Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/71

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DEMOCRACY
47

civil rights depend upon political rights. Men less intelligent, less sympathetic than Professor Dicey are absorbed in their own affairs, and women have had to fight and are still having to fight for every miserable concession in personal freedom and education (and in such fights Professor Dicey has often been on the women's side), and they have no security that they will be allowed to hold what they have won. Successive Local Government Acts have shown plainly how men will almost unconsciously sweep away the rights of women when their minds are concentrated on some reform for which men care. The Married Women's Property and the Custody of Children Acts repealed cruel and unjust disabilities which had been imposed by men upon women. Are we to suppose that all injustices are of the past, and that from henceforth for evermore men will feel like women?

Besides the difference in relative values which men and women place upon things, and the vast gulf that there is between actually experiencing and only listening to an experience, there is the fact that even when people know what is right, they do not always do it without some external pressure, whether of public opinion, legal rights or political power. In truth, the reactionaries are too thin-skinned when they wail about the sex-antagonism of women who frankly declare this weakness in men. If we asserted it of men only they would have some right to complain. But we do not. The very existence of customs and laws and govern-