EMMELINE PANKHURST AND JANE ADDAMS
A few months ago it was rather the fashion to reply to some political
verses by Mr. Kipling which assumed to show that women should not be
given the ballot, and which had as their refrain:
The female of the species is more deadly than the male!
But it seems that no one pointed out that this fact, even in the limited
sense in which it is a fact in the human species, is an argument for
giving women the vote.
For if women are, as Mr. Kipling says, lacking in a sense of abstract
justice, in patience, in the spirit of compromise; if they are violent
and unscrupulous in gaining an end upon which they have set their
hearts, then by all means they should be rendered comparatively harmless
by being given the ballot. For it is characteristic of a republic that
its political machinery, created in order to carry out the will of the
people, comes to respond with difficulty to that will, while being
perfectly susceptible to other influences. Republican government, when
not modified by drastic democratic devices, is an expensive, cumbrous,
and highly inefficient method of carrying out the popular will; and
casting a vote is like nothing so much as casting bread upon the waters.
It shall return--after many days. By voting, by exercising an
infinitesimal pressure on our complex, slow-moving political mechanism,
one cannot--it is a sad fact--do much good; but one cannot--and it
should encourage the pessimistic Mr. Kipling--one cannot, even though a
woman, do much harm.
This is not, however, a disquisition on woman suffrage. There is only
one argument for woman suffrage: women want it; there are no arguments
against it. But one may profitably inquire, What will be the effect of
the emergence of women into politics upon politics itself? And one may
hope to find an answer in the temperament and career of certain
representative leaders of the woman's movement. Let us accordingly turn
to the accredited leader of the English "votes for women" movement, and
to the woman in the American movement who is best known to the public.
That Miss Jane Addams has become known chiefly through other activities
does not matter here. It is temperament and career in which we are
immediately interested. What is perhaps the most outstanding fact in the
temperament of Miss Addams is revealed only indirectly in her
autobiography: it may be called the passion of conciliation.
Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst has by her actions written herself down for a
fighter. She has but recently been released from Holloway jail, where
she was serving a term of imprisonment for "conspiracy and violence." In
a book by H. G. Wells, which contains a very bitter attack on the
woman's suffrage movement (I refer to "Ann Veronica"), she is described
as "implacable"; and I believe that it is she to whom Mr. Wells refers
as being "as incapable of argument as a steam roller broken loose." The
same things might have been said of Sherman on his dreadful march to the
sea. These phrases, malicious as they are, contain what I am inclined to
accept as an accurate description of Mrs. Pankhurst's temperament.
No one would call Mrs. Pankhurst a conciliator. And no one would call
Miss Addams "implacable." It is not intended to suggest that Miss Addams
is one of those inveterate compromisers who prefer a bad peace to a good
war. But she has the gift of imaginative sympathy; and it is impossible
for her to have toward either party in a conflict the cold hostility
which each party has for the other. She sees both sides; and even though
one side is the wrong side, she cannot help seeing why its partisans
believe in it.
"If the under dog were always right," Miss Addams has said, "one might
quite easily try to defend him. The trouble is that very often he is but
obscurely right, sometimes only partially right, and often quite wrong,
but perhaps he is never so altogether wrong and pig-headed and utterly
reprehensible as he is represented to be by those who add the possession
of prejudice to the other almost insuperable difficulties in
understanding him."
Miss Addams has taken in good faith the social settlement ideal--"to
span the gulf between the rich and the poor, or between those who have
had cultural opportunities and those who have not, by the process of
neighborliness." In her writings, as in her work, there is never sounded
the note of defiance. Even in defense of the social settlement and its
methods of conciliation (which have been venomously assailed by the
newspapers during Chicago's fits of temporary insanity, as in the
Averbuch case), Miss Addams has not become militant. She has never
ceased to be serenely reasonable.
But when one comes to ask how powerful Miss Addams' example has been,
one is forced to admit that it has been limited. There are two other
settlement houses in Chicago which are managed in the spirit of Hull
House. But all the others--and there are about forty settlement houses
in the city--have discarded almost openly the principle of conciliation.
They are efficient, or religious, or something else, but they are afraid
of being too sympathetic with the working class. They do not, for
instance, permit labor unions to meet in their halls. The splendid
social idealism of the '80s, of which Miss Addams is representative, has
disappeared, leaving two sides angry and hostile and with none but Miss
Addams believing in the possibility of finding any common ground for
action. One event after another from the Pullman strike to the Averbuch
case has brought this hostility out into the open, with Miss Addams
occupying neutral ground, and left high and dry upon it.
It is the fact that Miss Addams has not been able to imbue the movement
in which she is a leader with her own spirit. Her career has been
successful only so far as individual genius could make it successful. If
one compares her achievement to that of Mrs. Pankhurst, one sees that
the latter is startingly social in its nature.
For Mrs. Pankhurst has called upon women to be like herself, to display
her own Amazonian qualities. She called upon shop girls and college
students and wives and old women to make physical assaults on cabinet
ministers, to raid parliament and fight with policemen, to destroy
property and go to prison, to endure almost every indignity from the
mobs and from their jailers, to suffer in health and perhaps to die,
exactly as soldiers suffer and die in a campaign.
And they did. They answered her call by the thousands. They have fought
and suffered, and some of them have died. If this had been the result of
individual genius in Mrs. Pankhurst, transforming peaceful girls into
fighters out of hand, she would be the most extraordinary person of the
age. But it is impossible to believe that all this militancy was created
out of the void. It was simply awakened where it lay sleeping in these
women's hearts.
Mrs. Pankhurst has performed no miracle. She has only shown to us the
truth which we have blindly refused to see. She has had the insight to
recognize in women generally the same fighting spirit which she found in
herself, and the courage to draw upon it. She has enabled us to see what
women really are like, just as Miss Addams has by her magnificent
anomalies shown us what women are not like.
Can anyone doubt this? Can anyone, seeing the lone eminence of Miss
Addams, assert that imaginative sympathy, patience, and the spirit of
conciliation are the ordinary traits of women? Can anyone, seeing the
battle frenzy which Mrs. Pankhurst has evoked with a signal in thousands
of ordinary Englishwomen, deny that women have a fighting soul?
And can anyone doubt the effect which the emergence of women into
politics will have, eventually, on politics? Eventually, for in spite of
their boasted independence the decorous example of men will rule them at
first. But when they have become used to politics--well, we shall find
that we have harnessed an unruly Niagara!
In women as voters we shall have an element impatient of restraint,
straining at the rules of procedure, cynical of excuses for inaction;
not always by any means on the side of progress; making every mistake
possible to ignorance and self-conceit; but transforming our politics
from a vicious end to an efficient means--from a cancer into an organ.
This, with but little doubt, is the historic mission of women. They
will not escape a certain taming by politics. But that they should be
permanently tamed I find impossible to believe. Rather they will subdue
it to their purposes, remold it nearer to their hearts' desire, change
it as men would never dream of changing it, wreck it savagely in the
face of our masculine protest and merrily rebuild it anew in the face of
our despair. With their aid we may at last achieve what we seem to be
unable to achieve unaided--a democracy.
Meanwhile let us understand this suffrage movement. Let us understand
that we have in militancy rather than in conciliation, in action rather
than in wisdom, the keynote of woman in politics. And we males, who have
so long played in our politics at innocent games of war, we shall have
an opportunity to fight in earnest at the side of the Valkyrs.