The Case for Women's Suffrage/Women and the Revival of Interest in Domestic Politics
WOMEN AND THE REVIVAL OF INTEREST IN DOMESTIC POLITICS
BY MABEL ATKINSON, M.A.
(Author of "Local Government in Scotland.")
THE militant Suffragist agitation, if able to count on ability and enthusiasm of a kind never aroused by the older movement, has yet by its decided action and definite policy stirred up not only all the old prejudices, but is confronted by newer misunderstandings even among those who on abstract grounds are in favour of the principle of women's enfranchisement. Its policy is assailed on the one hand by people who are so advanced that they will not even temporarily accept anything less than adult suffrage. These persons who, by refusing to take a single step forward because that one step will not land them at their goal, have done us and their own principles the great injury of providing for reactionaries, who do not dare any longer openly to declare themselves opposed to Women's Suffrage, an excuse for blocking in the name of progress further movement. On the other hand, the agitation is confronted by a pathetic bewilderment among the orthodox Liberals—among the women as well as the men. They are unable to understand why this determination to secure women's enfranchisement should appear precisely at the moment when the Liberal Party, after years of weary waiting on the opposition benches, finds itself once more in power. They ask with reiterated irritation, "Why did not the women attack the Conservatives? Why do they wait until the Liberals are in power to take up the policy of harassing any government that will not immediately deal with the question of Women's Suffrage? Why will they not be patient and trust to those who are their best friends to choose the right time for carrying through this reform?"
And so far has this bewilderment grown in some cases that a few Liberals, who ought to be better able to recognise sincerity when it is before their eyes, believe that the whole agitation has been incited by the Conservatives as an underhand means of injuring the Party in power. During the Hexham election the term "Toryette" was invented by this ignorant section, and one insulting question commonly asked of the Suffragists was: "How much are you getting from the Tories for this?"
This slander is only pardonable when uttered by totally ignorant people—and hardly that, indeed, if the framers of it have had opportunities of actually seeing and hearing the leaders of the franchise agitation, women who risk livelihood and social position and with many regrets separate themselves from their own political parties in order to concentrate all their energies on this one question. Yet the bewilderment of the devoted Liberal is comprehensible. Why does the new movement appear just at the moment when a Government inspired by democratic ideals comes into office, and when there is a chance, so thinks the Liberal, of forwarding social reforms that have already waited too long? Why were these women, admitting that they are entirely sincere, and that their motives are deserving of the highest respect, why were they so misguided as to allow the Conservatives to remain many years in power without subjecting them to the annoyance and irritation involved in the present tactics?
To this question many answers can be given. In the first place some of the leading spirits in this agitation were not during the last Government's term of office of an age to rebel against anything save the regulations of schoolroom or college. Nothing can be more ludicrous to one acquainted with the active members of the Women's Social and Political Union than the quite extraordinary contrast between the Suffragette as she really is and the Suffragette as caricatured. The latter is a gaunt, elderly person, badly dressed and excessively plain—she is popularly supposed to want a vote because her lack of charm has failed to secure her a husband; the former is quite frequently a girl or young matron between twenty and thirty, of delicate, even dainty appearance and usually dressed, if not fashionably, at all events with considerable charm and individual taste. Few movements have in all probability so many young people among their leaders, and many of the agitators, if asked why they personally did not oppose the late Government, can reply: "Because I was not old enough."
Yet after all this is but a superficial answer; for middle-aged women and even white-haired old ladies are now joining in the agitation, and from the beginning there were some older women acting with the ardent younger spirits. We must look deeper. If women do at the present time desire political freedom with such intensity, why did the movement not develop earlier? Why does it arise just at the time when it can embarrass the new Liberal Government? Perhaps the answer to this question can best be given in the Scottish fashion by meeting it with another. We might put to our puzzled Liberal friends the counter-queries: "Why has Liberalism so recently emerged from the slough of despond? Have the conditions, have your principles changed since the years of so-called Tory domination? Why are you, who were a short time ago weak and despairing, now strong and exultant?" In trying to answer this question the Liberals would probably refer to the recent war, and to the increase of Jingo spirit which it brought with it. Yet at the same time many would assert that it was the ebbing of Liberalism that made the war possible at all. A wise man said: "The wind bloweth where it liestth," and it is at all events true that the wind of human aspiration now dies away, now blows with freshening force. I have heard an eminent professor of history declare that nothing so impressed on his mind the conception of a Divine Spirit urging on the movement of human destiny as the study of the ripening and decaying of the different ideals of mankind and of the institutions that embody those ideals. The desire for the amelioration of the conditions of human life comes, so to speak, in gusts, and no one who follows the course of English politics at the present time can doubt that the breeze is now blowing with strength and impelling us onward in our search for that nobler future that allures him whom the squalid present fails to content. All schools that aim at domestic reform feel this; interest is quickened; minds that were asleep are now awake and alert. All reformers—Liberals and Radicals, collectivists and communists, temperance reformers, peace advocates, what you will—are toiling now with hope, while but a short time ago the few enthusiasts seemed to be hammering hopelessly at a blank wall of opposition. A new spirit is abroad in England. We may account for it as we please—as mere weariness of the prolonged government of one party, as due to education, or, as some would say, over-education, as resulting from changed economic conditions, as an awakening of the masses, as a fresh manifestation of the Life Force, to use the latest terms of popular philosophy; but all will agree that the new life, the new spirit is here, and—let us not be afraid of bathos, when the bathos is true—that one of its fruits was the victories of the Liberals at the general election. But that rising sap brings other fruits also to development. In the women's camp, as in all others, the new inspiration makes itself felt. Women too are emerging from the weary years of the reaction, are scanning old ideals and are finding that, though they burnt dimly in the days of despondency, they are shining brightly once more and are casting a clear light on the path of the future. Women who considered their rightful claims to full citizenship with lukewarmness are now falling under the influence of the new demands and are flocking alike into the old Suffrage Societies, and into the Women's Social and Political Union. Something deeper than their own narrow personal interests has gripped many of the women of England; on all sides one sees and hears it, among those women who gather to decorous Suffrage conventions in the provincial towns, in the masses of perfectly normal and respectable middle-class wives and daughters who walked in procession from Hyde Park to Exeter Hall on the 9th of last February, but most of all on the faces and in the voices of those women who have dared—exasperated beyond the bounds of patience by the unworthy tactics of a Government that calls itself Liberal—to strive to reach the House of Commons itself that they might urge their claims to a vote—claims nominally admitted to be just by a very large majority of that House—and who have in consequence served out their sentence of imprisonment as a testimony of the faith that is in them. And therefore if the Liberals ask why these things are done now, and not earlier, we can only reply that in us as among them—and many of us are (or were) Liberals—inertia and despondency ruled, and now rule now longer; and that their awakening and ours are due to a common cause, which historians in the future may account for in many ways, but which all will acknowledge to have existed, the striking re-emergence of interest in domestic politics which marked the second five years of the twentieth century. It is not mere perverseness on our part that makes the new agitation coincide with the accession to power of the Liberal Party. On the contrary, the two facts have a common cause.
Moreover, it is from a Liberal Government that claims for the extension of the franchise should meet with active support. Philosophic Liberalism depends on the ideals of political freedom; its very maxims are "No taxation without representation," and that just, though hardly inspiring expression of principle, "Each to count as one and none as more than one." The work of Liberalism is to provide fair and equal political machinery, to make the form of government democratic; that task is nearly done, and soon a new doctrine of political development, whether called by a different name or not, must replace the old views. One part, however, of the machinery still awaits completion. The rights of women must be acknowledged; their energy and devotion must be made available for the work of government. To carry out this reform is consonant with the principles and traditions of Liberalism, and yet those who urge it continue to be met with those often heard exhortations to wait, to be patient.
Now there are weighty reasons, not often clearly understood, why we dare not be patient any longer. As has been said, there is a new desire for social reform abroad among the people. Speaking generally, the work of the nineteenth century was to break down and clear away a system of government suited to earlier economic conditions, and to bring into existence the machinery of political democracy. The question of what product the machinery was to turn out when finished was naturally enough put aside for the time. Democratic government appeared then as an end in itself. But now Englishmen are learning—some of them with bitter disillusionment—that mere political freedom is in itself a mockery; that liberty must be used for some end; that in striving for that end—the provision of happier conditions of life for the nation—the forms of society must be gradually changed and fresh institutions brought into existence to take the place of those which are no longer suitable to our altered circumstances. We stand, in short, on the threshold of an age of reconstruction, of an organic era. Now in the course of this reconstruction, there must inevitably be great modification of the most personal and domestic concerns of men and women. Indeed the process has already begun. Does not the British housewife learn from the newspapers—often with astonished disgust—that henceforth she is to be liable for compensation should her maid stumble on the stairs and break an arm or leg? Are not demands for old age pensions apparently near to reaching their fulfilment? Are not schemes for providing work for the unemployed discussed far and wide throughout the country? But in all these questions women are personally and intimately concerned. They are servants, and the immediate employers of servants; they live to be old in greater numbers than men; they suffer in their own persons, and vicariously in those of their children, from lack of employment, whether they be widows thrown into the overcrowded market of women's labour, or wives of men who can find no work. These problems of social reconstruction are not alien from women's lives, but closely and immediately connected therewith. Therefore many women feel—sometimes clearly and with comprehension, but more often half-unconsciously—that now, not after some indefinite time of waiting, must political rights be granted to them, a feeling expressed in that cry of the Women's Social and Political Union: "Rise up, women, now." A thoughtful person can indeed see that the economic disabilities of women, due in the past to a considerable extent to custom and not solely to law, may, if this reconstructive legislation be undertaken before women receive their enfranchisement, put them at fresh disadvantages. At present, for instance, attempts to find work for unemployed women are made with far less energy than in the case of men. And the problems dealing with women's place in the industrial world that are bound to present themselves in the future are of such complexity that women should insist on receiving the right to vote, and on being in a position to influence Parliament directly before other legislation on their behalf is undertaken. Otherwise, in the tangle of conflicting interests, their special needs and circumstances may easily be overlooked. Take, for example, the question of married women's labour in factories. All who know anything of modern industry are ready to admit that factory work is not suitable for young mothers, actual or expectant. But should a law be passed forbidding factory work to married women without providing an easy way of compelling their husbands to maintain them adequately, it is only too possible that their burden may be increased, not lightened, and that they may leave the factory work, often after all comparatively well paid, to undertake at lower wages casual domestic employment which involves such heavy tasks as carrying coals or scrubbing floors, or that they may be forced to turn to the far more demoralising sweated home-work. It is probable also that before many years are past the country may be discussing in earnest the institution of a minimum wage. Now to regulate men's wages alone would be impossible. But are men to say what is the minimum wage for a woman? Should they undertake to do so, a two-fold danger awaits us. The employer, in his desire for cheap and docile labour, may insist on a woman's minimum too low to yield a true living wage, while Parliament and the constituencies would acquiesce, since women can bring no immediate political influence to bear. On the other hand, many think it possible that men trade-unionists might in certain trades cause the minimum to be fixed so high that very few women would be employed at the legal wage; they might, in fact, use the minimum as a means of shutting the trade to women altogether; for at present we must sorrowfully admit that in the less skilled divisions of industrial life women's main advantage is often—though by no means always—her greater cheapness.
In short, whether one welcomes or deplores the fact, it is hard to doubt that the immediate future is to see attempts to regulate by legislation many things in the industrial world that have hitherto been left to chance or custom. And unless women receive enfranchisement before further advances are made on this path, it is only to be expected that their special needs may be overlooked and fresh chains not merely of usage, but of law, may bind them more firmly in that economic inferiority which is the greatest of their grievances.
But the new legislation not simply affects women as individuals, it also affects what our opponents so energetically insist is our true sphere—the home and the nursery. I do not for a moment wish to protest against society's keener interest in the well-being of children, and the healthiness of the houses of the people. It is in my view eminently desirable that education should be compulsory, that attempts should be made to ensure that the children, who must by law be educated, should not be underfed, and should all have opportunities for a healthy physical development, that over-crowding should be prohibited, that experiments in housing should be made by local authorities, that baths, wash-houses, and sometimes crèches should be provided, that health visitors should superintend the nurture of infants, &c. All this is good; it means a wider and keener sense of responsibility on the part of the State towards the younger generation. But in adopting these reforms the State is encroaching on the traditional sphere of women, and a Government controlled solely by men, and almost exclusively administered by them, may, when dealing with children and the peculiar problems of women's lives, make very serious blunders. For instance, every one is coming now to admit that our system of elementary education did for many years impose, and in some cases still continues to impose on children of five and six a discipline that is not merely not beneficial but in some cases actually hurtful to the little undeveloped minds and movement-craving bodies. Many declare, too, that a serious blunder has been made in dealing with the question of trained midwives, and that since after 1910 none but properly qualified midwives will be allowed to practise, while yet no attempt is being made to provide the necessary training at a fee within the means of the women who undertake this work, we shall be faced with a serious deficiency in the number of properly-trained women (a question of considerable importance, one may note in passing, in connection with the problem of infantile mortality). In all these matters there is need of the woman's standpoint as well as the man's. And we desire the right of voting not that we may cease to be women, but because we are women, and because Parliament, chosen at present by men alone, is making laws that must influence very closely our work, the training of children and the conduct of home-life. It is our very womanhood with its inborn instinct to "childward care," and not merely the human nature which we share with men, that makes many of us eager to be politically enfranchised, in order that women also may take their proper share in controlling the future course of that legislation which must profoundly modify the daily lives of all English people—men, women, and children alike.