by William Tenn
Resolved: that the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, granting universal female suffrage, is unnatural biologically, politically, and morally, and the chief cause of our national troubles…
Resolved: that all proper pressure be brought to bear on the legislators of this nation, both holding and seeking office…
Resolved: that this convention go on record as demanding…
Resolved: that we hereby…
There were midterm congressional elections that year.
A Masculinist plan of battle was drawn up for every state. Coordinating committees were formed to work closely with youth, minority, and religious groups. Each member was assigned a specific job: volunteers from Madison Avenue spent their evenings grinding out propagandistic news releases; Pennsylvanian coal miners and Nebraskan wheat farmers devoted their Saturdays to haranguing the inmates of old-age homes.
Henry Dorselblad drove them all relentlessly, demanding more effort from everyone, making deals with both Republicans and Democrats, reform elements and big city bosses, veterans’ organizations, and pacifist groups. “Let’s win the first time out—before the opposition wakes up!” he screamed to his followers.
Scrabbling like mad at their beloved fence, the politicians tried to avoid taking a definite position on either side. Women were more numerous and more faithful voters than men, they pointed out: if it came to a clear contest, women had to win. Masculinist pressure on the ballot box was considerable, but it wasn’t the only pressure.
Then the voice of Hank the Tank was heard in the land, asking women—in the name of their own happiness—to see to it that the long, long winter of feminism was definitely past. Many women in his audiences fainted dead away from the sheer flattery of having Henry Dorselblad ask them for a favor. A ladies’ auxiliary to the Masculinist Movement was organized—The Companions of the Codpiece. It grew rapidly. Female candidates for office were so ferociously heckled by members of their own sex that they demanded special police protection before addressing a street-corner rally. “You should be ironing your husband’s shirts!” the lady masculinists shouted. “Go home! Your supper’s burning!”
One week before election, Dorselblad unleashed the Direct Action squads. Groups of men, wearing codpieces and derbies, descended upon public buildings all over the country and chained themselves to lampposts outside. While officers of the law chopped away at their self-imposed bonds with hacksaws and acetylene torches, the Masculinists loudly intoned a new liturgy: “Women! Give us your vote—and we will give you back your men! We need your vote to win—you need to have us win! Women! Give us your vote on Election Day!”
Where, their opponents inquired cruelly, was the vaunted pride and arrogance of Masculinism in such an appeal? Were the Lords of Creation actually begging the weaker sex for a boon? Oh, for shame!
But Dorselblad’s followers ignored these jeers. Women must themselves return the vote they had falsely acquired. Then they would be happy, their men would be happy, and the world would be right again. If they didn’t do this of their own free will, well, men were the stronger sex. There were alternatives…
On this ominous note, the election was held.
Fully one-fourth of the new Congress was elected on a Masculinist platform. Another, larger group of fellow travelers and occasional sympathizers still wondered which way the wind was really blowing.
But the Masculinists had also acquired control of three-quarters of the state legislatures. They thus had the power to ratify a constitutional amendment that would destroy female suffrage in America—once the repeal bill passed Congress and was submitted to the states.
The eyes of the nation swung to its capitol. Every leader of any significance in the movement hurried there to augment the Masculinist lobby. Their opponents came in great numbers too, armed with typewriter and mimeograph against the gynecocratic Ragnarok.
A strange hodge-podge of groups, these anti-Masculinists. Alumnae associations from women’s colleges fought for precedence at formal functions with Daughters of 1776; editors of liberal weeklies snubbed conservatively inclined leaders of labor unions, who in turn jostled ascetic young men in clerical collars. Heavy-set, glaring-eyed lady writers spat upon slim and stylish lady millionairesses who had hurried back from Europe for the crisis. Respectable matrons from Richmond, Virginia, bridled at the scientific jocosities of birth controllers from San Francisco. They argued bitterly with each other, followed entirely divergent plans of action and generally delighted their codpieced, derbied, cigar-smoking adversaries. But their very variety and heterogeneity gave many a legislator pause: they looked too much like a cross-section of the population.
The bill to submit repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment to the states wandered through an interminable Congressional labyrinth of maneuver and rewording and committee action. Mobs and counter-mobs demonstrated everywhere. Newspapers committed themselves firmly to one side or the other, depending on their ownership and, occasionally, their readership. Almost alone in the country, The New York Times kept its head, observing that the problem was very difficult and asking that the decision—whatever it eventually was—be the right one—whatever that might be.
Passing the Senate by a tiny margin, the bill was sent to the House of Representatives. That day, Masculinist and anti-Masculinist alike begged and battled for a gallery pass. Hellfire Henry and his followers were admitted only after they had checked their swords. Their opponents were forcibly deprived of a huge sign smuggled to the gallery in four sections. “Congressman!” the sign shouted. “Your grandmother was a suffragette!”
Over the protests of many legislators seeking anonymity on this issue, a roll-call vote was decided upon. Down the list of states it went, eliciting so many groans and cheers from the onlookers that the Speaker finally had to lay aside his damaged gavel. Neck and neck the two sides went, the Masculinists always holding a slim lead, but never one large enough. Finally the feverish talliers in the gallery saw that a deadlock was inevitable. The bill lacked one vote of the two-thirds majority necessary.
It was then that Elvis P. Borax, a junior Representative from Florida who had asked to be passed originally, got to his feet and stated that he had decided how to cast his vote.
The tension was fantastic as everyone waited for Congressman Borax to cast the deciding vote. Women crammed handkerchiefs into their mouths; strong men whimpered softly. Even the guards stood away from their posts and stared at the man who was deciding the fate of the country.
Three men rose in the balcony: Hellfire Henry, Old Shep, and white-haired Old Pep. Standing side by side, they forebodingly held aloft right hands clenched around the hilts of invisible swords. The young Congressman studied their immobile forms with a white face.
“I vote nay,” he breathed at last. “I vote against the bill.”
Pandemonium. Swirling, yelling crowds everywhere. The House guards, even with their reinforcements from the Senate, had a hard, bruising time clearing the galleries. A dozen people were trampled, one of them an elderly chief of the Chippewa Indians who had come to Washington to settle a claim against the government and had taken a seat in the gallery only because it was raining outside.
Congressman Borax described his reactions in a televised interview. “I felt as if I were looking down into my open grave. I had to vote that way, though. Mother asked me to.”
“Weren’t you frightened?” the interviewer asked.
“I was very frightened,” he admitted. “But I was also very brave.” A calculated political risk had paid off. From that day on, he led the counterrevolution.
III
The Counter-Revolution
The anti-Masculinists had acquired both a battlecry and a commander-in-chief.
As the Masculinist tide rose, thirty-seven states liberalizing their divorce laws in the husband’s favor, dozens of disparate opposition groups rallied to the standard that had been raised by the young Congressman from Florida. Here alone they could ignore ch
arges of “creeping feminism.” Here alone they could face down epithets like “codpiece-pricker” and “skirt-waver,” as well as the ultimate, most painful thrust—“mother-lover.”
Two years later, they were just strong enough to capture the Presidential nomination of one of the major parties. For the first time in decades, a man—Elvis P. Borax—was nominated for the office of chief executive.
After consulting the opinion polls and his party’s leading strategists, not to mention his own instincts and inclinations, he decided to run on a platform of pure, undiluted Mother.
He had never married, he explained, because Mother needed him. She was eighty-three and a widow; what was more important than her happiness? Let the country at large live by the maxim which, like the Bible, had never failed: Mother Knew Best.
Star-studded photographs of the frail old lady appeared all over the land. When Dorselblad made a sneering reference to her, Borax replied with a song of his own composition that quickly soared to the top of the Hit Parade. That record is a marvelous political document, alive through and through with our most glorious traditions. In his earnest, delicately whining tenor, Borax sang:
Rule, Maternal! My mother rules my heart!
Mother never, never, never was a tart!
And there was the eloquence of the famous “Cross of Swords” speech which Borax delivered again and again, at whistle stops, at church picnics, at county fairs, at state rallies.
“You shall not press down upon the loins of mankind this codpiece of elastic,” he would thunder. “You shall not crucify womankind upon a cross of swords!
“And do you know why you shall not?” he would demand, his right hand throbbing above his head like a tambourine. The audience, open-mouthed, glistening-eyed, would sit perfectly still and wait eagerly. “Do you know?
“Because,” would come a soft, slow whisper at last over the public address system, “because it will make Mother unhappy.”
It was indeed a bitter campaign, fought for keeps. The Dorselbladites were out to redefine the franchise for all time—Borax called for a law to label Masculinism as a criminal conspiracy. Mom’s Home-Made Apple Pie clashed head-on with the Sword, the Codpiece, and the Cigar.
The other party, dominated by Masculinists, had selected a perfect counter-candidate. A former Under-Secretary of the Army and currently America s chief delegate to the thirteen-year-old Peace and Disarmament Conference in Paris: the unforgettable Mrs. Strunt.
Clarissima Strunt’s three sturdy sons accompanied her on every speaking engagement, baseball bats aslant on their shoulders. She also had a mysterious husband who was busy with “a man’s work.” In photographs which were occasionally fed to the newspapers, he stood straight and still, a shotgun cradled in his arm, while a good hound dog flushed game out of faraway bushes. His face was never clearly recognizable, but there was something in the way he held his head that emphatically suggested an attitude of no nonsense from anybody—especially women.
Hellfire Henry and Kitchen-Loving Clarissima worked beautifully together. After Dorselblad had pranced up and down a platform with a belligerently waving codpiece, after he had exhorted, demanded and anathematized, Clarissima Strunt would come forward. Replying to his gallant bow with a low curtsy, she would smooth out the red-and-white-checked apron she always wore and talk gently of the pleasures of being a woman in a truly male world.
When she placed a mother’s hand on the button at the top of her youngest son’s baseball cap and fondly whispered, “Oh, no, I didn’t raise my boy to be a sissy!”—when she threw her head back and proudly asserted, “I get more pleasure out of one day’s washing and scrubbing than out of ten years’ legislating and politicking!”—when she stretched plump arms out to the audience and begged, “Please give me your vote! I want to be the last woman President!”—when she put it that way, which red-blooded registered voter could find it in his heart to refuse?
Every day, more and more Masculinist codpieces could be counted on subways and sidewalks, as well as the bustle-and-apron uniforms of the ladies auxiliary.
Despite many misgivings, the country’s intellectual leaders had taken up Borax’s mom-spangled banner as the only alternative to what they regarded as sexual fascism. They were popularly known as the Suffragette Eggheads. About this time, they began to observe sorrowfully that the election was resolving an ancient American myth—and it looked like the myth made flesh would prevail.
For Borax campaigned as a Dutiful Son and waved his mother’s photograph up and down the United States. But Clarissima Strunt was Motherhood Incarnate; and she was telling the voters to lay it on the line for Masculinism.
What kind of President would Strunt have made? How would this soft-voiced and strong-minded woman have dealt with Dorselblad once they were both in power? There were those who suggested that she was simply an astute politician riding the right horse; there were others who based a romance between the checked apron and the spotted codpiece upon Mrs. Strunt’s undeniable physical resemblance to the notorious Nettie-Ann Dorselblad. Today, these are all idle speculations.
All we know for certain is that the Masculinists were three-to-two favorites in every bookmaking parlor and stockbroker’s office. That a leading news magazine came out with a cover showing a huge codpiece and entitled Man of the Year. That Henry Dorselblad began receiving semi-official visits from U.N. officials and members of the diplomatic corps. That cigar, derby, and sword sales boomed, and P. Edward Pollyglow bought a small European nation which, after evicting the inhabitants, he turned into an eighteen-hole golf course.
Congressman Borax, facing certain defeat, began to get hysterical. Gone was the crinkly smile, gone the glow from that sweet, smooth-shaven face. He began to make reckless charges. He charged corruption. He charged malfeasance, he charged treason, murder, blackmail, piracy, simony, forgery, kidnapping, barratry, attempted rape, mental cruelty, indecent exposure, and subornation of perjury.
And one night, during a televised debate, he went too far.
Shepherd Leonidas Mibs had endured displacement as Leader of the Movement far too long for a man of his temperament. He was the position at the rear of the platform, at the bottom of the front page, as an alternative speaker to Hellfire Henry. He burned with rebellion.
He tried to form a new secessionist group, Masculinists Anonymous. Members would be vowed to strict celibacy and have nothing to do with women beyond the indirect requirements of artificial insemination. Under the absolute rule of Mibs as Grand Master, they would concentrate on the nationwide secret sabotage of Mother’s Day, the planting of time bombs in marriage license bureaus, and sudden, nighttime raids on sexually nonsegregated organizations such as the P.T.A.
This dream might have radically altered future Masculinist history. Unfortunately, one of Mibs’s trusted lieutenants sold out to Dorselblad in return for the cigar-stand concession at all national conventions. Old Shep emerged white of lip from an interview with Hank the Tank. He passed the word, and Masculinists Anonymous was dissolved.
But he continued to mutter, to wait. And during the next-to-last television debate—when Congressman Borax rose in desperate rebuttal to Clarissima Strunt—Shepherd Mibs at last came into his own.
The videotape recording of the historic debate was destroyed in the mad Election Day riots two weeks later. It is therefore impossible at this late date to reconstruct precisely what Borax replied to Mrs. Strunt’s accusation that he was the tool of “the Wall Street women and Park Avenue parlor feminists.”
All accounts agree that he began by shouting, “And your friends, Clarissima Strunt, your friends are led by—”
But what did he say next?
Did he say, as Mibs claimed, “—an ex-bankrupt, an ex-convict, and an ex-homosexual”?
Did he say, as several newspapers reported, “—an ex-bankrupt, an ex-convict, and an ex-heterosexual”?
Or did he say, as Borax himself insisted to his dying day, nothing more than “—an ex-bankrupt, an
ex-convict, and an ex-homo bestial”?
Whatever the precise wording, the first part of the charge indubitably referred to P. Edward Pollyglow and the second to Henry Dorselblad. That left the third epithet—and Shepherd L. Mibs.
Newspapers from coast to coast carried the headline:
MIBS CLAIMS MORTAL INSULT
CHALLENGES BORAX TO DUEL
For a while, that is, for three or four editions, there was a sort of stunned silence. America held its breath. Then:
DORSELBLAD DISPLEASED
URGES MIBS CALL IT OFF
And:
OLD PEP PLEADING WITH OLD SHEP—
“DON’T DIRTY YOUR HANDS WITH HIM”
But:
MIBS IMMOVABLE
DEMANDS A DEATH
As well as:
CLARISSIMA STRUNT SAYS:
“THIS IS A MAN’S AFFAIR”
Meanwhile, from the other side, there was an uncertain, tentative approach to the problem:
BORAX BARS DUEL—
PROMISE TO MOTHER
This did not sit well with the new, duel-going public. There was another approach:
CANDIDATE FOR CHIEF EXECUTIVE
CAN’T BREAK LAW, CLERGYMEN CRY
Since this too had little effect on the situation:
CONGRESSMAN OFFERS TO APOLOGIZE:
“DIDN’T SAY IT BUT WILL RETRACT”
Unfortunately: