Women are Children: Don't Let Them Vote

by Stephen J. Gertz

"The Militant" by G.T. (?), c. 1910-1912.

This political cartoon, in ink and watercolor, was likely inspired by and in sympathy with the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League (1908-1918) which opposed granting women the vote in Parliamentary elections within the United Kingdom.

The same sort of battle against women's suffrage was occurring simultaneously in the United States, ongoing since the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 proclaimed voting rights for women.

Here, a little girl is arrested by two bemused policemen. She's in tears holding a can of oil, the prime suspect of arson to the house ablaze at right in the background.  On the house's fence the girl has chalked the demand, "Voats fer Wimmen."

The message is clear: English domestic life is threatened by immature women demanding the vote. Militants are particularly irresponsible and dangerous; the whole of society will go up in flames if women stuff the ballot box with their foolishness. A more condescending view of the issue is difficult to imagine. It was not, however, unusual. Casting women suffragettes as little children was a standard weapon in the anti-suffragette arsenal.

In the United States, a similar anti-suffragette theme was expressed at the very same time by Ten Little Suffragettes, a scarce eleven-page comic based upon the folk-song, Ten Little Indians. Ten little girls in pinafores carry protest signs supporting women's suffrage but are undone by their pre-pubescent behavior until only one remains and, petulant, she breaks her doll's head.

That women are children and incapable of making informed decisions about things they care about is a sentiment that remains amongst many to this day. Why should adults cede power to emotionally labile kids?

Particularly female children who are now increasingly dominating college enrollment, often out-earning their husbands and boyfriends, and are members of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Cabinet.

Next thing you know, there'll be a female President of the United States. Somehow, the United States will survive - though a segment of the male voting population may feel their manhood whither and retract into their gut to disappear with their last vestige of superiority in everything except, perhaps, the ability to fix a toaster - a skill that many men have yet to master, this writer included whose grand philosophy regarding broken small household appliances boils down to, Buy a new one.
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[ANTI-SUFFRAGETTE ORIGINAL CARTOON]. G.T. [?]. The Militant. [London?]: c. 1910-1912. 39 x 35 cm original ink and watercolor drawing.
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Image courtesy of John Drury Rare Books, currently offering this item, with our thanks.
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Of related interest:

Ten Little, Nine Little, Eight Little Suffragettes...(And Then There Were None).
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Female Excellence: Satyr Pokes Women

by Stephen J. Gertz

The most celebrated wit and courtier in Restoration England, John Wilmont, 2d Earl of Rochester (1647-1680) suffered from a laundry list of STDs and alcoholism when he died at age thirty-three.  "Extravagant frolics," and drunkenness were his calling cards at the Court of Charles II.

He played hard, and he wrote wonderfully, producing poetry and ripping satires that got him into trouble with Charles. Routinely bounced out of Court for transgressing the boundaries of taste and Charles' tolerance, he'd then write or do something to redeem himself in the eyes of the king to earn his way back into his good graces.

Once, while in hiding to avoid a mess he'd made (after getting into it with a member of the night-watch, one of his friends was gored and killed by a pike-thrust), he assumed the identity of "Dr. Bendo," a quack with a knack for treating the gynecological disorders and barrenness of women with a proprietary magic potion that cured hysteria and infertility with an unsurprising degree of success considering that it was administered in situ con brio with tumescent syringe. When "Dr. Bendo" was otherwise busy, Rochester impersonated the nonexistent "Mrs. Bendo," the better to intimately examine patients without stimulating their husbands' suspicions. The Bendos of Bendover were, apparently, a popular couple.

In 1679, four satiric poems - A General Satyr on Woman; A Satyr upon Woman's Usurpation; A Satyr on Woman's Lust; In Praise of a Deformed, but Virtuous Lady, Or A Satyr on Beauty - were published under the title Female Excellence, Or, A Woman Display'd... written "by a Person of Quality."

John Wilmont, 2d Earl of Rochester

A satyr wrote these satires, and, though anonymously written, one, A Satyr upon Woman's Usurpation, was presumed by his contemporaries to have been written by Wilmont. Donald Wing, in his Short-Title Calalog 1641-1700, subsequently assigned authorship of all four of the satires in Female Excellence to him. David M. Vieth, in Attribution In Restoration Poetry: A Study of Rochester's Poems of 1680 (Yale: 1963), however, rejects it, as does Harold Love in English Clandestine Satire 1660-1702 (Oxford: 2004).

Whoever wrote these satiric verses, they, emerging from the Restoration, must be considered firmly within the realm of Rochesteriana,  a genre that includes the disputed yet highly likely by Wilmont, Sodom, a theatrical farce posthumously published in 1684 whose cast of characters includes: Bolloxinion, the King of Sodom; Cuntigratia, His Queen; Pricket, a young Prince; Buggeranthos, General of the Army; Borastus, the Buggermaster-general; and Fuckadilla, Cunticulla, and Clytorism as Maids of Honor.

Below, a Restoration cosmetic surgeon's pre-op assessment of an aging patient:

"With age with furrows shall have plow'd her face,

And all her body o're thick with wrinkles place,

Her breasts turn black, her sparkling eyes sink in,

Fearful to see the bristles on her chin,

Her painted face grown swarthy, wan and thin,

Her hands all shriveled o're, her nails of length

Enough to digg her grave, had she but strength.

Such is the mistress that blind poets praise..."

(from In Praise of a Deformed, but Virtuous Lady, Or A Satyr on Beauty).

This is truly unfair. Not all women age into gargoyles. And I've met more than a few men who evolved into troglodytes when Father Time slapped them upside the face.

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[ROCHESTERIANA.]  Female Excellence: or, Woman display’d, in several satyrick Poems. By a Person of Quality …   London, Printed for Norman Nelson … 1679. First edition. Folio. 8 pp.

Wing R1749.
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Image courtesy of Bernard Quaritch Ltd, currently offering this volume, with our thanks.

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The Most Amazing Woman You've Never Heard Of

by Stephen J. Gertz

With one exception, all first-person accounts of famous seafaring voyages have been written by men. The exceptional woman was not the first to circumnavigate the globe but she was and remains the sole one to have written about it, the only great voyage narrative told from a woman's point of view.

Rose Marie Pinon, later de Freycinet, Paris, 1812, aged 17.
From an engraving of the original portrait
in the possession of Baron Claude de Freycinet.

Rose Marie Pinon was nineteen, well-educated, and an attractive middle class girl when she married 35-year-old French naval officer and navigator, Captain Louis de Freycinet (1779-1842), in 1814. The two were extremely devoted to one another.

Debarking from Toulon three years later, on September 17, 1817, she accompanied Louis on the  corvette Uranie, which he commanded, for a three-year surveying voyage  that would take them and crew across the Atlantic to Rio de Janero, then around South Africa to Mauritius, soon Western Australia, New Guinea, Guam, Hawaii,  Samoa, the Cook Islands, New South Wales, New Zealand, and around South America's Cape Horn to the Faulklands where the Uranie was shipwrecked upon submerged rocks

The vessel damaged beyond repair the expedition continued on another ship, ultimately returning to Le Havre on November 13,  1820.

Essential point: Wives (and women in general) were strictly forbidden to join their husbands or otherwise travel solo on a ship wholly comprised of male crew members. Rose de Freycinet had been smuggled aboard disguised as a man by Louis, at great risk to his career; it was highly illegal. Rose's presence on the ship at first caused some disruption amongst the crew but she enchanted them and was immensely popular in most of the voyage's ports of call.

Her account of the three-year circumnavigation was composed of a series of letters to her friend, Caroline de Nanteuil,  in diary form. Rose recorded life aboard ship, observations of the people and places they visited, scientific work of the expedition, relationships between men and women, and the work of artist Jacques Etienne Arago. She had a keen eye for detail and composed vivid descriptions of the strange and exotic places they visited.

Detail from an original pen and ink drawing by Arago
of an aqueduct on Mauritius featuring Louis and Rose.
She wears her distinctive hat and scarf, as usual.

Although fêted by many while visiting the French colony of Mauritius, Rose evidently found the going a bit racy for her taste; her true grit was of a softer, gentler nature than Mattie Ross's in Charles Portis' novel. Her diary contains a polite and good-natured account of the reaction of the Creole women to her attire:

"I always wore a scarf, which strangely enough offended all the Creole women, as the ones I met, laughingly or mockingly, urged me to remove it. Mme Lindsay [her particular friend there] alone not only found it most becoming but would have liked to imitate me; however, she was afraid that her husband might not allow it, for, as you know, English women wear low-cut dresses even for dinner. I cannot begin to tell you all the gossip that my scarf gave rise to; there were some who claimed that undoubtedly I must have had some blemish on my breasts, or some scar that was hidden by the gauze. Others had learnt from one woman that I had nothing to hide, as she had seen me wearing a low-cut dress and had noticed nothing untoward, and so on... But all joined forces to make fun of my reserved nature, giving me the nickname of 'Mrs. Virtue' or other similar names, to which I can assure you I paid no attention whatsoever" (A Woman of Courage, p. 35).

Rose and her manuscript survived the dangers of the voyage and the shipwreck in the Falkland Islands yet all evidence of her presence on the Uranie and her role during the voyage were expunged from the official record of the expedition, which consumed Louis for twenty years, appearing as Voyage Autour de monde, entrepis par order du Roi... (Paris: Pillet ainé and Imprimerie Royale, 1824-1844), comprised of eight quarto volumes of text and four atlas folios. 

Réception à Diely (i.e. Dili, East Timor), November 1818.
The official version, sans Rose, painted by Pierre-Antoine Marchais.

 As an officer of the King, Louis was compelled to omit Rose's participation. Yet he did sneak her into the official narrative: He named both "Rose Island" in the Pacific near Samoa and "Cap Rose" in Shark Bay in Western Australia after her.

It was not until 1927 that her diary was finally published, magnificently illustrated by reproductions of twenty-five paintings done by Arago, who had been on the Uranie as visual documentarian. Published in a highly limited edition, it is quite scarce and is currently being offered for $8,000 (Australian; $8021 USD)

The same scene, avec Rose, by Arago.
Note her ever-present hat and infamous
scarf, which she holds rather than wears.

The life of this intrepid woman was tragically cut short when she died of cholera in 1834, aged 38 years, after nursing Louis through the same illness.
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FREYCINET, Rose. Campagne de L' Uranie (1817-1820). Journal de Madome Rose de Saulces de Freycinet, d'apres le manuscrit original, accompagné de notes par Charles Duplomb. Paris: Sociétie d'Editions Geographiques, Maritimes et Coloniales, 1927.

Borba de Moraes I, p. 328. Chadenat 1607. Hill 652.
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The first edition in English was published as A Woman of Courage. Translated and edited by Marc Serge Riviére. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1996.
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With the exception of the portrait of Rose, all images courtesy of Hordern House Rare Books, of New South Wales, Australia, with our thanks.

Horden House has recently published a beautifully produced hardbound catalog, Captain Louis De Freycinet and His Voyages to the Terres Australes, a collection of important printed, manuscript, and pictorial material related to the two great French expeditions to Australia, that of Baudin  in 1800 and Freycinet seventeen years later. It is sure to become a key bibliographical reference.
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