Jim Kershner’s This day in history » On the Web: spokesman.com/topics/local-history

From our archives, 100 years ago

Women had recently gained the right to vote in Washington, yet some men were still not reconciled to it.

Washington state Supreme Court Justice Henry B. Brown went on a diatribe about women’s suffrage, saying that women have “no responsibility.” He said that the better classes of women wouldn’t bother to vote unless it became a “fashionable thing to do” and that the “ballot would be dragged down by the women of the lower classes.”

The judge also scoffed at the idea that women stood for peace. He said that after the Civil War, it was “the women who retained the bitterness long after the men had practically forgotten about it.”

From the saloon beat: A saloon union organizer proposed a startling new idea: a code of ethics for Spokane bartenders.

The No. 1 item in the code would be: “Refuse to sell liquor to persons already intoxicated.”

He said that would go a long way toward eliminating the all-too-familiar sight of drunken people staggering around the streets of Spokane.

Any bartender who encourages such excess  “should be ashamed,” he said.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1925: The New Yorker magazine made its debut.