THE MATRIARCHATE

Those pessimists who argue that the effects of the Nineteenth Amendment are all and that the woman voter is a nonentity in so far as the government of the nation is concerned will have to reconcile themselves to Count Hermann Keyserling's emphatic antithetical views on the subject. For the Esthonian philospher, in advancing not only the opinion that America is governed by the feminine sex but that America's problem is "the emancipation of men, rather than the emancipation of women," presents an European point of view which the anxious male cannot entirely disregard if he is at all concerned over maintaining the supremacy of his kind.

Count Keyserling's chief evidence in support of his statement, it is interesting to observe, is the prohibition problem. To the European mind it is a accepted theory that women are responsible for prohibition. They are accredited with bullying men into supporting a regulation which they formulated of their own accord and by sheer domination having it made into law. Furthermore, the woman politician has just begun her "epidemic of lawmaking" according to Count Keyserling. He paints a gloomy picture of a country reduced to the bondage of minor social laws about which the masculine politician has little or nothing to say. To infer the worse it seems altogether too probable that the inversion of the sexes will place the supposedly stronger ones in the nursery and the kitchen in a few more years.

However, without disrespect of either woman suffrage or Count Keyserling's opinion of its prowess, the latter's ideas might be said to verify the fact that distance lends enchantment and that the European point of view on this particular phase of American politics is due not only to a lack of understanding but also a lack of sympathy. Merely because an Esthonian philosopher is unable to understand why the majority of American male voters den themselves the Epicurean pleasures of liquors is hardly substantial foundation for branding the United States a matriarchate."