis"
2. "The King" of Rock and Roll, "---is Presley"*
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4. "Revolu---n", a sudden, radical change
21. Tommy of Cheech and Chong
2. Hasbro toy for aspiring chefs ---- -ake Oven"
Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: The Subversive Power of Children's Literature by Alison Lurie My rating: 4 of 5 star...