THE STRUGGLE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
IN ancient Greece there was a certain symbolic ceremony of a very
picturesque character in connection with one of the great festivals.
A lighted torch was to be conveyed to a distant altar, and a series
of horsemen had to discharge the ceremony. Along the line of frantic
riders, from the exhausted hand of one horseman to the fresh grasp
of the next, the fiery symbol was handed, until the last of the
procession placed it in triumph on the destined altar.
Our story of the evolution of woman's position recalls this old
ceremony. For nearly three thousand years, at least, the torch has
passed from rider to rider, and the altar is in sight. The struggle
of the later Egyptian women re-appears in Greece, crosses the sea to
Italy, is raised again in the revival of ancient culture, passes on
to France, when the Italian States decay, and reaches at length the
vigorous hands of England, Germany, and the United States. In one
respect, however, the parallel fails. It is true that the cause has
moved onward through the ages, but there have been years, even
centuries, when the torch was almost, if not quite, extinct. There
have been times when the distant altar seemed to be forgotten, and
women sank back into uncomplaining subjection. Such a period was the
appalling stretch between the fifth and the twelfth centuries,
between the murder of Hypatia and the living death of Heloise. The
eighteenth century, compared with the promise of its predecessors,
is another such period, in most countries. The first quarter of the
nineteenth century is another, and the last. Then the torch flames
out again, and, for reasons I will give presently, can never more be
extinguished until it is laid on the altar.
After the fall of Napoleon in 1815 Europe closed the mouth of the
pit, as it thought, and dreamed soft dreams of continued despotism.
The Holy Alliance had a sharp ear for murmurs of rebellion against
any received ideal, and enforced submission everywhere at the point
of the bayonet. It would be futile for women to chafe at their bonds
in that world. Happily, the world was wider than the sphere of the
Bourbons, the Hapsburgs, and the Pope. England contemplated their
"white terror" with instinctive resentment; though England had
shuddered at Jacobinism, and in the main was more disposed than
before for coercion and subjection. But the United States maintained
its theoretic scorn of despotism, and little British colonies which
dotted the blue southern ocean promised the same spirit of
independence.
It was in the United States that the modern struggle for the
enfranchisement of nations began. The appeals of Mercy Warren and
Abigail Adams were almost forgotten, and the masculine ideal was
firmly incorporated in the American constitution, when a young
Scotchwoman, Frances Wright, used the comparative freedom of the
country to start a brilliant and fiery campaign for the rights of
women. How she was presently joined by the talented Polish Jewess,
Ernestine Rose, and the devoted Quaker women, Abby Kelly and the
Sisters Grimke; how the democratic Americans jeered and howled at
them, and the clergy branded them, and the little company grew
larger and larger--all this may be read in Mrs. Cady Stanton's
_History_. By 1837 the great American poet, Whittier, took up arms
for them against their clerical opponents. They had proved their
capacity for public life by their share in the anti-slavery
campaign. They did not take the view of Carlyle.
In the meantime the second Revolution had taken place in France, and
the second democratic wave passed over Europe. Its chief expression
was the passing of the great Reform Bill in England in 1832. With
singular logic the men who had prepared forests of pikes to
withstand Wellington, the men who had met in gatherings of 200,000
to sing "Hail, dawn of liberty," and threaten to march on London,
now turned on their less militant women and expressly excluded them
from political life. James Mill had laid it down in 1825 (_Essay on
Government_) that women's interests were bound up with men's, and
so Radicals could justly exclude them from the franchise. In their
resentment of the notion that a superior class should dictate to
them how they were to be represented, the men of England had sacked
cathedrals, challenged the troops, and trampled on the portrait of
the king; then they turned about and dictated to the women, who
would not do these things, how _they_ were to be represented. The
Reform Bill made the electorate exclusively male for the first time
in the history of England; and the Reformed Parliament went on, in
1835, to exclude women from the enfranchising clauses of the
Municipal Corporations' Act.
I have already described the influences that had for centuries been
undermining the older English ideal, but this open violation of it,
at the very time when streams of oratory were flowing all over
England on liberty and the value of representation, naturally led to
a reaction. The agitation for the Reform Bill had itself re-awakened
in women the desire of sharing in public life, and the injustice
shown by the reformers would not allay it. There were not wanting
gospels for the new cause. Mary Wollstonecraft had published a
_Vindication of the Rights of Women_ in the height of the French
Revolution (1792), and a political writer who had great influence
with Liberals, William Godwin, had supported her. William Thompson
had issued a spirited reply to James Mill in 1825. Robert Owen, who
had immense influence in England by 1840, adopted the same view.
Women also joined in the Corn Law Agitation, and some of its chief
leaders acknowledged that they proved their capacity for public
life. Cobden and Villiers favoured their claim. W. J. Fox, one of
the most brilliant of the Free Traders, minister of South Place
Chapel (London), warmly espoused their cause. About 1850 pamphlets
and magazine articles began to appear, advocating the
enfranchisement of women.[12]
By the middle of the century there was a strong feeling in England
and the United States for the enfranchisement of women. The number
of agitators was very small, but the life of the world was now
developing rapidly, and the new tendencies were putting an entirely
new complexion on the question of woman's position in the State.
It will be convenient to note these tendencies here--warning the
reader that they increase in later decades--in order to understand
the real logical strength of the modern movement.
The struggle is, in essence, a conflict of two ideals--the new ideal
and the old belief, not so much that "woman's place is the home,"
but that she shall have no interest beyond it. How far men have a
right to dictate their position to women, or how far one group of
women have the faintest pretension to dictate to another group, I
need not waste time in inquiring. I chance to be one of those males
who have never discovered the slenderest moral or rational base for
the assumed right to tell women what is best for them, and force
them to do it. But I need not linger over this, as the old ideal was
framed in harmony with a world that has passed away for ever, and it
is as odd and discordant as any other medieval survival in our
world.
I admitted that when political life, or the practice of settling
social or corporate issues, first arose it was quite natural that it
should fall exclusively into the hands of the men. The social
decisions usually concerned migration, or war, or some other
extra-domal matter, in the execution of which woman was, from the
nature of things, much less interested than man. I need not run over
the intermediate stages of political life, and will merely point out
a few of the ways in which the old division of home-work and
State-work broke down in the nineteenth century. The industrial
development made the first great breach in the old standard. The
early political system was obviously founded on the early division
of labour. Woman worked in and about the home, owing to the natural
tie of the children, and man worked further afield. The factory
system entirely discarded this old division, and encouraged women to
leave their homes and work by the side of men. Long before the
middle of the nineteenth century tens of thousands of women were
performing the same work as men, as far from the home as men. Then
workshops, shops, and offices took fresh groups of women away from
the home; and journalism and other professions further extended the
process. In 1851 there was not a woman photographer or book-binder
in England, and there were only 1,742 shop-girls. In 1861 there were
130 women in the photographic trade, 308 in book-binding (1,755 in
1871), and 7,000 in shops. To what proportions the extra-domal
employment has reached I need not describe. One-fourth of the women
and girls of England now have other than domestic employment. More
than a million married women are so employed.
With this enormous and increasing employment of women in view it is
impossible to continue to talk of woman's place being the home,
and quite ridiculous to make that threadbare phrase a ground for the
limitation of woman's interests. To refuse them a right that only
the most desperate stretch of imagination could represent as taking
women "out of the home," and at the same time to acquiesce in an
industrial development that effectively takes millions of them out
of it, is a quaint aberration of reasoning. It would be more
sensible to recognise that the phrase, "woman's place is the home,"
belonged to an older civilisation. Assuredly, it is a strange phrase
to use to-day as an argument against the suffrage. The old division
of labour has broken down. The old political division that was built
on it must follow.
Side by side with this economic development there was proceeding a
political evolution that no less thoroughly undermined the old
ideal. In the first place, the base of political power grew broader
and broader throughout the century. In 1848 the middle-class revolt,
that had succeeded in England in 1832, broke out over most of the
Continent, and triumphed. Though there was a reaction in some
countries, the basis of political life was generally and permanently
broadened, and millions of professional men and higher workers won a
share in the control of the affairs of their country. Towards 1870
(speaking generally) a fresh and larger class clamoured for
enfranchisement, and secured it. And as the century went on ever
fresh demands were made, and the enfranchised few found no principle
on which they could decently resist. In most of the countries of
Europe the overwhelming majority of the adult and literate males
have the vote.
This development of political life puts the modern demand of the
women in a position entirely new and incalculably stronger than it
ever had before. Only in ancient Athens was there a somewhat similar
situation, and in that case decay followed too quickly upon full
bloom to allow the natural consequence. In most other cases the
women had no specific political disability. Their husbands and
brothers had, as a rule, no more political right than they. A
woman-franchise movement was inconceivable in any earlier
period--apart from Athens, where it was evidently preparing--and it
was just as inevitable in modern times. When you extend the control
of national affairs to tens of millions of men--the Socialists alone
count between seven and eight million votes on the Continent--you
disfranchise as many tens of millions of women. You impose the
sex-disability in its most offensive and least defensible form.
Nor is this the only aspect of political evolution that exhibits the
cant phrase about woman's place as a medieval survival. So long as
political life was mainly concerned with issues, like trade or war,
that fell in the men's sphere of work, the primitive division of
political responsibility remained more or less plausible. It is no
longer even plausible. National defence is, and must be, a primary
concern of politics; but in England at least this concerns women
just as much as men. The vast majority of our men do not share in
the work. A select body undertakes it, and the other men have just
as much, and no more, interest in controlling them than women have.
Trade, commerce, and industry are still main objects of political
concern; but women are included in vast numbers in the industrial
world. And the new and broader conception of the task of an
administration has completed the annihilation of the old ideal.
Social reform--questions of housing, temperance, pensions,
etc.--obviously concern women as much as men, and are in no sense
whatever masculine issues; while the recent extension of legislation
to the home and the child has made it quite futile to talk of the
woman's home as her sphere, in the sense that she must have no
interest in the public life beyond it. Once she really was mistress
in the home; now, happily, the law has invaded every corner of it.
It controls the birth of her children, controls their infancy in a
score of ways, controls their beds and fires and food, controls
their punishment, their recreation, their education, and their early
employment. This is a colossal change in the objective of political
life, and it necessarily involves a surrender of the older idea of
enfranchisement.
Finally, we have in yet another way enfeebled the old idea of
woman's sphere. No one seems yet to have reflected that, while the
Churches have been the most serious opponents of feminism, they have
done more than any to give woman an interest outside the home. But
Church affairs and missionary enterprise and charity bazaars were
quickly succeeded or supplemented by other interests. As late as
1840 Londoners forbade a group of devoted American women from
speaking at the Anti-Slavery Convention on the express ground that
woman's place was the home. It seems centuries remote from our day
of women's clubs, literary societies, golf, and the hundreds of
organisations in which women are on equal terms with men. But the
last and most ironic departure from the old ideal was when the great
political bodies formed feminine annexes to their organisations, and
pressed women into active service in the electoral campaign. The
psychology of the Conservative or Liberal who approves of the
Primrose League or the Women's Liberal Federation, and the
employment of women at elections, yet, when these ladies ask for the
vote, murmurs that their place is the home, is a thing too turbid or
too insincere for analysis. One could, at least, understand a man
urging still the old phrase who would press for the exclusion of
women from our industries and professions, from all political
organisations, permanent or temporary, from all clubs, bazaars,
entertainments, and educative societies; but such a man would be
deemed little short of insane. Yet the right to cast a vote once in
five years, and to maintain a sufficient interest in politics to do
so reasonably, would lay no more strain on a woman's domestic
energy than any single one of these admitted activities.
At all events, these four radical changes that have occurred in the
nineteenth century have given an entirely new complexion to the
demand of women. The extension of the franchise to the general male
population has laid a specific sex-disability on woman: the
extension of the sphere of legislation has completely eliminated
whatever trace of justice there was in the primitive political
division; the economic evolution of woman has made her a sharer in
the nation's life, apart from the home, and involves a share in
the control of that life; and the deliberate encouragement of her to
occupy herself with public life has made the old phrase ring
somewhat hollow and insincere. These are the causes of the modern
suffrage movement. We have educated woman and developed her
personality. It is too late to tell her to remain a child in all but
maternal duties. We have ourselves destroyed the rigid partition
that once divided the life of the home from the life of the State,
and it is ludicrous to ask woman to imagine that it still exists.
The present revolt of woman is not the mere effect of a sudden
concession of education. Its roots run deep into the most
characteristic elements of modern life. It cannot possibly be
eradicated, but must grow on to its fulness.
It is in this spirit that we must approach the political evolution
of woman in the last half-century if we are to understand it aright.
It has advanced more rapidly in that half-century than in all
preceding time, and the reason is that human life itself has evolved
more rapidly and remarkably. It is not so much that women are
assailing an old social ideal. The old ideal is dead, and they
demand a live, just, and rational adjustment of their position to
the new conditions.
It would be quite useless to attempt a review of the struggle that
has been conducted in the last half-century, and I must be content
to summarise the steps of progress in England and record the
victories already gained abroad. The story is equally long and
eventful in the United States, but cannot be told here. Frances
Wright (later Mme. D'Arusmont), Ernestine Rose, Abby Kelly, and
the other pioneers, fought a stern missionary fight in the first
half of the century. When England refused a hearing to their finest
anti-slavery workers in 1840 the resentment of that piece of
medieval folly led to the holding of the first Women's Suffrage
Convention in the States, and the cause has gradually gained in
public feeling. The assertion of Mrs. Humphry Ward that it has
recently lost ground is astounding. She might have read, in the
current number of the _Englishwoman's Year Book_, that within the
last few years about five hundred men's organisations have
declared in favour of women suffrage, and that this number includes
such powerful bodies as the American Federation of Labour and the
United Mine Workers. Indeed, her statement was quickly followed by
the announcement in the Press that the women of New York were
preparing a fresh and far more active campaign, and that another of
the States (Oregon) is re-considering the question of granting it.
As is known, four States in the Union have granted the suffrage to
their women. In 1869 Wyoming admitted women to vote on the same
terms as men. The predictions of the Conservatives were so far
falsified that in 1893 the State Legislature forwarded to the
Legislatures of the other States in the Union an official resolution
to the effect that the change had "wrought no harm, and done great
good in many ways," and added: "As the result of experience we
urge every civilised community on earth to enfranchise its women
without delay." Wyoming has a remarkable record of social
improvement, and the Legislature acknowledges great aid in this from
the women. Divorce is far less frequent than in other States, so
that the predicted disruption of domestic peace seems not to have
followed. Nor have women tired of the vote they won, for to-day,
after forty years' possession, ninety per cent. of them vote.
Colorado granted woman franchise in 1893, and it has since had a
fine record of social legislation. Judge Lindsey declared in 1906:
"No one would dare to propose its repeal; and, if left to the men
of the State, any proposition to revoke the right bestowed upon
women would be overwhelmingly defeated. Many good laws have been
obtained in Colorado which would not have been secured but for the
power and influence of women."
The evident success of the reform stimulated neighbouring States
(who should be the most competent judges), and in 1896 Idaho and
Utah adopted it. Their leading public men speak in the same terms of
the effect, and a healthy stimulus has been given to social
legislation. In 1906 the same proposal was submitted to the male
electors of Oregon, and it was only lost by ten thousand votes. The
loss was easily accounted for by the violent opposition of the
saloon-keepers in the State. Ex-President Roosevelt has repeatedly
advocated the reform in his own State, and the movement is steadily
gaining ground in the other States.[13]
In England the movement has advanced far beyond the dreams of the
women of half a century ago. Miss Blackburn gives an ample chronicle
of the progress made since 1850, but I have (in writing the
biography of George Jacob Holyoake) been able to see a good deal of
correspondence of the period that throws light on the early group.
Holyoake, a faithful disciple of the great Owen, had endeavoured for
many years to stir women to revolt. As early as 1847 he had drawn up
a programme (published in the _Free Press_), according to which
they were to found a journal, hold meetings with women speakers, and
agitate for legal and political justice. Ten years later, when he
was in close relation with Miss Harriet Martineau, Miss Bessie R.
Parkes (later Mrs. Belloc), Miss Barbara L. Smith (Mrs. Bodichon),
Mrs. Stansfeld, Mrs. Crawford, and many other advanced women, they
founded the _Woman's Journal_, and began to increase. In the same
year the rights of women figured prominently for the first time in
an election-manifesto--that issued by Mr. Holyoake in his abortive
campaign at Tower Hamlets. He had also issued as a pamphlet Mrs. J.
S. Mill's article, "Are Women fit for Politics?" Mill himself
lent his powerful advocacy to the cause, and in 1869 issued his
famous _Subjection of Women_.
The growing feeling was now stimulated by the agitation over the
second Reform Bill in 1866-7, and strong parties were formed in
Manchester and London. Disraeli himself assented to the principle,
and within a fortnight a petition obtained 1,499 signatures. A great
public meeting was held in Manchester (where Miss Lydia Belcher had
been then working for two or three years) in 1868, and was addressed
by Dr. Pankhurst and other well-known public men. Mr. Jacob Bright
was another staunch supporter in the North. At London, in the
following year, a very striking meeting was addressed by Professor
Fawcett, Charles Kingsley, John Morley, Lord Houghton, Charles
Dilke, P. A. Taylor, James Stansfeld, and Professor Masson. Mrs.
Fawcett and Viscountess Amberley were now associated with the
movement, and Professor Francis Newman and Mr. J. Chamberlain were
quoted in favour of it.
In 1869 the first victory was won, when the municipal franchise was
restored to women; and in the following year the School Boards were
set up, and--apart from the metropolis--women could vote for and
serve on them. With such prominent and eloquent supporters, the
women movement now made rapid progress, and it was decided to open
the long, historic siege of Westminster. The first Bill to be
presented had the support of a petition of 134,000 women, and passed
the first reading. But Gladstone was hostile, and it was rejected on
second reading by 220 votes to 94. It would be impossible here to
follow the long and spirited struggle in detail, and I must refer
the reader to Miss Blackburn's chronicle. From 1875 to 1879 a Bill
was presented annually, and never failed to secure more than a
hundred votes. John Bright, unhappily, thundered against it with all
his eloquence, and in 1878 and 1879 the opponents made the most
unsparing efforts to win the members. Even in 1879, however, the
Bill had 103 supporters and 217 opponents. In 1883 a resolution in
favour was supported by 114 members against 130. In 1884 an
amendment to the Reform Bill was lost by 136 votes (271 to 135), but
it was well known that scores of Liberal members merely voted
against it owing to the threats of Mr. Gladstone. At the General
Election of 1886 there were 343 friends of women suffrage returned
to the House, and a fresh attempt was made in 1892. On the side of
the supporters were now Mr. Balfour and Sir G. Wyndham, while Mr.
Asquith began his career of hostility, and Mr. Gladstone threw his
influence against it. The voting showed 152 friends to 179
opponents. The General Election of 1892 reduced the friends of the
cause to 229, but the number rose to 232 in 1895, 274 in 1900, and
to the extraordinary number of 420 in the present Parliament, which
passed the second reading of Mr. Stanger's Bill by a majority of
179.
No one who reflects seriously on the growth of the demand for woman
suffrage since G. J. Holyoake quixotically expressed it in his
manifesto of 1857 can hesitate in forecasting the future. In half a
century the movement has expanded from a small group of a score of
women writers to a body that can force 420 Members of Parliament to
promise their support, can fill Hyde Park with half a million
demonstrators, and can hold thousands of meetings throughout the
country in the course of the year. No agitation, with anything like
the same resources, ever made such advance in the course of thirty
or forty years. Possibly two other organisations show a more
imposing record--the early Free Trade movement and the modern Tariff
Reform movement. But both these had enormous financial resources,
dealt with a material issue, and had the organisation of existing
great political parties to draw upon. The spirit of the age has
borne women on as it advanced, and the future is assured. It is
hardly too much to say that only the prejudice of _one_ man
prevents the granting of the demand to-day in England.
It will be in entire harmony with its early history and its finer
traditions if England is the first great power to grant woman
franchise, as it promises to be. Meantime, instances are multiplying
in which smaller communities admit their women to political life
with a happy success. In 1881 the miniature State of the Isle of Man
granted a restricted franchise to women in the elections for the
House of Keys. In Canada the question has been agitated since 1883,
when Sir J. A. Macdonald inserted a clause enfranchising women in
the Electoral Bill which he submitted to the Dominion Parliament.
But the large Roman Catholic population of French Canadians blocks
the way for the present in the Dominion.
In Australia and New Zealand the more independent and progressive
spirit of the colonists needed little pressure to realise that men
who resent the despotic dictation of other men have no title to
dictate despotically to their women. New Zealand very early caught
the echo of the struggle in England. In 1878 an Electoral Bill,
enfranchising women ratepayers, was put through the House of
Representatives by the Government, but failed--not exactly on the
woman issue--to pass the Legislative Council. The women organised in
1886, and saw their Bill in 1891 carried by a majority of thirty-two
to seven in the lower House, but lost by two votes in the Council.
In 1893 it passed both Houses, and of the 109,000 enfranchised women
no less than 90,000 voted at the next general election.
In most of the other colonies the victory has come with even less
struggle. South Australia debated and carried a resolution in favour
as early as 1885, though there was practically no demand on the part
of the women. As a two-thirds majority was needed, the women began
to educate and agitate, and the franchise was secured in 1894. In
New South Wales the question was brought forward by Sir H. Parkes in
his Electoral Bill of 1890, and a powerful organisation of women
took up the demand in the colony. By 1901 the measure passed the
House of Assembly by a large majority (fifty-one to seven), but was
rejected by a small majority (twenty-six to twenty-one) in the
Legislative Council. In the following year it passed into law. West
Australia passed the reform almost without a struggle. The Women's
Franchise League of that colony was formed in the spring of 1899,
and the suffrage was obtained the same year. In Victoria, during a
ten years' brisk agitation, a measure has passed the lower House
six times with increased majorities, but is blocked by the
Legislative Council. Tasmania granted the franchise to women in
1903, and Queensland in 1905. Finally, the franchise for the Federal
Parliament of Australia was granted to women, after a very brief
struggle, in 1902.[14]
To these victories won by the principle in the English-speaking
world must be added the granting of the municipal franchise in
Denmark, the enfranchisement of tax-paying women in Norway, and the
concession of the right, not only to vote, but to sit in the Diet,
in Finland. At the first election under the new Finnish constitution
nineteen women were returned to the Diet, and the number increased
to twenty-five in the following year (1908). Their colleagues
willingly testify to the advantage of their presence in passing the
beneficent series of Bills that the Tsar prevents them from carrying
into law.
These are the triumphs of a single generation against one of the
deepest-rooted prejudices of social life. One thinks instinctively
of some iron-bound coast, where the wavelets ripple feebly to the
foot of the beetling cliffs, and where even the fiercest storms
fling their waters impotently on the adamantine front. And one day
there occurs a convulsion of the crust, the culmination of a slow
alteration of level, and the storms begin to tear wide breaches in
the enfeebled barrier. From that day the confining rock is doomed.
There has been an alteration of level in the social, industrial, and
political life of the world. Large breaches have been torn in the
ring of prejudice that confined the life of women. Here it has been
the granting of municipal franchise or the power to serve as Poor
Law Guardians; there it has been the right to vote for the national
Parliament; at one place the right to sit in Parliament. The
confining bonds are doomed. The political evolution of woman is
running in a channel that it had never reached before in the history
of the world, and all the abortive rushes of earlier ages have no
moral for the present time. The only question now is, how long can
the reef of prejudice survive? Nay, we are not talking of
unconscious stone, but human hearts and minds, and the real question
is: Which great nation will win the honour of recognising first that
the age of despotism is over and the position of woman in the
commonwealth radically changed?