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Show CAN WOMEN DRIVE? "Isn't it rather singular, that women never learn how to drive a horse properly?" remarks some irate man as he inspects a tired animal, and finds the bridle over its ears and the bits half-way down its throat.<br><br> "But women can drive," cries a champion of the sex. "Don't they drive seven or eight miles to market with vegetables or loads of hay? Don't they take their babies out to ride whenever they can get hold of a horse? Why there never was a woman who couldn't drive, and some of them can handle a horse much better than their husbands can." <br><br> "Can women drive? and do you let them handle your best horses?" were the questions put to a good-natured livery keeper by an interested party. <br><br> "I should think they could; but as to letting them our best horses, that is another matter. We have horses in our stables few men could drive. We keep what we call safe horses for ladies' use - the kind that will go anywhere if you just guide them - old family nags, sensible enough to trot along and mind their own business and not fret if they are pulled two ways at once. <br><br> "Do you object to letting horses out for women to drive?" <br><br> "No, indeed; we have from twelve to fifteen ladies a week come to us for horses, and we give them good ones, too, but, somehow women fret horses when they drive them, so we don't care to give them high-spirited animals. Now look at that sorrel," pointing to one from whom the harness had just been removed; "I let that horse this morning to a bit of a woman with wrists no bigger than my two fingers. I didn't want to let it go because it's such an ugly puller. I told her it had a mouth like iron, but she said she wanted to take an old aunt that was visiting her out to see the town, and she drove off quietly enough. But half an hour after I saw her coming down Woodward avenue like a streak of lightning, everybody running to get out of the way, and her old aunt hanging on for dear life. She just had the lines wound around those little wrists, and braced her feet on the dash board, and when she came to a corner whisked around it on one wheel. The rig came in all right, but that horse won't get its breath for a week. "<br><br> "Do you often meet with accidents and have a smash-up?" <br><br> "No. It is curious, but a woman will take a team through [line missing/unreadable] right. We have any amount of trouble with men, who take our best rigs out on a spree, and break things all to pieces. A woman is either more cautious, or she will call upon every man in sight to help her out of the scrape. They are more apt to lose their heads in a crowd or collision, but there is most always some special providence at hand to help them. If you notice, the most disastrous runaways happen when some man has the reins. "<br><br> Further talk developed the fact that women were not cosiderate [considerate] in their management of horses. They forget to blanket them in winter and to tie them in the shade in the summer. They sometimes use the hitching straps, and have a settled dislike to learning proper names for harness. Not one in a hundred could tell the difference between the surcingle and the martingale, or had the least idea to which end of the animal the crapper belonged, and if compelled to divest a horse of its trappings would undo every buckle in the service, and take the collar off over the animal's head, to all of which the intelligent beast would submit, as if charmed, by being steadily talked to during the process in the witching tones of a woman's voice. <br><br> All this may be a libel on the sex, but it is certainly true that when an old family horse, with a ten-minute gait comes sea sawing down the street with a comically reckless air of running away, a woman's head looks out from under the buggy top, a woman's hand guides the steed in its eccentric orbit, and a woman=s voice shouts in distinct tones, Wh-o-o-a-a, at the same moment that the reins are jerked and the whip applied, while pedestrians ?? to the sidewalk in terror. However liable a woman is to run over a cow, or a street car, she will always stop or turn out for a baby. This is one of the instincts of her maternal heart to which even get up! ??? is sacrificed. |