AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT
The man in khaki stood at the door. And he held a woman close to his
heart in mansion or cottage—in a rose bowered cottage on the English
downs, or red roofed behind the yellow walls of France and Italy,
or blue trimmed beside a linden tree in Germany, or ikon blessed in
Russia. All that he had in the world, his estates, his fields or his
vineyards, his flocks or his factory, his shop or his job, his home and
his children, he was leaving behind. “I leave them to you, dear,” he
said.
The bugles blew. And he kissed her again. Then he went marching down
the street in those fateful days of August, 1914, when all the world
began going to war.
So in land after land she took up the trust and the burden that the
man who marched away had left her, to “carry on” civilisation. It was
the woman movement that was to be under the flags of all nations. Ours
too now flies behind the battle smoke. A little while since and our
men commenced to stand in khaki on our front porches, then went down
the front walk to join the long brown lines passing along Main Street
on their way to France. At Washington they told us why it had to be.
“They were going,” the President himself explained, “to fight for
Democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority, to have a
voice in their own government.” In the name of liberty, we too pass
under the rod. But we fall in line to catch step with the women’s
battalions of the world. We shall see them moving triumphantly even
on the very strongholds against which the woman’s cause of yesterday
dashed itself most vainly.
The tasks of the world were one by one being handed over to women
by men who were taking up arms instead. By solemn proclamation of
church and state, the patriotic duty of thus releasing every possible
citizen for military service was profoundly impressed on the women of
every nation. Only there was still one function that no country was
asking them to assume. In England a thoughtful woman filling in her
registration paper stating the national service that she could render,
wrote down her qualifications like this: “Possessed of a perfectly good
mentality and a University training, prepared to relieve a member of
Parliament who wishes to go to the front.”
But the lady wasn’t called. Whole brigades of women swung out across
the threshold of the home into industry. Regiment after regiment went
by into commerce. Companies passed into the professions. Cohorts even
crossed the danger zone for duty right up to the firing line. But
government was still reserved for men. Could a woman vote? O, my
lords, the legislative hall was not woman’s place!
Then the armies of Europe got into action. Even as their primitive
forefathers had done, the men of the modern world came together to
put liberty to the test of the sword. They fight for the freedoms
their leaders have formulated—and for another they did not know and
did not understand. A freedom that was enunciated from Holloway jail
and turbulently contested in London streets is also being fought to a
finish in front line trenches even along the Somme and the Aisne and
the Yser.
Sergeant Jones of Company C of the 14th regiment of the Cold Stream
Guards was a combatant. He was a British soldier bravely defending his
flag against the Huns. And he found himself up against a great deal
more that his enemies also equally face, the most revolutionary force
that the world has ever known in this Great War that is overturning the
destinies and opinions of individuals and the decrees of the social
order as lightly and as easily as the dynasties of kings.
Sergeant Jones was bowled completely over. A German bullet hit him,
and another and another. For weeks thereafter he was wandering on
the borderlands of death. At length he was drifting back to earth
in a roseate blur of warmth and soft comfort. Slowly his mind began
to establish again the realities of existence. The roseate blur
straightened away and away from beneath his chin: it was the cherry
red comforter that covered his bed at Endell Street Hospital, London.
Rip Van Winkle himself came back with no more wonderment. The sergeant
awoke, a soldier literally in the hands of women.
He couldn’t so much as bathe his own face. A woman in a white
headdress, with a red cross in the centre of her forehead, was doing it
for him. When he opened his eyes again, a girl orderly in a blue tunic
was saying, “You can smoke if you want to.” And she began propping
pillows softly about his shoulders. There was a queer numb feeling
along his side. He couldn’t find his right hand. “Never mind,” the girl
said hastily. She placed the cigarette between his lips and held the
lighted match. He smoked and began to remember that he had gone over
the top. He pulled gently again for his right hand. He tried to draw up
his left leg. At the least movement, somewhere outside the numb, tight
bound area of him, there were answering stabs and twinges of pain. He
wanted to flick the ashes from his cigarette. As he turned his head and
his left hand found the tray on the little bedside stand, he glimpsed
a long row of cherry red comforters that undulated in irregular lines.
From where he lay, he could see still, white faces, bandaged heads, an
arm in a sling, a man in a convalescent uniform clumsily trying out
crutches. The man in the very next bed to his own lay moaning with
face upturned to the light, hollow, empty, staring sockets where the
eyes had been. In the bed beyond was a man with his face sewed up in
an awful twisted seam that was the writhing caricature of the agony
that had slashed it. A sickening sensation of nausea swept over the
sergeant. God in heaven, he thought, then how much was the matter with
him?
A woman was coming down the room, pausing now and then by the side of
a cherry red comforter. By the waving mass of her red brown hair, she
was a woman, but not such as the sergeant had seen before. His mother
wore a black dress and his wife’s, he remembered, was a blue silk
for Sundays and at home, why he supposed it was calico beneath their
gingham aprons. But this woman was in khaki as surely as ever he had
been.
Now she reached his bed. She stood looking down on him with an air
of proprietorship, almost of possession. “How are you, this morning,
Sergeant Jones?” she asked, with firm professional fingers reaching
authoritatively for the pulse in his left wrist. Without waiting for
a reply, she was proceeding calmly to turn back the covers. “We have
a little work to do here, I think,” she said, gently grasping—could
the sergeant be sure—it seemed to be his left leg. “The dressings, you
know,” she was saying easily.
“But, but, ’er—the doctor,” he gasped in protest.
“I am the doctor,” she answered.
Of the female of the species, Sergeant Jones of course had heard. He
had never before seen one. “I’ll be—” he started to say. But he wasn’t.
Then he would have jerked away. But he couldn’t. “I want a doctor, a
real one,” he blurted out angrily.
A shadow of a smile flickered for an instant in the woman’s eyes.
Often she had seen them like this. “I am the surgeon in charge, the
commanding military officer here,” she replied evenly. “After awhile,
I’m sure you won’t mind.”
She went quietly on unwinding him. He heard her scissors snip. She was
going to take some stitches. Once or twice she had to hurt horribly.
She did it with deft precision. With the same quick motions, the
sergeant had seen his wife at home roll out a pudding crust or flap
a pancake. It was the convincing sureness of the woman who knows her
business. Could a woman be a doctor, after all? The strips of linen had
piled in a blood stained heap on the floor. With an effort the sergeant
steadied his voice: “What is there left of me?” he asked.
The doctor smoothed his pillow first. “Sergeant,” she said very gently,
“you have one perfectly good arm. I think there will be one leg. Last
week the other—” But the sergeant did not have to hear the rest of the
sentence. When he struggled back from somewhere in a black abyss, the
hand that last week had held the surgeon’s knife was softly smoothing
back the damp locks of hair from his cold forehead. She drew the cherry
red comforter up and patted it about his shoulders with the infinite
sympathy that speaks in a woman’s touch. She leaned over him with a
glance that signalled courage and understanding. Then she left him to
fight the fight he had to fight in the grim grey light of that London
day for his own readjustment to the cruelty of existence. Was he glad
that a woman was a doctor? She had saved his life.
There were weeks of convalescence. The hospital librarian in khaki
stopped beside his cherry red comforter. He turned his face to the
wall. There was nothing she could do for him. But in time he came to
watch for her on her rounds as he did for the doctor. Finally he asked
for books and magazines and the papers. And the news of the day that
she brought him, flared with just two topics, War and Woman. The one
was man’s universal activity, the other was his Great Discovery. You
know how pleased a boy is with a Christmas toy he finds will go with
some new unexpected action? Women were in all kinds of unprecedented
action.
THE NEW WOMAN’S SLOGAN
The girl orderly in the blue tunic dressed Sergeant Jones one day for
the convalescent soldiers’ outing. A girl chauffeur of the Woman’s
Reserve Ambulance Corps picked him up in her arms like a child and
set him on the seat beside her and took her place at the wheel. Could
a woman drive a car? She shot hers in and out of the tangled maze of
the London traffic as easily as a girl he had seen send a croquet ball
through a wicket. Other cars whizzed by with women at the wheel. Great
motor vans, with a woman on the high driver’s seat, swung safely past.
Fleets of motor busses came careening along with girl conductors in
short skirts balancing jauntily in command on the rear platforms. The
bus marked “Woolwich Special” drew up at the Haymarket curb to take on
a load of women munition workers going out for the night shift at the
great arsenal. High on a ladder against a building here in Cockspur
Street, two girl window cleaners stand at work in tunic and trousers.
Girl footmen are opening the doors of carriages before the fashionable
shops of Oxford Street. Girl operators are running the lifts. Girl
messengers in government uniform are going in and out of Whitehall.
A kingdom is in the hands of its women. Round and round the world has
turned since yesterday.
Here in Trafalgar Square a crowd of a thousand people hang on the words
that a woman is speaking. Jones had never heard Mrs. Pankhurst; he had
forbidden his wife to when she came to their town. Rampant, women’s
rights females were against the laws of God and England. This, the arch
conspirator of them all, he pictured in his mind’s eye as permanently
occupied in burning country residences and bombing cathedrals and
engaging in hand to hand conflicts with the London police.
Now wouldn’t it take your breath away? Here she was doing nothing
at all of the kind. A very well gowned lady stood directly between
the British lions, her slender figure outlined against the statue of
Nelson. Her clear, ringing tones carried over the listening throng to
Jones and his comrades in the Women’s Reserve Ambulance car. One small
hand frequently came down into the palm of the other in the emphatic
gesture that in times past brought two continents to attention. It is
the hand that hurled the stone that cracked the windows of houses of
government around the world.
To-day, as England’s most active recruiting agent, the greatest leader
of the woman’s cause is calling men to the colours to win the war. Had
she once a slogan, Votes for Women? ’Tis a phrase forgot. In the public
squares of London since the war, her countrymen have heard from Mrs.
Pankhurst only “Work for Women.” Round and round, you see, the world
has turned.
A puzzled Sergeant Jones asked the next day for a book about the woman
movement. It was Olive Schreiner’s “Woman and Labour” the librarian in
khaki brought him. “But I wanted to know about the suffragettes, the
suffragettes. Did you ever hear of them?” he questioned. So Rip Van
Winkle might have asked, I suppose, why, say, for women who once wore
hoop skirts.
The woman beside the hospital bed smiled inscrutably for an instant.
“Sergeant,” she said with a level glance, “I was one, a militant,
Sergeant,” she added evenly. “And the doctor was in Holloway jail, and
your nurse. And the girl who drove your car yesterday was a hunger
striker and—” She stopped. The truce! By the pact that was signed in
Kingsway, the most radical suffragists in the world, along with all the
others, were war workers now in their country’s cause and not their own.
The woman in khaki was still. Jones stared. She was dropping no bombs.
Only the armies were smashing. Nothing about here was broken but
men—and women were mending them!
At length they had the sergeant patched up as well as they could. He
would never again work at his skilled trade. But they pinned a medal
for valour on his coat lapel. And they sent him back to his wife in the
north of England. The woman who met him at the door fell on her knees:
“My dear, my dear!” She gathered him from a wheel chair into her arms
with a sob. The man who had gone out in khaki was home again.
“Mustered out of the service,” his papers read. But his wife will never
be!
Mustered out of service. So was the man with the twisted face, who
never again can smile. And so was the man with the blinded eyes, whose
little daughter on sunny days leads him to the Green Park where he sits
on a bench and talks to the squirrels. Just so I have seen him sitting
in the Gardens of the Tuileries. Just so he sits in the Tiergarten by
the side of the River Spree. He is going to be “re-educated” to keep
chickens. And Sergeant Jones shall learn basket weaving for a living!
Oh, and there are thousands of others!
After each great drive on the front, they are passing through the
hospitals to the cottage rose bowered and red roofed, to the blue
trimmed cottage and the ikon blessed cottage. And now they are waited
for in plain little white houses where a woman on the front porch
shades her eyes with her hand to look down Main Street as far as she
can see. And it isn’t the woman who can fall on her knees and gather
her burden to a hungry heart whose shoulders will bear the heaviest
load. It is the woman whose arms are empty never again to be filled!
These are the women whom not even the peace treaty will discharge from
their “national service.” Every Great Push makes more of them. And the
rest must always watch fearfully, furtively looking down Main Street
as the years of strife wear on. Who shall say whether she too may be
conscripted to “carry on” for life. For this is the way of war with
women.
Like this, the trust and the burden have rested heavier and heavier on
woman’s heart and hands. Millions of men will never be able to lift it
for her again. No one knows when the others will. Men must fight and
women must work.
So many men are with the flag at the front. So many men are under the
crosses, the acres of crosses with which battle fields are planted. So
many men are in wheel chairs and on crutches. Women are carrying on in
the home, in industry, in commerce and in the professions. Then why not
in the State?
[Illustration:
MRS. MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT OF LONDON
For fifty years leader of the Constitutional Suffragists, whose cause
triumphed in 1918 when Parliament granted the franchise to English
women.
]
Little by little, in every land, a voice began to be heard. It was the
voice of the man with the flag, and the man with the twisted face, and
the man with the blinded eyes, and the voice of Sergeant Jones. It
said what the sergeant said, when from his wheel chair by the window
where his wife had placed it, he took his pen in hand and wrote back to
Endell Street hospital: “Women are wonderful. I didn’t know before.
Now I wouldn’t be afraid for you even to have the vote.”
And curiously enough, what the man in the wheel chair and the man in
the Green Park and the Tuileries and the man with the flag was saying,
the newspapers began to repeat as if it had been syndicated round the
world. The _Matin_ had it in Paris, the _Times_ in London and the
_Tageblatt_ in Berlin. You read it in all languages: “The women are
wonderful. We didn’t know before.”
GREATEST DRIVE FOR DEMOCRACY
Then couldn’t a woman who could cast a shell, cast a vote? Parliaments
trembled on the verge of letting her try.
It wouldn’t be at all the difficult undertaking it used to look to
those women of yesterday, whose place was in the home pouring afternoon
tea or embroidering a flower in a piece of lace. Why, to-day they would
scarcely have to go out of their way at all to the polls! They could
just stop in as easily as not, as they went down the street to their
day’s work in shop and office and factory. Sergeant Jones’s wife is
out of the home now anyway from six o’clock in the morning until seven
at night making munitions. Some one must support her family, you know.
Well, all over the world a new call began. Simultaneously in every
civilised land, through the crack in the window of the government house
where man gathered with his fellow man, you could hear it. In some
lands yet it is only a murmur of dissent. But in many lands now it
is a rising chorus of consent: “Women wanted in the counsels of the
nation!”
At the gates of government, the new woman movement has arrived. And not
through the broken window is it entering in. Without benefit of even
a riot, suffrage walking very softly and sedately is going through an
open door. In England, a gentleman holds it ajar, a gentleman suave and
smiling and bowing the ladies to pass!
Democracy, the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice
in their own government, is breaking through apparently on all the
fronts at once. It is a most remarkable coincidence. In August, 1917,
Parliament in England removed the “grille,” the brass lattice barring
the ladies’ gallery in the House of Commons and symbolising what had
been the English woman’s position. The _Times_, commenting on the
proceeding, characterised it as a “domestic revolution.” In the same
month in India 5000 Hindus were applauding Shimrati Pandita Lejjawati
who at Jullundur had come out on a public platform to urge that her
country abolish purdah!
But the great drive for Democracy that now thrills around the world at
the International Suffrage Alliance headquarters, began unmistakably
in Britain. Mrs. Pankhurst in the old days never staged a raid on the
houses of Parliament more spectacularly. Just see the gentleman bowing
at the open door! It is Mr. Asquith, the former leader who for years
held the Parliamentary line against all woman’s progress. And smiling
right over his shoulder stands Mr. Lloyd George, the present premier.
Oh, well! The girl in the green sweater who horsewhipped one member of
Parliament, at the Brighton races, is driving a Red Cross ambulance in
Flanders. The quiet little woman in a grey coat, who fired the country
house of another in 1912, is rolling lint bandages. Sergeant Jones’s
wife has become a bread winner. Soldiers are not afraid for women to
vote. And cabinet ministers take courage!
There is a town in the north of England with a monument erected to a
shipwrecked crew: “In memory of 17 souls and 3 women,” says the marble
testimonial. That categorical classification to which the English ivy
clings is about to be changed. Six million English women are about to
be made people![3]
[3] Bill passed by House of Lords and received King’s sanction, Feb. 6,
1918.
At the outbreak of hostilities, politicians the world over hastened
to declare woman’s suffrage a “controversial” question that must be
put aside during the war. And every government engaged said to its
suffragists: “We’re in so much trouble, for heaven’s sake don’t you
make us any more.”
“Well, we won’t,” the women agreed, as the organisations in land after
land called off their political campaigns. It was for his sake—the
man in khaki. And in every land, the trained women of the suffrage
societies assembled their countrywomen to stand ready with first aid
for him. Day by day, week after week, now year after year, they have
been feeding the nation’s defenders, clothing them, nursing them,
passing up ammunition to them. To-day there isn’t an army that could
hold the field but for the women behind the men behind the guns.
In England Mrs. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, president of the National
Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, had been a member of the
committee that in 1866 sent up to Parliament the first petition for
the enfranchisement of women. She had been a girl of twenty then. It
was a cause, you see, to which she had given a lifetime, that she
now laid aside. With the summons, “Let us show ourselves worthy of
citizenship,” she turned 500 women’s societies from suffrage propaganda
and Parliamentary petitioning to hospital and relief work.
But it was when Mrs. Pankhurst, the dramatic leader of the Woman’s
Social and Political Union who had first smashed suffrage into the
front page of the newspapers of all nations, lay down her arms to give
her country’s claims precedence above her own, that the world realised
that there was a new formation in the lines of the woman movement.
Emmeline Pankhurst was on parole from Holloway jail recuperating from a
hunger strike, when there came to her from her government the overtures
for a peace parley. When the authorities offered her release for all
of the suffragettes in prison and amnesty for those under sentence,
she ran up the Union Jack where her suffrage flag had been. In no
uncertain terms she announced in Kingsway, “I who have been against the
government, am now for it. Our country’s war shall be our war.”
For a minute after that proclamation, you could have heard a pin drop
in the great assembly hall of the smashing suffragettes. Then in a
burst of applause she had them with her: they would follow their
leader. Some few at first drew back in consternation. Had their late
leader lost her mind? The girl in the green sweater looked dazed: “I
was in the front ranks of her body guard when we stormed Buckingham
Palace,” she murmured. A very few were angry: “She’s selling out the
cause,” they exclaimed bitterly.
But she wasn’t. The greatest little field marshal the woman movement
has ever known, was leading it to final victory.
When Kitchener announced, “We shall not be able to win this war until
women are doing nearly everything that men have done,” it was the
woman who had organised raids on Parliament who now organised the
woman labour of a nation. On the day that she led 40,000 women down
the Strand to man the factories of England and turned Lincoln’s Inn
House, her headquarters in Kingsway, into a munitions employment
bureau, opponents of the woman’s cause the world over began an orderly
retirement from their front line trenches. The next morning the London
_Post_ announced: “We stand on the threshold of a new age.”
We do. You see, you could not have practically the men of all nations
in arms for Democracy without their finding it. And some of them who
buckled on their armour to go far crusading for it, are coming to the
conviction that there is also Democracy to be done at home. When the
history of these days at length is written, it will come to be recorded
that the right of women to have a voice in the government to whose
authority they submit, was practically assured by the events of 1917.
In that year, the women who came to petition the English Parliament for
citizenship, got what they had for fifty years been asking in vain. For
the women who with Mrs. Pankhurst and Mrs. Fawcett and Mrs. Despard of
the Women’s Freedom League now stood at the gates of government were:
women shell makers and howitzer makers, pit brow lassies, chain makers,
textile workers, railway engine cleaners, women motor lorry drivers
in khaki, women letter carriers, women window cleaners, women bus
conductors, women engineers, women clerks, women in the civil service,
women tailors, women bakers, women bookbinders, women teachers, women
army nurses, women army doctors, women dentists, women chemists, and
women farm labourers. Among them was the wife of the man with the
twisted face and the wife of the man with the blinded eyes and the wife
of Sergeant Jones.
The capitulation of the English Government was assured in the
recantations of its greatest men. Ex-premier Herbert H. Asquith spoke
first: “I myself,” he declared, “as I believe many others, no longer
regard the woman suffrage question from the standpoint we occupied
before the war.... I have said that women should work out their own
salvation. They have done it. The woman’s cause in England now presents
an unanswerable case.”
Mr. Lloyd George agreed: “The place of woman,” he said, “is altered
for good and all. It would be an outrage not to give her the vote.
The further parliamentary action now involved may be regarded as a
formality.”
General French, former commander of the British armies, the brother
of Mrs. Despard and of Mrs. Harley who died at the front, crossed the
Channel to announce his conversion to the woman’s cause through “the
heroism, the endurance and the organising ability of the women on the
battlefields of France and Belgium.”
The press of the country burst into print with a new confession of
faith. The _Observer_ declared: “In the past we have opposed the claim
on one ground and one ground alone—namely, that woman by the fact of
her sex was debarred from bearing a share in national defence. We were
wrong.” The _Daily Mail_: “The old argument against giving women the
franchise was that they were useless in war. But we have found out that
we could not carry on the war without them.” The _Evening News_: “In
the home woman has long been a partner—not always in name, perhaps, but
generally in practice. Now she is a partner in our national effort.
And if she demands a partner’s voice in the concerns of the firm, who
shall say her Nay?” The _Northern Daily Telegraph_: “The duties of
citizenship are fulfilled by women to the uttermost. The continuance
of the sex disqualification would be a cruel crime and a blind folly
as well.” The _Referee_: “Women have earned a right to be heard in the
nation’s councils. The part they have played in winning the war is
their victory.”
Like this, the cause that yesterday was rejected and most bitterly
assailed of men was now championed by the nation. This was a kingdom
saying Votes for Women. Field Marshal Pankhurst would never again have
to. Her war-time strategy had won. When Mr. Asquith rose in the House
of Commons himself to move the woman’s suffrage resolution, it had
ceased to be a “controversial” question. The measure was passed by an
overwhelming majority.
RECORD YEAR FOR SUFFRAGE CAUSE
The domestic reform that was begun in England has echoed round the
world. See that which had come to pass in 1917: Four other nations,
France, Italy, Hungary and the United States had suffrage measures
before their parliaments. Members of the Reichstag were warning that
Germany cannot avoid it if she would keep up in efficiency with the
rest of the world. King Albert announced that it should be one of his
first acts for a restored Belgium to confer citizenship on its women.
Holland and Canada have just accomplished it in limited measure.
Russia and Mexico in the throes of revolution have actually achieved
it. Women have for the first time taken their seats in the governing
bodies of three nations, Hermila Galindo in the Congress of Mexico,
Mrs. McKinney and Lieutenant Roberta Catherine McAdams in Canada and
Jeanette Rankin in the United States. A woman, the Countess Sophia
Panin, has been a cabinet minister in Russia. And for the first time
since civilisation began, a woman, Dr. Poliksena Schiskina Yavein, as
a member of the Council of 61 at Petrograd, has assisted in writing a
nation’s constitution.
[Illustration:
MME. CHARLES LE VERRIER
One of the feminist leaders in Paris to whose appeal for votes for
women the French government is listening to-day.
]
On with Democracy! Nations are convinced that those who serve their
country should have a voice in directing its destinies. Land after
land preparing to extend its franchise for soldiers, as England
with her Representation of the People Bill, is reflecting on a real
representation. For every country is finding itself face to face with
the question with which Asquith first startled Britain, “Then what are
you going to do with the women?” Everywhere at the gates of government
are deputations like that in England who are saying, “We also serve who
stand behind the armies. We too want to be people.”
And some one else wants them to be. From the training camps to the
trenches, the supporting column of the man in khaki stretches. Every
knitted sweater, every package of cigarettes tied with yellow ribbon
has been helping votes for women. And now over there he is getting
anxious about his job or his home or his children. What can he know
at the front about food control or the regulation of school hours in
Paris or London or New York? And when there are decisions like that to
be made, “I’d like to leave it to Her,” the soldier is beginning to
conclude. Why, war-time is the time for women to be free! The whole
world is athrill with the new ideal.
See the lines of women arriving before the government houses. Theresa
Labriola voices the demand of the National Federation in Italy:
“Women,” she says, “form the inner lines of defence for the nations.
We need the ballot to make our lines strong.” Yes, yes, agrees her
country. You shall begin right away with the municipal franchise. And
Premier Boselli and the Italian Parliament are proceeding to get it
ready.
In France, Mme. Dewitt Schlumberger and Mme. Charles LeVerrier for the
Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes, present the “unanswerable
case.” The senate on the Seine, looking out, sees many women wearing
long crêpe veils in the delegation before its doors. “Let us give
them,” says a member of the Chamber of Deputies in a burst of poetic
chivalry, “the suffrage _de la morte_: every soldier dying on the
battle field shall be permitted to designate the woman relative he
wishes to have carry on his citizenship for him.” Very gently the women
of France declined the suffrage of the dead. Presenting a carefully
prepared brief that was the review of their war work, they said, “We
can vote for ourselves, please.” And who else shall? There are whole
communes with most of the men dead. There are villages with not
so much as a man to be made mayor, and a woman filling the office
instead. The French Chamber of Deputies has before it a bill to confer
the municipal franchise on women. “It is an act of justice,” says
ex-Premier Viviani. The _Droit du Peuple_ declares, “After the war,
many homes will be maintained by women who will perform men’s tasks and
fulfil men’s obligations. They ought to have men’s rights.”
Canada, too, thought to reward her women with a vicarious vote. The
“next of kin” franchise was devised, by which the Government has
conferred on the wife or widow, mother, sisters and daughters of men
in the service the right to vote. But the delegations of women outside
the government house at Ottawa do not go away. They still wait. “We
also serve,” they repeat. And the country, in which no less than five
provinces last year gave to all of their women full citizenship, has
promised now to prepare the full direct federal franchise.
In Mittel Europa, Rosika Schwimmer is marshalling the feminist forces.
Under her leadership, a great deputation has marched to the Town Hall
in Budapest. The resolution there presented for universal suffrage was
carried by the Burgomaster to the Emperor. In reply, the Hungarian
Feminist Union has received the assurance of the prime minister that
the Government will introduce a measure extending the franchise to
a limited class of women. At Prague, Austria, the Town Council has
appointed a committee to draw up a new local government franchise
which shall include women. The free town of Hamburg, Germany, preparing
to enlarge its franchise in recognition of the self-sacrifice of
soldiers, hears the voice of Helene Lange and 27,000 women. They are
reminding the Hamburg Senate that women, too, who have borne the
burdens of war, will wish to devote themselves to reconstruction
and in order to fulfil the duties of citizens, they claim citizens’
rights. The Prussian Diet has before it the petition of Frau Minna
Cauer and the Frauenstimmrechtsbund urging that suffrage for women be
included in the projected franchise reform. The Reichstag arranging a
Representation of the People Bill has at last referred the petition of
the Reichverbund, the German National Union for Woman Suffrage, “for
consideration” _zur kenntnisnahme_, which is the first indication of
their change of attitude before the women’s offensive. The Socialists
in the Reichstag are urging: “Women suffrage is marching triumphantly
through other lands. Can Germany afford to fall behind the other
nations, with her women less fully equipped than the rest for the
struggle for existence?” Meanwhile, Germany, as other countries, is
depending more and more upon her women. Two leading cities, Berlin
and Frankfort-on-Main, both have women appointed to their municipal
committees. Frau Hedwig Heyl, that woman behind the food control policy
for the Empire, who has turned her great chemical factory on the
Salzufer to canning meat for the army, says: “Woman suffrage in Germany
is a fruit not yet ripe for the picking. I water the tree,” she adds
significantly.
Holland has seen in The Hague 4,000 women assembled in the Binnehof,
the public square before the House of Parliament. On their behalf,
Dr. Aletta Jacobs, president of the Vereenigingvoor Vronwenkeisrecht,
presented to Premier Cort Van der Linden a petition with 164,696
signatures, asking for citizenship for women. “Society,” Dr. Jacobs
told him, “can only gain when the forces and energy of its women, now
concentrated on the struggle for the vote, can be used along with
men’s in finding a solution for the many social problems for which
the insight of both is necessary.” And the Dutch Parliament, making
over its Constitution to enlarge the franchise for men, decided on
the amazing plan about women, “We will try them first, as members of
Parliament. And if we find they can make the laws, afterward we shall
let them vote for law makers.” So the new Dutch constitution gives
to women the “passive” franchise, which is the right to hold all
administrative offices, including representation in Parliament. There
is also removed an old prohibitory clause, so that the way is now
clear for the introduction of a measure for the “active” franchise for
women—if it is found the dinner doesn’t burn while they are sitting in
Parliament.
A South African Party Congress, for the first time it has ever listened
to women, has received a delegation who urge: “Half the population of
the country is composed of women. Can you any longer afford to do
without our point of view in your national deliberations?” The Grand
Council of Switzerland is considering a bill which is before it,
proposing to give women the franchise in communal affairs. Mexico is
struggling toward national freedom with her women at the side of her
men. It was not even considered necessary to incorporate in the new
constitution the woman suffrage provision suggested by Hermila Galindo
at the national convention. The new Mexican Federal constitution states
explicitly that “Voters are those Mexicans who are 21 if unmarried and
over 18 if married and possessed of an honest means of livelihood.” And
under this constitution, in the March, 1917, elections, Mexican women
quietly voted as a matter of course along with the other citizens.
[Illustration:
DR. POLIKSENA SCHISKINA YAVEIN
Who led 45,000 women to the duma in Petrograd to make their calling to
citizenship sure.
]
In all of Russia’s turbulent revolutionary unrest, none of the divers
parties struggling for supremacy there, denies the claim of half
the race to the freedom which it is hoped ultimately to establish.
The Provisional government’s first announcement was for universal
suffrage. But the Russian women weren’t going to take any chance.
They remembered a French revolution that also proclaimed “universal”
suffrage and has not yet done anything of the kind. The Russian League
for the Defence of Women’s Rights said, “Let’s be certain about this.
We want our calling to citizenship made sure.” So Dr. Schiskina Yavein,
the president of the League, led 45,000 women to the Imperial Duma in
Petrograd. As their spokesman she told the government: “At this time
of national crisis we should have no confusion of terms. Without the
participation of women, no franchise can be universal. We have come for
an official declaration concerning the abolition of all limitations
with regard to women. We demand a clear and definite answer to two
questions: Are women to have votes in Russia? And are women to have a
voice in the Constituent Assembly which only in that case can represent
the will of the people? We are here to remain until we receive the
answer.”
Well, the answer came. It was an unconditional affirmative, received
in turn from the men who came out from the government house to reply
to the waiting women: M. V. Rodzianko, president of the Imperial
Duma; N. S. Tchkeidze, president of the Council of Workingmen’s and
Soldiers’ Deputies, and Prince Lvoff, president of the Council of
Ministers. And when the preliminary parliament of the Russian Republic
was opened at Petrograd in October, 1917, the chair was offered to
Madame Breshkovsky, the celebrated “Little Grandmother” of the Russian
Revolutionaries, as the senior member of the council.
In New York City on election night of November, 1917, the newsboys
shrilled out a new cry, “The wimmin win!” “The wimmin win!” It was like
a victory at Verdun or the Somme. The cables throbbed with the news
that New York State, where the woman movement for all the world began
ninety years before, had made its over three million women people. It
is now only a question of time when all other American women will be.
New York State carries with it almost as many electoral votes as all
of the 17 previous States combined, which have conferred on women the
Presidential franchise. The strongest fortress of the opposition is
fallen. And President Wilson has already recommended women suffrage to
the rest of the States as a war measure for immediate consideration.
It was from the hand of Susan B. Anthony that the torch of freedom was
received by every leader of the woman movement now carrying it. On her
grave at Rochester, N. Y., we have already laid the victory wreath.
For Democracy, the right of women to have a voice in the government to
whose authority they submit, is about to be established in the earth!
“One thing that emerges from this war, I feel absolutely convinced,”
(it is Mr. Lloyd George, Premier of England, who is speaking in a
public address), “is the conviction that women must be admitted to a
complete partnership in the government of nations. And when they are
so admitted, I am more firmly rooted than ever in the confident hope
that they will help to insure the peace of nations and to prevent
the repetition of this terrible condition of things which we are now
deploring. If women by their enfranchisement save the world one war,
they will have justified their vote before God and man.”
There is a story that the anti-suffragists started. But it’s our best
suffrage propaganda now. A farmer’s wife in Maine, who had cooked the
meals and swept the house, and washed the children and sent them to
school, and hoed the garden and fed the chickens, and worked all the
afternoon in the hayfield, and was now on her way to the barn to finish
her day’s work with the milking, was accosted by an earnest agitator,
who asked her if she didn’t want the vote. But the farmer’s wife shook
her head: “No,” she answered, “if there’s any one little thing the men
can be trusted to do alone, for heaven’s sake, let ’em!”
But is there? From the rose bowered cottage, the cottage red roofed and
the blue trimmed cottage and the ikon blessed cottage, and the plain
little white house somewhere off Main Street, there is a rising to the
question.
Lest we forget, this war was made in the land where woman’s place was
in the kitchen!
And the mere housewifely mind asks, Could confusion be anywhere worse
confounded than in the government houses of the world to-day?
Hark! You cannot fail to hear it! The cry of the nations is now sharp
and clear. It is the cry of their distress: “Women wanted in the
counsels of state.”