Bother the Men! by Mrs Howard Paul (Isabella Featherstone) c1870s

PAUL, Mrs Howard (Isabella Featherstone, 1830–1911), performer; WALKER, Henry, composer and lyricist. Bother the Men! Sung by Mrs Howard Paul, in her Impersonation of Miss Grym, in which she will lecture on Woman’s Rights.
 
London: Metzler & Co., 37 Great Marlborough Street, [c. 1870s].
 
Folio sheet music, 350 × 240 mm. Lithographed pictorial title-page, partially hand-coloured, with musical score and words, and publisher’s advertisement to verso (“New Music by Virginia Gabriel”). Trimmed at foot and with rough left edge from removal from a bound volume; small edge tears and light creasing; paper lightly toned, but the cover image and music text clear and complete. Very good.
 
A music-hall character song written for and performed by Mrs Howard Paul, a prominent Victorian comic performer, here appearing as “Miss Grym”, a caricature of the “strong-minded woman” lecturing on women’s rights. The cover depicts her in bonnet and spectacles, umbrella in hand, standing before a pile of books and a lectern.
 
The lyrics explicitly reference contemporary parliamentary agitation for women’s suffrage, though in a comic and dismissive way. The refrain repeats the title injunction:
“Bother the men! Bother the men! …
It makes me quite mad when I think of the men!”
 
while later verses invoke legislative reform:
“Bring in a bill,
To give us the franchise, and have it we will!
Women we’ll send into Parliament then…”
 
The song lampoons the demand for the vote and female representation in Parliament, presenting it as the fantasy of a comic lecturer rather than a serious political programme, placing it very much of its time. An early example of anti-suffrage caricature.