What the police officer told Genevieve Stone

    My Sauntering led me the other day to a reminder that social problems are solved by eroding them to nothing. What erosion lacks in speed, it makes up for in effectiveness. I am thinking of Mrs. Genevieve Stone, wife of Congressman Stone of Illinois, who when marching in a suffrage parade on March 3, 1913, Washington D.C., had an unidentified police officer tell her:

If my wife were where you are I’d break her head. (From Prelude to Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War, by Kimberly Jensen. University of Illinois Press, 2008.)