The Future of the Women's Movement/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
VOTES
Who made the law thet hurts, John,
Heads I win,—ditto tails?
"J. B." was on his shirts, John,
Onless my memory fails.
Ole Uncle S., sez he, "I guess
(I'm good at thet)," sez he,
"Thet sauce for goose ain't jest the juice
For ganders with J. B.,
No more than you or me."
WE come now to the question, what is the use of the vote, about which women are making such a bobbery? Not more bobbery, be it well understood, than men have made; not nearly as much, if we are to take as a measure the amount of suffering that men have been willing to inflict and the crimes they were willing to perpetrate in pursuit of the franchise.
We exaggerate the use of the vote, say the Antis. Well, even if it is possible to exaggerate the use of the vote, it is scarcely possible to exaggerate the significance of the continued denial of the vote. To the awakened, organised, articulate women who are demanding the vote, the shifts and excuses and dodges of politicians, the exhibitions of mob spirit and the revelations of passions and motives usually hidden have been startling. Women, whose private lives were fortunate, have been taught that they were living in a fool's paradise concerning the lives of other women. The sight of woman-baiting by a mob of her political masters; the listening to debates in the House of Commons; above all, the arguments used by anti-suffragists have made women infinitely keener and more conscious of their position than they were before. Many of these things have been as startling as a blow in the face. The letter of Sir Almroth Wright, the verses published by Mr. Rudyard Kipling under the title, The Female of the Species, the animus of Mr. Belfort Bax and the vulgarities and shallows of Mr. Harold Owen and the Anti-Suffrage Review must have converted thousands of men and women who before had refused to believe that such views were at the back of the opposition to women's enfranchisement. But do we exaggerate the value of the vote? People often talk as if the vote were only of use for making more and more laws, and ascribe to women the desire to "make men good by Act of Parliament." They forget that votes may also be of use to resist and to modify legislation; that, through Parliament, attention is called to the administration of public affairs; that Bills are capable of amendment, if the electors will be keen and united enough for their amendment; above all, that Parliament raises money by taxation of women as well as of men, and that Parliament alone decides how this money shall be spent. Three million women and nine million men profit by the Insurance Act. Is this not sufficient commentary on the assertion that a woman's chief business is to mind the baby and that men protect her in that business? The only medical care that she gets from the Insurance Act (barring maternity benefit) is when she refuses to mind the baby or has no baby to mind.
There are two ways in which the possession of the vote will benefit women: first, by raising their status, and, second, by giving them power to influence Parliament directly through their representatives. The matter of status seems to me by far the more important of the two, but because it is intangible, people with no imagination cannot grasp it. Yet men from the days of ancient Greece and Rome to now have very passionately clung to the badge of citizenship. We find magistrates now in England adjusting their sentences so as to avoid adding the humiliation of disfranchisement to other penalties of the law; we find Parliament debating earnestly how relief may be given to poor men without involving them in pauperisation, which means the loss of the vote; we remember how Members of Parliament pleaded for the coloured man in South Africa that "the intolerable slur of disfranchisement" should not be cast upon him, and we note with burning indignation that these Members are quite placidly content that this intolerable slur should remain upon their own mothers and wives. It is only an idea. Yet ideas have moved the world, and this idea that women are not born to be the slaves of men has rankled for ages; now that it has found expression, it rankles no longer, it has become an inspiration to millions of lives, not only of women but of men too.
As to the direct use of the vote in affecting legislation, it is quite ludicrous to find people denying it. Like any other tool, the vote is only of use if the owners use it, and that men have made bad or insufficient use of the vote only shows that men may do so; it does not show that men always will do so, nor does it show that women ever will. Now there is one idea that always seems to crop up in the minds of politicans when any women's problem is presented to them: it is, to prohibit. As Miss Gore-Booth has remarked, politicians of the type of Mr. John Burns cry out periodically, "Go and see what the women are doing and tell them not to!" It is always done, ostensibly, in the interests of the mothers and their children, but women know that what the mothers want is the means and freedom to do their work, not prohibition. What is the matter with the poor is their poverty, says Mr. Shaw. What is the matter with the mothers is their poverty and the ignorance that comes out of poverty. Remove the poverty and the ignorance and you will have done vastly more to check the infant death-rate and the manufacture of unemployables than you will by prohibiting all the mothers in the land from earning (not from working! No one ever proposes really to relieve them from toil!) and putting them absolutely into the power of men.
The influence of the women's vote would be felt by no means only at election times. In the countries where it exists it has not so much affected the balance of parties; that is to say, it has not had just that element of fighting that so interests the sensation lover and that is so fundamentally contrary to real progress. There has been no apparent opposition of interests and no sex-war, but politics have been peacefully penetrated by the women's point of view. Women without the vote can do something to form public opinion; but women with the vote will find public opinion far easier to move. Acts of Parliament do not spring full-grown from the minds of politicians; we see how different interests are at work moulding them, before they are even presented as Bills, and it is the voters who are listened to, the voters whom the Minister in charge addresses and persuades and treats with, the voters whose amendments are first taken. I do not deny that politicians do sometimes consult women, but what women? Some say they consult their own wives; who selected these wives, and for what qualities? It is farcical, when democracy insists that men shall choose their own rulers, to tell women that they get the equivalent when men choose what and how many women they will "consult." Voting women may be expected to influence Bills both in their introduction and in their passage through Parliament. Members have repeatedly stated that they could have voted for certain amendments or measures if they had felt that they owed their seat in Parliament in part to the votes of women who favoured these measures. A member represents only his constituents, and in the long-run he votes in accordance with the views of his constituents. If he does not, it is their fault for electing him.
There are, moreover, the indirect effects of the possession of the vote. The politician who is also a statesman should know that Acts of Parliament only work well with the intelligent co-operation of the people. Who can expect the women to cooperate intelligently in working Acts about which they were never consulted, and which no one ever takes the trouble to explain to them? Men say they were never consulted about the Insurance Act. But it was their own fault if they allowed themselves to be overridden. The women could not help themselves. In addition to the certainty of better co-operation, there is the increased sense of responsibility, the stimulus to thought and organisation, the fact that politicians and reformers all concentrate on educating the voter or the potential voter. We all know the candidate who will only answer questions from electors, and any woman who has not been permitted to ask her own question, but has been compelled to put men up to ask it, knows with what pathetic ease such men are fobbed off. Men are not educated in women's questions as they should be, and the women themselves are not educated and independent. In his fine speech in the House on 6th May 1913, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald said: "I share the opinion of those who say that the mere granting of the votes to women would not directly increase wages, and so on. But the difficulty we have got is that when we try to increase women's wages there is a sort of subordinate frame of mind in which women approach all these points. They are careless. They will not organise. They will not take pains and trouble to look after themselves. What is the reason? The reason is that they have always been accustomed to shuffle responsibility for their own actions upon somebody else's shoulders. The very argument which the Prime Minister used this afternoon, that we were doing so well for women, was the most humiliating argument that any Liberal could use against such a reform as we are asking for. We want women to do these things for themselves, because they can do them a great deal better than men can do them. We want to get them into the frame of mind of independent and self-respecting citizens who will co-operate with us, and not merely ask us to do things for them, when they can do them much better for themselves. What would happen if the franchise were given would be this: Women would take a far keener interest in such questions as wages, a far keener interest in their place in the factory or workshop. Women as enfranchised citizens would join the unions, would make their economic demands with far more advantage, with far more spirit, with a much more rigid backbone than they do now. Up would go wages as an indirect consequence of the vote having been given to them." So we come back to status after all as the most important of all the effects of enfranchisement. I hope to return later on to this matter of low status, and show how it has been responsible for other evils than political evils.
Many opponents of women's suffrage are really anti-suffragists in a far wider sense than they will admit; the arguments which many of them use are arguments against the franchise altogether. But if the anti-suffragist happens to be a candidate for Parliament, he dare not speak his mind about the existing male electors, lest they should not return, to represent them, a man who expresses so frank a contempt for them; he does not, therefore, express it. But some of the women anti-suffragists do, and we may learn a good deal from them as to the hidden sentiments of the men like-minded with them. One of the fallacies into which they most frequently drop is the confusion between legislating and electing legislators. They become eloquent about the disaster that would follow if women voters decided matters of foreign policy and high finance, and some cheap fun is made at the notion of the charwoman negotiating a loan, and the society beauty delimiting a frontier. But the male voters do not perform these functions, and the women voters would not be called upon to do so. The strongest argument against the Referendum is that the great mass of the people cannot and never will be fit to judge of matters requiring specialisation, nor to conduct negotiations requiring secrecy and despatch. Popular election means that the people chooses its rulers, chooses those—whom it should then trust—who shall carry out in detail the policy whose broad lines the people approve. Free press, free speech, open debates are the safeguards and opportunities for criticism and revision, but not for legislation and administration, which are the functions of governments and not of electors. There is no system conceivable that will work if the people will not work it. Men, unfortunately, are to be found who expend their ingenuity in discovering how best they can make representative institutions unworkable, and these men are by no means on one side of the House only. A great deal of the preposterous machinery of Parliament has been set up to circumvent the wreckers, who are, in practice, whatever they may call themselves, anti-democratic. But no machinery can take the place of common sense. It is the belief of the progressives that women have at least as much common sense as men, and that they have proved themselves far better diplomatists, perhaps because they have never had the same temptations as men to rely upon physical force as an "argument."
The conclusion is, that to be without representation in a country professedly governed by representative institutions, is to be perilously near to a state of slavery. If women were given the vote, England would be a better place, not because women are better than men, but because conduct is not right or wrong independently of its effects, and the effects of slavery are bad both for slave and for owner.