The following article was discovered buried in an old newspaper and is reproduced here for your entertainment. It details the growing practice of women entering all areas of society, not only to work alongside men, but to replace them – a trend that has prevailed and increased to this day. The author of the article asks whether the marginalising of males, if continued, might lead to men becoming isolated upon reservations and a form of “gynocracy” being instituted. I’m sure readers at AVfM have some easy answers for this 110 year old question. – PW
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A DETHRONED TYRANT
Ample Evidence that Man’s Position is growing Precarious
The position of the dethroned tyrant, Man, is growing precarious, reports the New York Sun. “Woman’s Spear,” which Prof. Artemus Ward asked the strong-minded woman not to spear him with, is becoming more and more dangerous. The poor devil is being crowded out. Doubtless he is getting what he deserves. Still, the giant woman should not be tyrannous in using her strength.
Every day the head of the ridiculous Samson is shaved a little nearer to the hide. A woman relieves her husband of $1,000. He has no redress, says the courts. A woman has a right to search her husband’s pockets and snap up such sums as she chooses, says the Missouri Solomon, Judge George B. Sidener. Day by day the law prunes something from man’s already beggarly status. Day by day his employment is taken from him. Most of the novels and magazines are written and read by women. A few struggling men still keep their hold upon the typewriter’s keys, but they fight in vain against Fate, who is a woman herself. Many men who could write novels if they had a chance are now the pilots of elevators. But the elevator girl has sprung up in Chicago. The woman office holders are numerous in the west. The Missouri woman suffragists have fixed their commanding eyes upon the supreme court of that state. They say that women are eligible to be judges of that court. We foresee the triumph of the gown, and man, petty man, thrust from the bench.
The physical exploits of the women folks are as brilliant as their Intellectual successes. Women play foot ball. Women belong to fire companies. In St. Louis the other day three factory girls had a fist fight, described as highly scientific. Last week Mrs. Ernest F. Burmeister, wife of the sheriff of Dane county Wisconsin, took “two burly convicts” to the state prison, her “38-caliber revolver handy in her pocket.” The country is full of athletic women, trained in many exercises and tall of their hands. Hear this plaint of weak man ruled by a muscle of iron; the plaint of Hon. George R. Conover of Chicago against the wife of his bosom:
“I married a woman who was a physical culture teacher. She amused herself by throwing me across the room, smashing me with both hands, throwing me down and sitting on me until I was almost suffocated. We are the same weight, but I couldn’t do anything with her. She made a punching bag of me. Once, when she hurt her hands on me, she took a club and put me out.”
The gradual exclusion of man from his former vocations and avocations may be compared to the retreat of the red Indian before white civilization. As the fringe of white settlements widened so does the range of feminine activities widen. In time will man be isolated upon reservations and gynocracy prevail? Who knows? Women can do what they will. Man is feeble. In our ears still rings an awful voice, the voice of that vindictive Kansas woman who proclaimed a year or two ago that men must be annihilated.
