A WOMAN'S RIGHTS DEBATE.
There never was a time when, on all sorts of subjects, from Mesmerism to
Woman's Rights, the ladies had so much to say for themselves. There is
an ancient heresy which tells us that, on most occasions, ladies are
prone to have the last word; but certain it is that they are making
themselves heard now. On the special subject of her so-called "Rights"
the abstract Woman was, I knew, prodigiously emphatic--how emphatic,
though, I was not quite aware, until having seen from the top of a
City-bound omnibus that a lady whom I will describe by the Aristophanic
name of Praxagora would lecture at the Castle Street Co-operative
Institute. I went and co-operated so far as to form one of that lady's
audience. Her subject--the "Political Status of Women"--was evidently
attractive, not only to what we used in our innocence to call the weaker
sex, but also to those who are soon to have proved to them the fallacy
of calling themselves the stronger. A goodly assemblage had gathered in
the fine hall of the Co-operators to join in demolishing that ancient
myth as to the superiority of the male sex. My first intention was to
have reported verbatim or nearly so the oration of Praxagora on the
subject; and if I changed my scheme it was not because that lady did not
deserve to be reported. She said all that was to be said on the matter,
and said it exceedingly well too; but when the lecture, which lasted
fifty minutes, was over, I found it was to be succeeded by a debate; and
I thought more might be gained by chronicling the collision of opinion
thence ensuing than by simply quoting the words of any one speaker,
however eloquent or exhaustive.
I own with fear and trembling--for it is a delicate, dangerous
avowal--that, as a rule, I do not sympathize with the ladies who declaim
on the subject of Woman's Rights. I do not mean to say I lack sympathy
with the subject--I should like everybody to have their rights, and
especially women--but they are sometimes asserted in such a
sledge-hammer fashion, and the ladies who give them utterance are so
prone to run large and be shrill-voiced that their very physique proves
their claim either unnecessary or undesirable. I feel certain that in
whatever station of domestic life those ladies may be placed, they would
have their full rights, if not something more; and as for Parliamentary
rights, I tremble for the unprotected males should such viragos ever
compass the franchise; or, worse still, realize the ambition of the
Ecclesiazusæ of Aristophanes, and sit on the benches of St. Stephen's
clad in the nether garments of the hirsute sex. There was nothing of
that kind on Tuesday night. In manner and appearance our present
Praxagora was thoroughly feminine, and, by her very quietude of manner,
impressed me with a consciousness of power, and determination to use it.
Her voice was soft and silvery almost as that of Miss Faithfull herself;
and when, at the outset of her lecture, she claimed indulgence on the
score of never having spoken in a public hall before, we had to press
forward to the front benches to catch the modulated tones, and men who
came clumping in with heavy boots in the course of the lecture were
severely hushed down by stern-visaged females among the audience.
Disclaiming connexion with any society, Praxagora still adopted the
first person plural in speaking of the doctrines and intentions of the
down-trodden females. "We" felt so and so; "we" intended to do this or
that; and certainly her cause gained by the element of mystery thus
introduced, as well as by her own undoubted power of dealing with the
subject. When the "we" is seen to refer to the brazen-voiced ladies
aforesaid, and a few of the opposite sex who appear to have changed
natures with the gentle ones they champion, that plural pronoun is the
reverse of imposing, but the "we" of Praxagora introduced an element of
awe, if only on the omne ignotum pro magnifico principle. In the most
forcible way she went through the stock objections against giving women
the franchise, and knocked them down one by one like so many ninepins.
That coveted boon of a vote she proved to be at the basis of all the
regeneration of women. She claimed that woman should have her share in
making the laws by which she was governed, and denied the popular
assertion that in so doing she would quit her proper sphere. In fact, we
all went with her up to a certain point, and most of the audience beyond
that point. For myself I confess I felt disheartened when, having dealt
in the most consummate way with other aspects of the subject, she came
to the religious phase, and begging the question that the Bible and
religion discountenanced woman's rights, commenced what sounded to me
like a furious attack on each.
Now I happen to know--what perhaps those who look from another
standpoint do not know--that this aggressive attitude assumed so
unnecessarily by the advocates of woman's rights is calculated to keep
back the cause more than anything else; and matter and manner had been
so much the reverse of hostile up to the moment she plunged
incontinently into the religious question, that it quite took me by
surprise. I have known scores of people who, when they came under
vigorous protest to hear Miss Emily Faithfull on the same fertile
subject, went away converted because they found no iconoclasm of this
kind in her teaching. They came to scoff and stopped, not indeed to
pray, but to listen very attentively to a theme which has so much to be
said in its favour that it is a pity to complicate its advocacy by the
introduction of an extraneous and most difficult question. So it was,
however; with pale, earnest face, and accents more incisive than before,
Praxagora said if Bible and religion stood in the way of Woman's Rights,
then Bible and religion must go. That was the gist of her remarks. I
need not follow her in detail, because the supplementary matter sounded
more bitterly still; and, had she not been reading from MS. I should
have thought the lecturer was carried away by her subject; but no, she
was reading quite calmly what were clearly enough her natural and
deliberate opinions. I said I was surprised at the line she took.
Perhaps I ought scarcely to have been so, for she was flanked on one
side by Mr. Bradlaugh, on the other by Mr. Holyoake! but I never
remember being so struck with a contrast as when at one moment Praxagora
pictured the beauty of a well-regulated home, and the tender offices of
woman towards the little children, and then shot off at a tangent to
fierce invectives against the Bible and religion, which seemed so
utterly uncalled for that no adversary who wanted to damage the cause
could possibly have invented a more complete method of doing so.
The lecture over, the chairman invited discussion, and a fierce little
working man immediately mounted the platform and took Praxagora to task
for her injudicious onslaught. But, as usual, this gentleman was wildly
irrelevant and carried away by his commendable zeal. Over and over again
he had to be recalled to the question, until finally he set his whole
audience against him, and had to sit down abruptly in the middle of a
sort of apotheosis of Moses--as far as I could hear, for his zeal outran
his eloquence as well as his discretion, and rendered him barely
audible. A second speaker followed, and, though cordially sympathizing
with the address, and tracing woman's incapacity to her state of
subjugation, regretted that such a disturbing element as religion had
been mixed up with a social claim. He considered that such a subject
must inevitably prove an apple of discord. For this he was at once
severely handled by Mr. Bradlaugh, who, consistently enough, defended
the line Praxagora adopted towards the religious question, and justified
the introduction of the subject from the charge of irrelevance. He also
deprecated the surprise which the last speaker had expressed at the
excellent address of Praxagora by pointing out that in America about
one-third of the press were females, a fact which he attributed to the
plan of Mixed Education. Then a new line was opened up by a speaker--it
was as impossible to catch their names as to hear the stations announced
by porters on the Underground Railway. He predicted that if women did
get the franchise, Mr. Bradlaugh's "Temple" would be shut up in six
months, as well as those of Messrs. Voysey and Conway and Dr. Perfitt.
The ladies, he said, were swayed by Conventionalism and Priestcraft, and
until you educated them, you could not safely give them the franchise.
A youthful Good Templar mounted the rostrum, for the purpose of patting
Praxagora metaphorically on the back, and also ventilating his own
opinions on the apathy of the working man in claiming his vote. Then
somebody got up and denied that ladies were by nature theological. Their
virtues were superior to those of men just as their voices were an
octave higher. He was for having a Moral Department of the State
presided over by ladies. Only one lady spoke; a jaunty young woman in a
sailor's hat, who said that in religious persecutions men, not women,
had been the persecutors; and then Praxagora rose to reply. She first of
all explained her position with regard to the Bible, which she denied
having unnecessarily attacked. The Bible forbade a woman to speak; and,
that being so, the Bible must stand on one side, for "we" were going to
speak. That the highest intellects had been formed on Bible models she
denied by instancing Shelley. If she thought that this movement was
going to destroy the womanhood of her sex she would not move a finger
for its furtherance. She only thought it would give a higher style of
womanhood. As to women requiring to be educated before they would know
how to use the franchise, she pointed triumphantly to the Government
which men had placed in power. It was significant, she said, that the
first exercise of the working men's franchise had been to place a
Conservative Government in office.
I daresay I am wrong, but the impression left on my mind by the
discussion was that the liberty of thought and action claimed was the
liberty of thinking as "_we_" think and doing what "_we_" want to have
done--a process which has been before now mistaken for absolute freedom.
Stripped of its aggressive adjuncts, Praxagora's advocacy of her main
subject would be telling in the extreme from the fact of her blending
such thorough womanliness of person, character, and sentiment with such
vigorous championship of a doctrine against which I do not believe any
prejudice exists. Drag in the religious difficulty, however, and you
immediately array against it a host of prejudices, whether reasonable
ones or the reverse is not now the question. I am only concerned with
the unwisdom of having called them into existence. I own I thought that
Christianity had been the means of raising woman from her state of
Oriental degradation to the position she occupies in civilized
countries. But I was only there to listen, not to speak; and I confess I
came away in a divided frame of mind. I was pleased with the paper, but
irritated to think that a lady, holding such excellent cards, should
risk playing a losing game.