VOTES FOR WOMEN
There is always a large percentage of people who range themselves on the
side of the majority in regard to any question of the day. They range
themselves there not because of any principle involved, but simply and
solely because they consider this mode of action expedient. And they feel
far safer, far happier, taking the flabby, muscleless arm of Expediency
than in venturing into unknown difficulties behind the uncompromisingly
stiff figure of Principle. But there are others-thank God for them!--who
hate the shifty, cunning eye of Expediency far too much to have anything
to do with him. These others would far rather be in the minority in
championing some good cause than with the "expedient" majority.
These others are the pioneers of civilization. Sometimes--to-day we have
many cases in point as regards the social crusade of brave women against
taxation without representation--they are martyrs as well as pioneers. But
the splendid spirit of knight-errantry, which shone so vividly with the
fire of enthusiasm in medieval days, is still abroad in our midst to-day.
A few militant personalities fight for a great cause, a great principle--
the raising of a better moral tone amongst us, the betterment of the lives
of their fellows. Newman was one of these. His sword was always in the
thickest of the fight when it was a fight against some social injustice to
his fellow citizens. Forty years ago and more he spoke out in championship
of woman's rights. So long ago as 1867 he led the movement which tilted at
social wrongs, social injustices dealt out to the sex. It is a movement
which has taken, as I said, more than half a century to make its way to
the position it holds to-day. It has been opposed bitterly almost every
inch of the way by men who love expediency, and turn their backs on the
principle of the thing; which is fair play for women. Nevertheless,
England is a country which prides herself on her keen sense of justice and
freedom.
If Newman had done nothing else, his work for this movement would be
unforgettable; his words were so outspoken, his way of dealing with the
subject so broad-minded. In one of his articles he urged the following on
his fellow men:--"Readers of History, and Lawyers, are aware that women's
wrongs are an ancient and terribly persistent fact.... Why has our law
been so unjust to women?--Because women never had a voice in the making of
it, and men as a class _have not realized the oppression of women as a
class_" (the italics are my own). "Men have deep in their hearts the idea
that women _ought_ to be their legal inferiors; that neither the persons
of women nor their property ought to remain their own; that marriage is
not a free union on equal terms; and that the law ought to favour the
stronger sex against the weaker. It is remarkable that our law is more
unjust to women than that of the great historically despotic nations, and
in some important respects less favourable than that of the Turks. All
these things point out that _equality of the sexes in respect to the
Parliamentary Franchise_ is essential to justice. The conscience of men is
opening to the truth...." "Readers of newspapers cannot be ignorant of the
miseries endured by wives from brutal husbands. In ordinary decorous
families, sons at lavish expense are trained to self-support. The
_daughters_ in one class have nothing spent on their education; in
another, are educated as elegant ornaments of a drawing-room, where they
live in luxury for a parent's delight; yet when he dies, and their youth
is spent, they are often turned adrift into comparative poverty,
incompetent for self-help. When complaint is made of this, the ascendant
sex graciously tells them, 'they ought to marry,' and this in a country
where women are counted by the hundred thousand more numerous than men;
where also men do not universally accept the state of marriage. Meanwhile,
the law is made as if to dissuade the woman from such a remedy. If she
dare to adopt it, it instantly strips her of all her property, great or
little; [Footnote: Since then some amendment of the wrong has been done by
the "Married Women's Property Act."] and if she earn anything, authorizes
her husband to seize it by force. In the Marriage Service, the husband, as
if in mockery, says, 'With all my worldly goods I thee endow': while the
law allows him to gamble away her whole fortune the day after the
marriage, or to live in riotous indulgence on _her_ money, and give to her
the barest necessaries of life.... He may maliciously refuse her the sight
of her own children.... And if to gain one sight of them she return to his
house for two days, the law holds her to have 'condoned' all his offences
however flagrant."
Mr. Haweis many years ago said a very significant thing. He said that the
best--if the rarest--men had always a good share of the woman nature in
themselves. Francis Newman was one of these men. He understood the woman's
point of view without any telling. He knew instinctively, intuitively, the
mental cramp, the moral inability to rise to her full stature, which is
induced by man's perpetual effort to fit her into a measured mould
prepared by himself. He knew that if "a man's reach must exceed his grasp,
or what's a heaven for?" what a hell faced the woman who could not even
_reach_ forward to fulfil all the many aims which she was conscious were
stirring within her, longing for attainment. He had seen women, his
countrywomen, shake the bars behind which they faced their world for the
very passion of revolt against these man-set limits, which kept them in on
every side. He knew that, of all hard fates, perhaps few are more bitter
than to feel the power and ability within you to do some work as well as
another does it, and yet to have no freedom to use that power. To be
forced, by man-made laws, to wrap up your talent in the napkin of legal
red-tapeism, when everything within you, perhaps, urges you to turn it to
good account.
Let us look for one moment at some of the legal disabilities of women to-
day. Perhaps some of us are hardly aware to what an almost incredible
distance they reach.
Mr. Henry Schloesser, barrister-at-law of the Inner Temple, [Footnote: In
his pamphlet published by the Women's Social and Political Union.] very
explicitly explains how they affect women. "At Common Law the father is
entitled against the mother to the custody of the children, and this right
he could only forfeit by gross misconduct; so also he was entitled to
prescribe their mode of education.... He remains _prima facie_ the
guardian of his children, _to the exclusion of the mother_" [the italics
are my own]. "Alone of the learned professions, the medical is open to
women...." (She constantly proves her aptitude to take the same honours as
man as regards the others, but he still growls over his share and keeps
_her_ out.) "A husband is not bound at Common Law to cohabit with or
maintain his wife."
These facts show luridly against the sky of woman's world, but perhaps few
men know what purgatorial fires they light in many a woman's heart to-day.
They show that man's injustice to her does not only concern her in public
life, but even in the home life (to which he would fain limit her
energies); she has practically no legal status at all. She has not even a
right to her own children in the eye of the law. Quite recently a judge
decided that "a woman is not a parent in the eye of the law," and
therefore powerless in things relating to her children. She is excluded
from the guardianship of them. Yet so curiously irrational is this same
English law that, should any woman wronged by a man become mother to an
illegitimate child, upon her falls the whole onus of its maintenance until
it is sixteen years old. The man gets off scot-free; for the world which
condones an offence (which is shared by both) in the case of the man,
condemns it in the _woman_.
Thus, as Mr. Thomas Johnston [Footnote: _The Case for Woman's Suffrage_,
by Thomas Johnston. Published by the Women's Social and Political Union.]
very clearly puts it: "Where there is any stigma or blame, the woman bears
it alone.... Under the law of England to-day a man can secure divorce by
simply proving the unfaithfulness of his wife. But the wife, in order to
obtain a divorce from her husband for the same unfaithfulness, must, in
addition, prove cruelty or desertion." This in itself is very one-sided
law, and certainly indefensible.
Francis Newman describes this law in no measured terms. He declares in his
article on "Marriage Laws" (1867) that what undeniably needs reform in our
country's government is "the extravagant power given by our law to a
husband.... The exclusive right attributed to him over the children is
unjust and pernicious. His rights over his wife's person [Footnote:
According to English law, as evidenced in a recent case, the wife is _not_
"a person" at all; presumably, therefore, she is simply his chattel!] are
extreme and monstrous.... We need a single short, sweeping enactment that,
_notwithstanding anything to the contrary in past statutes, no woman
henceforth shall by marriage change her legal status or lose any part of
her rights over property_....
* * * * *
"We implore all true and genuine Conservatives not to delay and use half-
measures, but to do justice to the sex in good time. He who tries to
uphold injustice is the true and efficient revolutionist, while he thinks
he is Conservative."
He goes on to touch thus on what is perhaps the most cruel injustice of
all--that the law permits a man to deprive his wife of the children, who,
before God, are as equally hers as his:--
"Not only with regard to _property_, also in regard to _children_, the law
is unjust to women. The mother has to undergo much in bringing a child to
maturity--the agony of childbirth... the countless cares of tending and
watching by night and day. The child becomes the darling of her heart, the
image of her dreams, the great centre of her thoughts and hopes; and after
all her toils, the law permits a husband to take the child permanently out
of her sight, and (if he choose) to put it under the charge of an enemy
... who will fill its mind with falsehoods and teach it to hate and
despise its mother. Such things are not possibilities merely and dreams;
they are stern realities, and the law gives her no redress."
When one thinks of all that these words mean, one is face to face with the
almost unthinkable fact that the case of the woman in England is unjust
beyond description, and for this reason, that, as Newman says, "Men, who
alone make the laws, make them with but little account of woman." At home
with her children she is defenceless. She has no power over them, and her
husband is not bound to "maintain" her, notwithstanding the sentence,
which English law has made absolutely meaningless, of his marriage vow to
her: "With all my worldly goods I thee endow."
In the world, if she have no husband or be unmarried, she is not a
"person" in a legal sense; and during election time her house is
described, in canvassing for votes, as having "no occupier"! In the world,
too, she is unable to obtain a fair wage for her work. She may do the work
as well as man, but nevertheless, in most cases, her pay is less. Mr.
Johnston tells us that the average male worker's wage has been calculated
to be about 18s., but the average woman worker's wage is only about 7s.
And when women find out these many injustices suffered at home and in the
world by their sex, as Miss Christabel Pankhurst says, they are absolutely
unable to right these wrongs, for "women have no political power."
Here is the pivot round which the wrongs of women revolve--her lack of
legal status, her voicelessness as regards the laws of her country, the
country which is so openly irrational as to count her a "person" when it
wants to get a tax out of her, but refuses to do so at any other time when
she has something to ask of it in return!
Once the parliamentary vote is given to women, the same results would
follow in England as have followed elsewhere. Wages and hours of labour
are made just for women, as in many respects they have been now made for
men. The laws of divorce are the same. Mothers are made joint guardians of
their children with their fathers. The age of protection for girls is
raised to 18. [Footnote: At the present moment, by the English law, a girl
can contract a valid marriage at twelve years of age; a boy at fourteen.
(See _Legal Status of Women_, by H. H. Schloesser.)] In New South Wales,
after the women were given the vote, Dr. Mackellar brought in a bill to
deal with the protection of illegitimate children, which has answered
admirably; while in New Zealand and Australia the Wages Board, which the
women's vote helped to pass, has raised in both countries the wages of
women from 5s. to l6s. per week for the same amount of work done. And in
other respects it has abolished sweating--that crucial question of crucial
questions in England to-day.
There is another point, too, amongst many others, in which the vote helped
the national life in Australia in the giving of old age pensions. Perhaps
had women the vote here in England, the shameful system in which old men
and women are separated in the last years of their life, as the workhouses
ordain, would be altered. And this is a question which demands immediate
attention--_immediate_ attention; for more than £26,000,000 are paid by
taxpayers each year to be spent in great part on our wretched system of
poor laws.
Francis Newman was strongly against poor laws administered as they are in
England to-day, as, indeed, is every thoughtful man. He was also strongly
of opinion that there should be women on juries in some cases. And indeed
it is a fact that women magistrates, as well as women jurors, are most
certainly a _sine quâ non_ in those cases where, at the present moment,
owing to juries being composed of men only, common justice for the
unrepresented Englishwoman in relation with the other sex is not, in a
great proportion of cases, rendered her. But even were women made eligible
for these offices, it would be no new thing, for in Mary Tudor's reign
there were two women appointed justices of the peace; and, of course,
always there has been a provision in law for "a jury of matrons" in
certain cases.
Indeed, when one goes far enough back in research into most questions, the
invariable lesson, is taught us, which we are always so reluctant, in our
cocksureness of the "antiquity" of our present-day conditions of life, to
learn, and we find that our arrangements very often are _not_ "as it was
in the beginning," but only mushroom growths of a decade or two. As Mrs.
Wolstenholme Elmy very justly says in her recent pamphlet on "Woman's
Franchise," women possessed voting rights from time immemorial, and the
year 1832 was the year when they were dispossessed of many ancient rights
by the Reform Act passed in that year.
As regards other disabilities of women, Francis Newman wrote very fully
and very strongly upon them, and it is impossible to leave them
unmentioned here. In 1869 he wrote: "There is one important matter which
young men need specially to be taught, viz. that at no time of life is any
man ... exempt from the essential duty of curbing animal impulses....
Nothing so paralyzes his force of Will as to be told that some men have
from God the gift of continence, and _others have it not_. This doctrine
is disastrously prominent in the Anglican marriage service, and is
borrowed from St. Paul. But that great and deep-hearted apostle was
unmarried and without personal experience. He writes, not as one revealing
supernatural communications, _but as imparting his best wisdom_.... A
general and just inference is, that a firm self-restraint is necessary and
salutary for every man."
It is impossible to write more strongly and clearly of the wickedness of
women's ancestral personal rights being swept away than does Newman in
articles published in the fourth volume of his _Miscellanies_. He does not
disguise the shameful state of the law as it affects woman to-day, and as
it is carried out by Government--that law which makes wrongdoing so easy
and unpunishable for man, and so hard and unjust to woman. The
unjustifiableness of certain laws was shown up with no uncertain pen by
him. He was himself convinced of their iniquity; and once convinced, he
stood forward as a modern John the Baptist, spared no one, and
passionately accused his countrymen of the injustice, immorality, and
cruelty of their making one law for men and another for women. He
inveighed against the world's point of view of this subject: and this not
once, nor twice, but constantly; and urged with all his might that these
wrongs to his countrywomen should be righted. Nevertheless his articles,
many of them, are forgotten. The dust of neglect is lying thick upon them
on many an unused shelf to-day. His voice has long been silent; and no
doubt it has been said of him (as it was by a Church dignitary of Father
Dolling at his death): "We shan't be worried any more by _him_ now about
the righting of social abuses." Laws against which Newman declaimed are
not altered yet, and we are a long way from those far-reaching reforms he
advocated. But the words he wrote are not dead. They are in our midst to-
day, and they stir depths to-day in the hearts of his countrymen in
suggestions towards social reformation; towards the righting of wrongs
just as glaring to-day as they were a century ago. Questions which can
never be put superficially aside, by men who, like Newman, cannot endure
to leave a social wrong unredressed, if they can by any searching find the
remedy.