Will you give me a hearing?"
And the hearing I gave that beloved and devout woman was the _reveille_
that awakened me to this--this whirlwind that seems to be both inside me
and outside me, and everywhere else in the whole world.
It's not woman's suffrage; it has gone way down past the road from votes
for women. I wish I could have stopped in that political field of
endeavor before Jane got to me. She might have left me there doing
little things like making speeches before the United States Senate and
running for Governor of Tennessee, after I had, single-handed, remade
the archaic constitution of that proud and bat-blind old State of my
birth; but such ease was not for me.
Of course for years, as all women have been doing who are sensible
enough to use the brains God gave them and stop depending on their
centuries-seasoned intuitions and fascinations, I have been reading
about this feminist revolution that seems all of a sudden to have
revoluted from nobody knows where, and I have been generally indignant
over things whether I understood them or not, and I have felt that I was
being oppressed by the opposite sex, even if I could not locate the
exact spot of the pain produced. I have always felt that when I got to
it I would shake off the shackles of my queer fondness and of my
dependence upon my oppressors, and do something revengeful to them.
When my father died in my Junior year and left me all alone in the
world, the first thing that made me feel life in my veins again was the
unholy rage I experienced when I found that he had left me bodaciously
and otherwise to my fifth cousin, James Hardin.
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