The Future of the Women's Movement/Chapter 1
THE FUTURE OF THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT
CHAPTER I
CAUSES OF THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT
"New occasions teach new duties; time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must pilgrims be,
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key."
THE world is full of books about women,—most often alluded to in such books as "Woman." The vast majority of these books have been written by men, and until quite lately the few women who wrote about women confined themselves to repeating the precepts laid down by men. There were remarkable exceptions, of course: Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, George Sand and Elizabeth Barrett Browning spoke as women and not as echoes of men. Quite recently women have suddenly broken the long silence, and there is a flood of exposition which is likely, from its volume and force, to make confusion take the place of silence. Ellen Key in Sweden, Rosa Mayreder in Austria, Mrs. Gilman in America and Olive Schreiner in South Africa are a few of the most distinguished writers; but there are troops of others who, in books and magazines and papers, strive to deliver their souls. This little book aims merely at being a brief survey of the women's movement and of the directions it appears to be taking; a survey which shall deal with principles and the broad aspect of things rather than with details, and that will rather suggest what are the difficulties and in what spirit they should be approached, than offer a universal solution for the deepest and most complex problem that has been set before the human race.
The women's movement in Great Britain has for the last seven years been directed so considerably into political channels, the struggle for the parliamentary vote has absorbed so much of the active, organised and thinking women of the nation, that one hears people talk sometimes as if the suffrage movement were the women's movement, and as if, when the vote shall be won, there will be no more women's movement. One would have to be very shallow and very insular, too, to think so. And what a tragedy it would be! What! Shall all these sacrifices be made to get the vote and then nothing be done with it? Shall the vote be at once the record of the progress of women and its grave? The women's movement is world-wide, and whether or no it has taken a political turn depends on the circumstances of each several nation. That it will be of political import some day everywhere is unquestionable to us who believe that it will not die, but that it is life and "holds a promise for the race that was not at our rising." A condition of virtuous anarchy may be the highest of all ideals; no one, it is to be imagined, regards government, laws and compulsion as good in themselves; but so long as governments exist, so long are social reforms at their mercy, and no civilisation is internally stable until it has moulded the body politic into harmony with itself. This is not to say that no progress can be made except by law-making; it is to say that the time comes in the development of every civilisation when laws and the administration of social affairs must change to meet the growing needs of the people. It is because British men have in the main acknowledged this, that the history of Great Britain has been in the main a peaceful history.
The women's movement is felt in all departments of life. In the education and training of girls, and, since men are the sons and mates of women, in the education and training of boys; in social, economic, religious and political matters. Custom, opinion and prejudice are as important as legislation; administration of law is sometimes vastly more important than law-making. On all these lines, then, march the women, but not on the old beaten paths. Roadmakers they are, and besides the toil of making the roads, they have not infrequently to endure the harassment of the stones and dirt which are hurled at them by those who are sitting in the old track, and who resent their divergence from it.
In England the intensity of the political struggle is due to the fact that women have made such great advances along the lines of personal and social effort, while the recognition of them within the Constitution is still withheld. Moreover, the causes of this continued exclusion have been of late so merely political, so entirely the result of an artificial party system, that the women who desire enfranchisement for no party reasons at all, but from their consciousness of a deep human need, are exasperated by the pettiness and futility of politicians, who subordinate a great issue of social right and wrong to the miserable party game of recrimination and retaliation, of power and office, of ins and outs. The women who had for forty-six years been steadily building up a majority in the House of Commons, and had kept a majority unbroken for twenty-six years (a feat which can be recorded of no other reform party in parliamentary history), found themselves apparently no nearer the attainment of their object, for the morally insufficient but politically overwhelming reason that their majority was composed of men from all parts of the House.
I do not propose to give the history of the English suffrage movement during the administration of the last three Parliaments; to be clear and comprehensible, this would take a considerable volume in itself. I wish only to point out that these women have been driven to throw their energies more and more into a political direction because they have been made to feel that their majority in Parliament would not act until political pressure was put upon them to compel them to act. "I have been a suffragist all my life," was the plaintive wail of the politician; "what more do you want?" Well, the women in the movement want the vote, and they are realising more and more, with every year that passes and nothing done, that they must concentrate upon winning the vote. It is hard enough at any time to get measures through Parliament unless there is a party advantage to be made out of them. Conceive how much this difficulty is multiplied when, besides the absence of party support, the reform is urged by women who have the powers of the purse and the press to contend with, and who have not one single vote wherewith to get the vote! Newspapers are owned, edited and written very largely by men and very largely for men; even what is known as the Woman's Page has, till recently, been contrived in the interests of tradesmen, for purposes of advertisement. Women are notoriously the poor sex. Even a woman who figures as a rich woman is often merely an article de luxe for the man who provides for her, and, though he may hang her neck with jewels, he does not readily give her a cheque for her suffrage society. All the more need, then, for concentration, and the fact that these Englishwomen have, on a very moderate estimate, raised and spent in twelve months a sum of £100,000 in working for the vote alone, may be taken as some evidence of the intensity of their demand and of the wantonness of infliction upon them of further delay and further sacrifice.[1]
I have said that in England women have made great progress on the lines of personal and social effort. There are reactionaries so consistent as to deny that there has been any progress at all, and in almost every direction of change it is possible to find people who think it was bad. The change in the lives of Englishwomen has been so rapid, however, that it stares us all in the face and cries out for recognition. Vainly we wail about the dedicated ways of womanhood, when scarcely a living woman is to be found there.
Much of the great change has been due to deliberate and devoted effort on the part of men as well as women, who, at any rate, thought they were making for progress. The great impulse towards the education of the people which characterised the nineteenth century made a far greater revolution in the lives of women than of men. Not only did elementary education put all the young girls of the working class on something like an equality with boys, but the foundation of public day schools and the decisions of Charity Commissioners gave girls of the middle class a chance of education in school subjects, and, what was of at least as much importance, removed them from the hothouse air of the home and the seminary and gave them the discipline of knowing their fellows and finding their level. The great movement for the higher education of girls secured, step by step, their instruction in the universities, their admission to degree examinations and, finally, their admission to degrees in all but the two most conservative universities. Of more recent growth is the inevitable development of postgraduate research among women. All these changes were deliberate and were regarded by those who initiated them as great reforms. So also were the efforts made, largely by the same group of people, to open careers to qualified women. All the world knows of the foundation of the great modern career of sick-nursing; of the more bitter and prolonged struggle of women to be allowed to study medicine and surgery and qualify as practitioners therein; of the gradual introduction of women into State service as clerks, inspectors and commissioners. All these changes had, to a greater or less degree, to be fought for by those who desired them. They represented improvements in the status of women, increase in power, in knowledge and in earnings. People resisted them with more or less tenacity, and used against the reformers the sort of arguments they are still using against further emancipation; but few can be found now who do not admit that, broadly speaking, they represented improvements. There are, of course, some Orientalists even in England, who think in their hearts that it was a great mistake to teach women to read. But most people now accept the principle that women should have the best education available, and only differ as to what that education should be.
Other vast changes have, however, been made in the lives of women which no women or friends of women consciously strove for, which no one regarded as great reforms, which were, in fact, the unintended and unforeseen results of man's invention and man's commercial and financial enterprise, directed solely towards the increase of purchaseable commodities and the manipulation of these in markets; not by any means directed towards the improvement of the lives of women and the home, towards the easing of labour, or the increase of beauty, peace and health. With the introduction of machinery there came the usual talk about its lightening the lot of the worker and so forth, but when one reads the history of the first factories, of child-labour and monstrous hours of work, inhuman and foul conditions and vast fortunes made in a few months by exploitation and speculation, one is forced to recognise that the passing of work out of the home, and of the woman into the factory was accomplished without thought of social consequences, and that, of all creatures on earth, the women were the most helpless to resist this change, had they wished to do so.
These, then, are the two great classes of revolution that have come over the lives of Englishwomen during the past hundred years. One blind, unintended, inexorable, whether for good or evil; the other fought and striven for with the highest idealism and devotion. Both wrong and disastrous in the eyes of some. Both, whether right or wrong, accomplishments, hard facts, which the sociologist must meet and either repeal or amend. The one thing he must not do is idly to bewail the revolution and refuse either to adapt persons to conditions or conditions to persons.
Pathetic people lament the disappearance of the woman of a hundred years ago, and some reproach the present generation with being rude to its great-grandmother. But surely any great-grandmother of sense would not wish the twentieth-century man to be mated with a nineteenth-century woman. Even regarding women merely as complements to men, it is desirable that the wife should be of the same generation as the husband. And it is nothing short of cruelty to desire to see an early Victorian lady under modern conditions; it would be like nothing so much as the liberation of a cage-bred canary into a flock of ravenous starlings.
The industrial revolution did extraordinary things to women. It drove them out of the shelter and subordination of the home and bluntly told them that they must compete for their lives in the open market with men. It taught them (a lesson which is hard indeed for women to learn, and which they are only learning very slowly) that only by the combination of individuals can progress be made in a world where no individuals, no loves count, and where there are no considerations but economic considerations. At the same time it gave them wages in hard cash for the work they had hitherto done as parts of the family organism, without wages in cash. These wages, for the most part shamefully inadequate for a human existence, have yet been unconditional and have produced in working women a sense of independence and a desire for "spending money" that, for good or evil, is having an immense effect in the comparison they make in their hearts between wage-earning and non-wage-earning employments. Lastly, the use of political pressure by working men, to further their industrial purposes, has slowly roused working women to desire power to put that same pressure on for their purposes.
All these effects have been slow in emerging and even slower in becoming clear; the aroused interest of more fortunate women has greatly helped in clarifying thought and bringing it to a practical issue. It is sometimes brought up against the suffrage movement that it is a middle-class movement, in the sense that women of education and some leisure were its pioneers. Undoubtedly it was so, in its inception. How could it have been otherwise? It is so no longer and it never was so, in the sense that middle-class women wished to secure something for themselves from which working women should be excluded; the very reverse was and is true, for, in demanding the franchise for all women on the same terms as men, privileged women are deliberately asking to be allowed to abandon some of their privileges. They are asking that the privileges of social influence which they now possess, and which the charwoman and the factory worker are without, shall be compensated for, to some extent at least, by the granting of a democratic franchise to less privileged women.
The entrance of women into money-earning employments has had two further effects of considerable importance. The Married Women's Property Act was in part a result; for whereas it was plausible to hold that a woman had only a courtesy title to wealth which had been made and given or bequeathed to her by some man, it revolted everyone's sense of fairness that, when a man had said at the altar, "With all my worldly goods I thee endow," he should become entitled to the wages of the charwoman or the copyright of the novelist whom he had married. Another effect was that women began more consciously to compare their work with men's work. So long as men always went out as "bread-winners" and women stayed in the home, it was possible to entertain extravagant notions of the arduousness of a man's toil. Now that women are book-keepers, clerks, doctors and inspectors, they have a measure that they had not formerly, and to many women the peace, order, simplicity and convenience of office or factory may well have appeared in favourable contrast with the exacting and conflicting claims of the household, run too often with inadequate supplies, shortage of labour and antiquated tools.
Enough has been said in this very hasty survey to show the gigantic changes in the lives of women, the necessity for clear and unprejudiced thinking about those lives, and for a certain courage in experimenting with them. The women are thinking. What are they thinking about? About education and training; about marriage and parentage and prostitution; about custom and opinion and prejudice; about the economic and moral and religious side of all questions; about organisation and agitation, about politics and representation in politics; about laws and the administration of laws.
And the movement is world-wide. I shall speak mainly of the forms it has taken in England. They vary in every country. But the world is now so well in touch that the experience of one country becomes the experience of all, and what women undergo in one country smites the hearts of all women and rouses in them the sense of personal pride, of womanly dignity, of faith in woman's work and soul. The women's movement has brought about a solidarity unmatched by any other, a solidarity which represents a very high ideal of civilisation, a civilisation based upon the law of love and the knowledge of truth. As the president of the Woman Suffrage Alliance said at Budapest, women feel now that by the degradation of some women, all women are cheapened; that what is injurious to the human race is wrong, whether it be perpetrated in Chicago, in Singapore or in Brussels.
- ↑ The National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies in twelve months raised, at headquarters and among its affiliated societies, £42,000. I have assumed that the Women's Social and Political Union raised as much. It seems likely that if we add together all the other societies (thirty odd), and also reckon the immense amount of money spent in travelling and so forth by voluntary workers, the total of £100,000 is well within the mark.