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THE FUTURE OF THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT
by
H. M. SWANWICK, M.A.
With an Introduction by
Mrs. Fawcett, LL.D.
President of the National Union of Women’S Suffrage Societies
[Illustration]
London
G. Bell & Sons Ltd.
1913
TO F. T. S.
PREFACE
Women in the movement often wish that the word humanist had not been
appropriated, because it would far more properly connote the women’s
movement than the word feminist.
It is significant of much that there is in the English language no
commonly used substantive corresponding to “_homo_.” There is need, of
course, for the words man and woman, but there is also need for a word
denoting the species, irrespective of sex, and I have been driven to make
use of a locution not common in English, in writing “a human.” But the
common pronoun is non-existent and I have not used the neuter, lest it
should alarm nervous persons. Perhaps when we have got over the panic
fear of unsexing ourselves, we may find it safe to speak of a human, just
as we do of a baby, as “it.”
There may seem to be a disappointing lack of prophesy in a book avowedly
dealing with the future; but since I believe the women’s movement to be
a seeking for knowledge and good, to show what is reasonable and good
in the movement is to show what will persist and triumph. Through all
our faults and mistakes, we women are aiming at better understanding
and co-operation with men, and a better adaptation to one another of
conditions and persons. We are having to hammer out for ourselves the
right principles of government. We can take them ready-made from no man.
Doubtless we shall flounder considerably, as men have done—and do. But
there is little fear that in the long-run the best minds of men and women
will not have a common principle.
Meanwhile we have to resist the tendency to easy and cheap
generalisations about woman, her sphere, her vocation, and her capacity,
based upon a very small amount of very partial investigation and a huge
amount of inherited prejudice and native conceit. Men who ought to have
some respect for scientific methods will, when some _à priori_ theory
of woman’s proper sphere has closed their minds, make the most palpably
faulty deductions from imperfect data, and use their reputation in some
other branch of science as cover for their bad reasoning. No statistics
are more useful than vital statistics, and none have been more misused
to prove some foregone conclusion. Everyone experienced in investigation
knows how helpful it is to have some general hypothesis in view, by
which to co-ordinate all phenomena, but knows also how necessary it
is to be constantly watchful lest the hypothesis should obscure new
and unexpected phenomena. When the investigator is himself personally
involved, and when the hypothesis is one which the majority of men have
thought self-evident for ages, and when the strongest of all impulses,
next to hunger, confuses the mind of the investigator, we are justified
in being very sceptical about the positive nature of his conclusions,
until he can satisfy us that they have been reached by strictly logical
methods of agreement and difference.
If to some reasonable and civilised men it may seem that I have given
undue importance to the foolishnesses and barbarisms of another kind of
men, I would ask those men to remember that these are among our masters
and we may not ignore them. We might like to treat them “with the
contempt they deserve,” but we have at present to live under the laws
that they help to make. Doubtless, when we are free, we shall suffer
fools more gladly than we do now, having less to fear from them.
INTRODUCTION
Those who open this book expecting to find in it a romantic sketch,
rather in the style of _Erewhon_, of what the civilisation of the
twentieth century is likely to be after women have won their freedom,
will be doomed to disappointment. It does not deal with what a humorist
in the Cambridge Historical Society used to call “that department of
history which treats of the future.” Those who look for a plentiful
supply of prophecy will not find it; but they will find a masterly sketch
of the sources and aims of the women’s movement; and, in the author’s
own words, a brief survey of the directions in which it appears to be
travelling. They will find also wisdom, and knowledge, and understanding.
Mrs. Swanwick avoids cheap and easy generalisation. She writes from a
wide and deep knowledge, which has been gained from years of active
work, especially in the women’s suffrage movement as it exists here and
now; and she writes with the temperance and restraint which come of the
philosophic mind.
Her book will be read and digested by her fellow-workers. They are
quite certain to make it their own, for it is an armoury of facts and
arguments bearing on their work. It ought also to be studied by every
intelligent man and woman who perceives that the women’s movement is one
of the biggest things that has ever taken place in the history of the
world. Other movements towards freedom have aimed at raising the status
of a comparatively small group or class. But the women’s movement aims
at nothing less than raising the status of an entire sex—half the human
race—to lift it up to the freedom and valour of womanhood. It affects
more people than any former reform movement, for it spreads over the
whole world. It is more deep-seated, for it enters into the home and
modifies the personal character. No greater praise can be given to Mrs.
Swanwick’s book than to say that she treats of this great subject in a
manner worthy of it.
Her pages on militancy will be carefully studied. She is known to be
deeply antagonistic to violence in all its forms, and she gives the
reasons for the faith that is in her. It is also well known that she is
a leading member of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies,
the chief of the non-militant suffrage organisations. But though she
criticises severely the Women’s Social and Political Union, she is not
among those who can see nothing but harm in their activities. Militant
suffragism is essentially revolutionary, and, like other revolutionary
agitations, has arisen from a want of harmony between economic and
educational status and political status. Educationally, socially, and
industrially women have made enormous advances during the last sixty
years. But the laws controlling their political status have stood still.
Similar conditions have invariably led to revolutionary outbursts except
where lawmakers have had the sense to recognise the situation in time and
adjust the political status of the group concerned to the changes which
had already taken place in its general condition. It is by making these
timely changes, and by grafting the bud of new ideas on the stem of old
institutions, that our countrymen have shown their practical political
instinct, and have, on the whole, saved the nation from the ruinous waste
of revolution. They have not yet shown this good sense about women. But
the signs of the times are full of hope that they may revert to type and
be wise in time.
Dr. Arnold, writing from France within a generation of the Terror, said
in reference to the destruction of the feudal power of the nobles over
the French peasantry: “The work has been done … and in my opinion the
blessing is enough to compensate the evils of the French Revolution; for
the good endures, while the effects of the massacres and devastation are
fast passing away.” If that could be said of the Terror cannot it be even
more positively said of the comparatively innocuous “militancy” of recent
years? The good endures, while the evil is temporary and passes away, is
as true to-day as it was a hundred years ago.
MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE
_Homo_—Human principles of government—Unscientific scientific
men—Our masters vii
INTRODUCTION. By Mrs. Fawcett xi
CHAPTER I
CAUSES OF THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT
Woman becomes articulate—Why the movement has become political
in England—Women’s handicap—The need for concentration—Two
kinds of change: education, industrialisation—Adaptation
essential—Solidarity of women 1
CHAPTER II
WHAT IS THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT?
Is it chaotic?—Knowledge and scope—What the world is losing—The
spirit of the time a scientific one; women must share it—Action
will follow knowledge—Is it to be thwarted action? 14
CHAPTER III
THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN
Importance of motherhood—Vocational training of women for
motherhood a mistake—Whole human beings—Full development
under Men’s domination impossible—Sentimentalists and
Brutalitarians—Subjection degrading—Are women mentally inferior
to men?—An irrelevant question—Opportunity for development 20
CHAPTER IV
PHYSICAL FORCE
Man’s undoubted superiority—The handicap of motherhood—Woman’s
battle a spiritual one—Domination by force is bad
business—Foreign policy and war—Equality of service and equality
of sacrifice—War not the only business 31
CHAPTER V
DEMOCRACY AND REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT
Mr. Frederic Harrison and Prof. Dicey—Difficulties of governing
others—Civil rights depend upon political rights—Illiberal
arguments against women’s suffrage—Safety a delusion—Progress
due to control of physical force by mind—Law of diminishing
returns on compulsion—Opinions and interests of voter 42
CHAPTER VI
VOTES
Effects of the denial of the vote—Legislation,
administration, taxation—Status—The intolerable slur of
disfranchisement—Direct effect of the vote—What women want—How
Bills are made—Peaceful penetration—Indirect effect of
the vote—Responsibility, independence, co-operation 59
CHAPTER VII
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM: (1) THE WAGE-EARNER
The domination of economic force—Woman’s natural
handicap, motherhood—Woman’s artificial handicap, law and
custom—_Laissez-faire_ abandoned—Case of the pit-brow
girls—Opening up of trades and professions—A living wage—Danger
of sweated womanhood 69
CHAPTER VIII
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM: (2) THE MOTHER
Neglected motherhood—King Log and King Stork—The
Englishman’s almost absolute power over his wife—Socialistic
legislation—Endowment of motherhood—Payment of wives—Man’s
outlook mainly personal, not racial—Woman’s outlook 78
CHAPTER IX
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM: (3) THE HOUSEWIFE
The mother is generally the housewife—Convenient and
economical—Bad conditions of housework—No reform
without discontent—Motherhood and housewifery not
inextricable—Co-operative housekeeping—Divorce of producer and
consumer—Advertisement and speculation—Waste, adulteration, and
ugliness—Specialisation needed in the consumer; also collective
effort and political action 89
CHAPTER X
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM: (4) THE PROSTITUTE
Prostitution the most commercially profitable of women’s
trades—Definition—Extent—Is it an evil?—Is it (1) necessary for
health, or (2) necessary consequence of evil nature and evil
institutions?—Professions and performances—What is wrong with
men, women, and marriage?—A complex evil requiring many
remedies—Education—Self-respect—Wages—Brutality—Housing—
Alcohol—Cruelty—Rescue 99
CHAPTER XI
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM: (5) COMMERCIALISED VICE
Women’s crusade against prostitution, alcoholism, and
war—Decay of Empires—Originally appetites, have become
trades—Advertisement and finance—Vested interest in
alcohol—Traffic in women—Chicago Vice Commission—More facts
wanted—Enormous profits—Trade controlled by men—Ignorance and
indifference—Traffic in war 117
CHAPTER XII
THE MAN’S WOMAN: WOMANLY
Two ideals—Motherly qualities do not attract men—Weakness and
dependence are not motherly—Women distrust men’s judgment of
women—Women’s wiles—Social value of women’s qualities—Florence
Nightingale—Women must combine and organise—Inarticulate
women 126
CHAPTER XIII
THE WOMAN’S WOMAN: A PERSON
Ideal, Normal, and Average woman—Procrustes’ bed—Motherhood
not everything—Genius and motherhood—Scientific men constantly
overlook the mind—Breeding _versus_ environment 138
CHAPTER XIV
SEX-ANTAGONISM: (1) MAN’S PART
No permanent opposition of sexes—Mr. Heape’s theory—Primitive
man and woman are opposed—Men and women not the “same” nor
“equal”—Effect of luxury—Mr. Heape’s nightmare: Men “brute
beasts,” maidens “waste products”—Love the reconciling
force—Adaptation of the Human to environment—Women not all
sex—The literature of abuse—Are men fit for judicial powers? 156
CHAPTER XV
SEX-ANTAGONISM: (2) WOMAN’S PART
Women’s war—Is men’s need greater?—War open and articulate—The
Ladies’ Gallery—Sir Charles Grandison on the enemies of
women—Militancy and the machine—The mob spirit—A revival
due—Press, purse, and party—The good and the evil of
militancy—Is it War or Martyrdom?—Men’s hypocrisy about women’s
violence—The weapon of femininity—The responsibility of the
Government—Exasperation is not statesmanship 173
CHAPTER XVI
THE OLD ADAM AND THE NEW
Adaptation—A man’s world difficult for women to live in—Men’s
needs—The double standard—The child’s needs—Health of
girls—Co-education—Teaching of sex—Parasitic daughters—The
birth-rate—Women the natural protectors of children; therefore
they should be given power to protect—Men should help women—The
experience of Finland—Comradeship—Faith 193
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.”
J. R. LOWELL.
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.