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From Door to Door
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (December 30, 1911) : 26
Purdue copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link
 

      Women having done everything in their efforts to gain equal suffrage, from becoming disheveled to getting imprisoned, it was to be expected that they would cheerily submit to becoming invisible. Yet there is something very unpleasant about invisibility, especially when it comes upon one suddenly. It occurs in door-to-door canvassing. Yet there is something very unpleasant about invisibility, especially when it comes upon one suddenly. It occurs in door-to-door canvassing. You feel yourself only hazily out-lined in space, but bravely you ring the hostile bell, after which comes a long interval when eyes are felt to be gazing from behind curtains. This helps considerably in the process of disintegration. Then the door is opened and you begin explaining what the vote is, why it is desirable, how great the need that the coming meeting should be a success, the cheapness of the tickets, and at the same time the figure who grudgingly opened the door is monotonously chanting, “I don’t want anything; no, not to-day. Go away; go away.” From the beginning she seems to have the better of the argument, and when she closes the door so that only her negatively shaking cheeks are visible, and finally these are withdrawn and the click of the lock is heard, your voice dies into silence and you fade from sight on the doorstep of a woman whose name you do not know.
      You feel yourself at liberty to rest there. Your non-existence permits it. It cannot matter to even so inhospitable a creature as your hostess — no other name suggests itself for the unsympathetic dame inside — that a shadow the more flicker for a moment on her scrubbed steps. When that door closed on your flowing reasoning you were washed off as though you had been a grotesque figure drawn on a slate. Your conception of yourself is such that, if at that moment any one chose to accuse you of peddling “Extracts From Fireside Poets,” or patent coat-hangers and shoe buttons combined, you would confess to it instantly and accept her anathemas without a protest.
      Looking down the long street with houses repeating one another, even to the mummified plant in each window, you wonder how you are ever to distinguish those who have visited from those you have not. What if you should forever walk down that shell- bordered path and enter at the same gate, perpetually to confront the woman who has just extinguished you? The horror of the thought is sufficient to send you in a panic to the next house. Once more you bite your dry lips, assume an air of ingratiating affability, mingled with something commanding, to indicate the honor you do, and a second supply of courage is summoned to ring this second bell.
      A toothless old woman with a red shawl about her appears and listens to your harangue with illicit delight. She acts as though she had unexpectedly encountered a lawless joy, and, raising both hands, exclaims , “Law! do you believe all that?” Then she insists that you enter and sit by her kitchen fire, and, doubling herself up, she giggles and wags her shoulders, and says, “Ain’t the men to do it any more, really?” She dismisses your suggestion that she buy a ticket as though there were limits she did not believe in even voicing, but she protests on your rising, and closes the door on you unwillingly with chuckles and exclamations still sounding. She is a most unseemly old woman. It is as though countless grudges, stored up with no thought or hope of their eventually being revenged, had suddenly been revived, and a horrid hope had flamed of the tables being turned at last. She is a most unseemly old woman. It is as though countless grudges, stored up with no thought or hope of their eventually being revenged, had suddenly been revived, and a horrid hope had flamed of the tables being turned at last.
      Once more there is the glance down the street, and in each of those little red-brick houses it is safe to surmise that there dwells a human entity as unassailable as the most impregnable citadel ever built. Some doors are not opened at all, though steps are heard inside. If one was observed one was not evidently liked. One’s back feels uncom- fortable on leaving these houses. At other doors females appear who might be either mistress or maid. If they are addressed as one they always turn out to be the other. The flow of one's enthusiasm sometimes leads to a plea that the husband of the house should be brought to the meeting, and it is always these very houses who are owned by widows. With a spurt of hope it is announced, “But you, a property-holder, are the very woman who should be interested in having the vote”; and with superior gentility the answer comes, “I don’t trouble about such things.” Occasionally in a mesmerized stupor tickets are bought. The purchasers know so little what they are for that it seems unfair to let them do it. The idea will occur that it is their way of dismissing the faint nebular person who temporarily clutters their doorsteps. One feels one’s presence so little that it is a surprise that others minded it so much. One feels one’s presence so little that it is a surprise that others minded it so much. If they had walked through you it would have seemed logical, but to make tribute of a real sixpence to a wraith murmuring incomprehensible sentences is a little uncanny.
      Somewhere in the endless chain of houses a lady bountiful in a blue checked apron comes beaming to the door, and says: “I am always willing to give threepence to a worthy object, but I can’t go out in the evenings. I have a cold on my chest. I’ve been rubbing myself with oil for a week; still, if suffrage is anything I can do in the house I will. I never refuse a deserving cause.” That threepenny bit burns as it is taken. If the donor tried to do suffrage in the house, how would she go about it? The question raises such vague possibilities that flight is imperative. The inmates of the houses begin to seem as unreal as she who is visiting them. After that comes a ruddy mother who can’t come because the hour fixed for the meeting is bathing-time for four babies. She cannot come when she has bathing to do. Yet if she becomes interested — “But how can I become interested when I can never come?” The fog the visitor now moves in is thickening so that it is but numbly that she sees the curtains of the next house. There is an air about them. They look as though their owner calls them “tasty.” Their owner comes to the door. She has frizzy hair and a bow on the pocket of her sewing apron. With tilted chin she chimes over and over, “I'm not interested — no, I’m not interested.” She is the spirit of the row; she is not interested, and she feels it to be her chief attainment. Sadly the visitor gives up the unvisited houses. After all, no harm has been done. If any one has really noticed her, it was but as an instrument to make her like the more her own tight invulnerability.
 

8 August 2026