VOTES
Who made the law thet hurts, John,
_Heads I win,—ditto tails_?
“J. B.” was on his shirts, John,
Onless my memory fails.
Ole Uncle S., sez he, “I guess
(I’m good at thet),” sez he,
“Thet sauce for goose ain’t _jest_ the juice
For ganders with J. B.,
No more than you or me.”
J. R. LOWELL.
We come now to the question, what is the use of the vote, about which
women are making such a bobbery? Not more bobbery, be it well understood,
than men have made; not nearly as much, if we are to take as a measure
the amount of suffering that men have been willing to inflict and the
crimes they were willing to perpetrate in pursuit of the franchise.
We exaggerate the _use_ of the vote, say the Antis. Well, even if it is
possible to exaggerate the use of the vote, it is scarcely possible to
exaggerate the significance of the continued denial of the vote. To the
awakened, organised, articulate women who are demanding the vote, the
shifts and excuses and dodges of politicians, the exhibitions of mob
spirit and the revelations of passions and motives usually hidden have
been startling. Women, whose private lives were fortunate, have been
taught that they were living in a fool’s paradise concerning the lives
of other women. The sight of woman-baiting by a mob of her political
masters; the listening to debates in the House of Commons; above all, the
arguments used by anti-suffragists have made women infinitely keener and
more conscious of their position than they were before. Many of these
things have been as startling as a blow in the face. The letter of Sir
Almroth Wright, the verses published by Mr. Rudyard Kipling under the
title, _The Female of the Species_, the animus of Mr. Belfort Bax and
the vulgarities and shallows of Mr. Harold Owen and the _Anti-Suffrage
Review_ must have converted thousands of men and women who before had
refused to believe that such views were at the back of the opposition to
women’s enfranchisement.
But do we exaggerate the value of the vote? People often talk as if the
vote were only of use for making more and more laws, and ascribe to
women the desire to “make men good by Act of Parliament.” They forget
that votes may also be of use to resist and to modify legislation; that,
through Parliament, attention is called to the administration of public
affairs; that Bills are capable of amendment, if the electors will be
keen and united enough for their amendment; above all, that Parliament
raises money by taxation of women as well as of men, and that Parliament
alone decides how this money shall be spent. Three million women and
nine million men profit by the Insurance Act. Is this not sufficient
commentary on the assertion that a woman’s chief business is to mind the
baby and that men protect her in that business? The only medical care
that she gets from the Insurance Act (barring maternity benefit) is when
she refuses to mind the baby or has no baby to mind.
There are two ways in which the possession of the vote will benefit
women: first, by raising their status, and, second, by giving them
power to influence Parliament directly through their representatives.
The matter of status seems to me by far the more important of the two,
but because it is intangible, people with no imagination cannot grasp
it. Yet men from the days of ancient Greece and Rome to now have very
passionately clung to the badge of citizenship. We find magistrates
now in England adjusting their sentences so as to avoid adding the
humiliation of disfranchisement to other penalties of the law; we find
Parliament debating earnestly how relief may be given to poor men without
involving them in pauperisation, which means the loss of the vote; we
remember how Members of Parliament pleaded for the coloured man in South
Africa that “the intolerable slur of disfranchisement” should not be
cast upon him, and we note with burning indignation that these Members
are quite placidly content that this intolerable slur should remain upon
their own mothers and wives. It is only an idea. Yet ideas have moved
the world, and this idea that women are not born to be the slaves of men
has rankled for ages; now that it has found expression, it rankles no
longer, it has become an inspiration to millions of lives, not only of
women but of men too.
As to the direct use of the vote in affecting legislation, it is quite
ludicrous to find people denying it. Like any other tool, the vote
is only of use if the owners use it, and that men have made bad or
insufficient use of the vote only shows that men may do so; it does
not show that men always will do so, nor does it show that women ever
will. Now there is one idea that always seems to crop up in the minds
of politicians when any women’s problem is presented to them: it is, to
prohibit. As Miss Gore-Booth has remarked, politicians of the type of Mr.
John Burns cry out periodically, “Go and see what the women are doing
and tell them not to!” It is always done, ostensibly, in the interests
of the mothers and their children, but women know that what the mothers
want is the means and freedom to do their work, not prohibition. What is
the matter with the poor is their poverty, says Mr. Shaw. What is the
matter with the mothers is their poverty and the ignorance that comes
out of poverty. Remove the poverty and the ignorance and you will have
done vastly more to check the infant death-rate and the manufacture of
unemployables than you will by prohibiting all the mothers in the land
from earning (not from working! No one ever proposes really to relieve
them from toil!) and putting them absolutely into the power of men.
The influence of the women’s vote would be felt by no means only at
election times. In the countries where it exists it has not so much
affected the balance of parties; that is to say, it has not had just that
element of fighting that so interests the sensation lover and that is
so fundamentally contrary to real progress. There has been no apparent
opposition of interests and no sex-war, but politics have been peacefully
penetrated by the women’s point of view. Women without the vote can do
something to form public opinion; but women with the vote will find
public opinion far easier to move. Acts of Parliament do not spring
full-grown from the minds of politicians; we see how different interests
are at work moulding them, before they are even presented as Bills,
and it is the voters who are listened to, the voters whom the Minister
in charge addresses and persuades and treats with, the voters whose
amendments are first taken. I do not deny that politicians do sometimes
consult women, but what women? Some say they consult their own wives;
who selected these wives, and for what qualities? It is farcical, when
democracy insists that men shall choose their own rulers, to tell women
that they get the equivalent when men choose what and how many women they
will “consult.” Voting women may be expected to influence Bills both in
their introduction and in their passage through Parliament. Members have
repeatedly stated that they could have voted for certain amendments or
measures if they had felt that they owed their seat in Parliament in part
to the votes of women who favoured these measures. A member represents
only his constituents, and in the long-run he votes in accordance with
the views of his constituents. If he does not, it is their fault for
electing him.
There are, moreover, the indirect effects of the possession of the
vote. The politician who is also a statesman should know that Acts of
Parliament only work well with the intelligent co-operation of the
people. Who can expect the women to co-operate intelligently in working
Acts about which they were never consulted, and which no one ever takes
the trouble to explain to them? Men say they were never consulted about
the Insurance Act. But it was their own fault if they allowed themselves
to be overridden. The women could not help themselves. In addition to
the certainty of better co-operation, there is the increased sense of
responsibility, the stimulus to thought and organisation, the fact
that politicians and reformers all concentrate on educating the voter
or the potential voter. We all know the candidate who will only answer
questions from electors, and any woman who has not been permitted to ask
her own question, but has been compelled to put men up to ask it, knows
with what pathetic ease such men are fobbed off. Men are not educated
in women’s questions as they should be, and the women themselves are
not educated and independent. In his fine speech in the House on 6th
May 1913, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald said: “I share the opinion of those who
say that the mere granting of the votes to women would not directly
increase wages, and so on. But the difficulty we have got is that when
we try to increase women’s wages there is a sort of subordinate frame of
mind in which women approach all these points. They are careless. They
will not organise. They will not take pains and trouble to look after
themselves. What is the reason? The reason is that they have always been
accustomed to shuffle responsibility for their own actions upon somebody
else’s shoulders. The very argument which the Prime Minister used this
afternoon, that we were doing so well for women, was the most humiliating
argument that any Liberal could use against such a reform as we are
asking for. We want women to do these things for themselves, because they
can do them a great deal better than men can do them. We want to get them
into the frame of mind of independent and self-respecting citizens who
will co-operate with us, and not merely ask us to do things for them,
when they can do them much better for themselves. What would happen if
the franchise were given would be this: Women would take a far keener
interest in such questions as wages, a far keener interest in their place
in the factory or workshop. Women as enfranchised citizens would join the
unions, would make their economic demands with far more advantage, with
far more spirit, with a much more rigid backbone than they do now. Up
would go wages as an indirect consequence of the vote having been given
to them.” So we come back to status after all as the most important of
all the effects of enfranchisement. I hope to return later on to this
matter of low status, and show how it has been responsible for other
evils than political evils.
Many opponents of women’s suffrage are really anti-suffragists in a
far wider sense than they will admit; the arguments which many of
them use are arguments against the franchise altogether. But if the
anti-suffragist happens to be a candidate for Parliament, he dare not
speak his mind about the existing male electors, lest they should not
return, to represent them, a man who expresses so frank a contempt
for them; he does not, therefore, express it. But some of the women
anti-suffragists do, and we may learn a good deal from them as to
the hidden sentiments of the men like-minded with them. One of the
fallacies into which they most frequently drop is the confusion between
legislating and electing legislators. They become eloquent about the
disaster that would follow if women voters decided matters of foreign
policy and high finance, and some cheap fun is made at the notion of
the charwoman negotiating a loan, and the society beauty delimiting a
frontier. But the male voters do not perform these functions, and the
women voters would not be called upon to do so. The strongest argument
against the Referendum is that the great mass of the people cannot and
never will be fit to judge of matters requiring specialisation, nor to
conduct negotiations requiring secrecy and despatch. Popular election
means that the people chooses its rulers, chooses those—whom it should
then trust—who shall carry out in detail the policy whose broad lines
the people approve. Free press, free speech, open debates are the
safeguards and opportunities for criticism and revision, but not for
legislation and administration, which are the functions of governments
and not of electors. There is no system conceivable that will work if the
people will not work it. Men, unfortunately, are to be found who expend
their ingenuity in discovering how best they can make representative
institutions unworkable, and these men are by no means on one side of the
House only. A great deal of the preposterous machinery of Parliament has
been set up to circumvent the wreckers, who are, in practice, whatever
they may call themselves, anti-democratic. But no machinery can take the
place of common sense. It is the belief of the progressives that women
have at least as much common sense as men, and that they have proved
themselves far better diplomatists, perhaps because they have never had
the same temptations as men to rely upon physical force as an “argument.”
The conclusion is, that to be without representation in a country
professedly governed by representative institutions, is to be perilously
near to a state of slavery. If women were given the vote, England would
be a better place, not because women are better than men, but because
conduct is not right or wrong independently of its effects, and the
effects of slavery are bad both for slave and for owner.