Courtesy to Women

1920

We used to forgive the vaudevillians who coined patter about the gentlemen who occupy the trolley seats while less aggressive female passengers cling to the straps, says the Boston Post. That was because the same vaudevillians also cracked those ancient Brooklyn slanders, which caused us to think that both were part and parcel of the "original" production.

It is getting past that point now. Boston is suffering from the same capitulation to selfishness, to smugness and to irreverence. A woman, in a recent letter to the Post, complaining of the jams in tunnel and subway stations, touched a matter that concerns not only politics and economics, but sociology. For the bitterest lines in her letter are those describing an attempt to force an entrance into an "L" train during the rush hour. "I made three attempts," she writes, "and was hurled back by a mob of males (you couldn't call them men), and finally the fourth train I got in, and was almost crushed doing so."

This indicates that, for what reason philosophers will, we have got farther away than is good for us from the simple, honest acceptance of courtesy and comity.