WOMEN AND POLITICS A REJOINDER I MISS GORE BOOTH appears to believe that women's wages can be raised by Act of Parliament; and that the main cause of the difference between their earnings and that of men is unfair legislation by a masculine assembly. I am not a political economist, and must leave this theory to be dealt with by those who are. I own, however, that I am profoundly sceptical with regard to it. Miss Gore Booth and I differ, not as to the fact of the miserable condition of great numbers of working women, nor as to its tragic importance, but as to the causes and the true cure of this state of things. The question of female suffrage is but a minor point in the larger question of the right general position of women. It is a political question which I have no desire to argue, being (as I said in my article on 'Women and Politics') well aware that I am not competent to deal with it in all its aspects. My object in that article was to recall attention to some undeniable truths which lie at the very root of the larger question, but which are often and disastrously forgotten. I was certainly not pleading for elegant leisure, still less for conventual seclusion, as luxuries to be maintained for well-to-do women at the expense of their poorer sisters. I was pleading for home life and home duties as the natural and indispensable function of women generally. Nor did I represent women as too weak, but as too fully occupied, to engage in politics. I urged the claim for a fair division of labour between the sexes, and the paramount importance of those offices which women alone can fill as entitling them to some exemption from the more ordinary duties (e.g. electing members of Parliament and serving on juries) which men are competent to perform. I pointed out-did it need that I should do so ?-that marriage and motherhood are in their very nature an arduous undertaking, the duties of which cannot be neglected without ruin to the nation. The whole controversy seems to turn on the question whether politics and legislation are a sphere of labour or of privilege. If political power be a mere privilege which can be used without either care or study, and which yet is certain to bring in its train an increase not only of wages but of personal freedom, by all means let it be enjoyed by all of either sex who can get it. But if politics and legislation (even our modern legislation by constituencies) are tasks, involving hard work and calling for serious study, then let them be undertaken by those whose hands Nature has left free. You cannot legislate with one hand and rock a cradle with the other. What precise effect would be produced by giving votes to women is quite beyond the calculation of one who, like myself, is no politician. I doubt whether it can be accurately foreseen by anyone. Should the experiment ever be tried, the result may well prove much less important than we either hope or fear. It is, I repeat, not the value of the suffrage as a political engine that we have chiefly to consider, but the whole movement towards a redistribution of labour as between the sexes. I deprecate any such redistribution as would assign to women an increased share in the outer work of the world; not that women may be idle, but that their whole energies may be bestowed on their own more central work. While domestic life absolutely requires the immense amount of energy now bestowed upon it, which yet falls far short of the demand; while children are dying at so fearful a rate, or growing up stunted and degenerate because the full discharge of maternal duties is impossible where women are the breadwinners; while able-bodied men are not ashamed to be supported by their wives while these things are so it does appear to me to be madness to encourage the ignorant cry for votes, as though they could cure the miseries brought upon women and children, and through them on the whole nation, by poverty and ambition, by want of thought, and want of dutifulness. The unnatural state of things, by which so many women are driven to compete, on very unequal terms, with men for a bare livelihood, and are thereby debarred from serving their country in family life, is surely a state to be corrected at any cost; not to be assumed as the permanent basis of our electoral system. Let that system, however, be what it may-it matters little, so long as women are true to their highest duties.' CAROLINE E. STEPHEN. The Editor kindly allows me to introduce here a note which I regret to have omitted from my article in the February number (p. 231). In our Quaker Parliament (as we may call the yearly meeting of the Society of Friends), there has been for more than 100 years a separate Women's Meeting; which, though without legislative power, exercises a very marked influence on the action of the Society, through the opportunity it provides for the voice of Women Friends to be heard on all its affairs, and for their views to be placed on record. WOMEN AND POLITICS A REJOINDER II MISS STEPHEN, in her contribution to discussion of the above subject in the February number of this Review, dwells upon the impossibility of detaching [the question of female suffrage] from the much larger and deeper problem of the right general position of women, and the feminine and human ideals to which that position should correspond and contribute.' 1 These words strike the key-note of the opposition engendered in the minds of (I believe) large numbers of the most thoughtful women in this country, by the proposal to introduce and establish their sex in the political arena. There are, of course, many side issues; but the real ground on which we of the Opposition join battle is the fundamental one that the proposal involves a futile contradiction of the 'nature of things,' an ignoring of unchangeable facts and relations of facts in human life, which is bound to lead to disaster. To many all this seems mere profitless verbiage. Of course (say they) the differences between the sexes are patent in carrying on the business of life. You need not enlarge upon them. We see them; but we hold that they do not affect the claim of women to a share in determining the laws by which they as well as men are governed, and in the management of affairs-in a word, the policy-of the country which is their country as much as men's. It is certainly a plausible—many hold it to be an irrefragably just— contention. But let us look a little closer into the matter. Claims are of various origin. There is the claim of weakness upon pity, generosity, honour, good state-craft; but it is not this kind that the advocates of women's rights,' and of women's suffrage among those rights, principally urge. The claim to act, on the other hand, rests upon ability. Can women do these things which they claim to do? Are they, indeed, competent, and is it, therefore, desirable in the interest of the whole community that they should be admitted, to exercise all or most of the functions of the male citizen ? 1 Nineteenth Century, February 1907, p. 228. Here occurs some divergence. People answer with all manner of shades of meaning-distinguons. Everyone, indeed, shrinks from the 'all'; everyone rules out certain functions, certain vocations, for which women are by nature too obviously unfitted for the most ardent champion of female 'rights' to claim female fulfilment of them. But after the unanimous ruling out of these, there is much variety of category in estimating the claims and functions of women apart from the bearing and bringing-up of children. Some people are prominently for the political female ratepayer and her vote for Parliament. Do let in this little tiny concession, is their cry. It is as reasonable as it is tiny; it would not alter the existing state of things, socially or politically, a jot; but it would remedy a crying injustice to certain ratepayers. And it is as a ratepayer that one stands before the universe; and a ratepayer who is not a voter is a living 'contradiction in terms'-she is as smoke in air or foam on water.' Then comes another cry-or rather, a roar; The 'existing state of things' as between the sexes in matter of politics is a monstrous survival of mediæval superstition and tyranny-it is effete-no, it is powerful—well, it is both effete and powerful; it must be overturned and abolished. Women are the half of the race, therefore they ought to have half the voting power of the English Parliamentary electorate. Give us this, and the New Jerusalem would be as nothing to the bliss which will dawn on the women of England, and through them on the whole country. Every female worker will draw regularly men's wages, and the quartern loaf will be double its present weight for a less price.2-Oh, but we don't stop short with the suffrage, insists a third cry. We don't shrink from-nay, we long for the sight of women judges upon the bench, pleaders (yes, in divorce cases if you will) in the courts of law, permanent officials in the Civil Service (you see they are already letter-sorters and telegraph-clerks), perhaps eventually even members of the House of Commons itself, Ministers of the Crown, ambassadresses to foreign powers, and so on. I have hardly made a caricature of the medley; and I put in a claim that significant facts are at the bottom of my banter. For two things stand out clearly in the tumult of many counsels. First, it is, even upon the female suffrage claimants' own arguments, acknowledged an impossibility to reason strictly pari passu between men and women in the distribution of the rights and duties of life. Miss Eva Gore-Booth's 'reply' to Miss Stephen (Nineteenth Century, March 1907, pp. 472-476), makes one ask, seriously, whether she believes, and leads poor ignorant working-women to believe, that the reason women are paid lower wages than men is that they have not the vote for Parliament and men have it. Surely the most elementary acquaintance with economics should teach her that there is no Parliamentary road to the general raising of women's wages. It is not (as she seems to think) a question of bringing pressure through the House of Commons,' for it is not, as with men, a simple issue of demanding better wages. It is a question of competition between the sexes; and that competition arises from causes which Parliament can no more control than the tides of the ocean, Both sexes are undoubtedly reasoning human beings, and probably of about equal average intelligence; yet it is conceded that precisely similar functions in the commonwealth cannot, in the nature of things, be allotted to both. This admission made, the remaining point is, Where and upon what principle is distinction of functions to come in? The claimants of women's suffrage, it would seem, make a clear answer. Our principle of distinction, they reply in effect, is that of physical capacity. Women are by bodily constitution unfit for certain functions and occupations, and the normal demands of life upon their bodily energy emphasise and increase this unfitness. To claim such functions and occupations would be absurd; but neither the exercise of the franchise nor any other function of political activity is one of them. Now to persons insisting upon the ability of women who already are matrons of hospitals, mistresses of schools and colleges, physicians in full practice, &c., to meet the demands made on the energy, not merely of voters at the poll, but of members of Parliament, party-leaders, ministers of the Crown, chiefs in diplomacy-to persons arguing thus, the kind of reply set forth above may seem forcible and conclusive. But it has, as I submit, one fatal flaw. It runs counter to the whole purport and teaching of modern knowledge of the laws of life, which even a humble outsider may discern. That purport and teaching is to the effect that the human being, man or woman, is by natural constitution a living unity, in which various powers and functions are bound up; that to deal with such powers and functions severally, without regard to the others, spells disaster; that, consequently, if a certain plan of life is strongly indicated in one department of this unity, the overwhelming probability is that such plan ought to rule it wholly. And it would follow that to separate in consideration one group of vital facts from others essentially bound up with them is unscientific, unphilosophical, indeed-in the strictest sense of the word -absurd. But this is precisely the position taken up by those who would isolate the obvious, absolute physical disabilities of women— e.g., to fight a battle or lay a line of railway—as having no bearing on the question of their fitness or unfitness for other activities also heretofore held appropriate only to men. Our contention, on the other hand, is that these obvious, absolute physical disabilities are not isolated facts, pointing to isolated exceptions to a general rule that all careers and functions in the community should be common to both sexes. We hold that they point to the existence of kindred disabilities, not so obvious but not less real; that just as absolute and permanent disability bars women from (say) command of an army in the field or service in the rank and file, so it bars them from the efficient exercise of political, legislative, and judicial functions, and from those of the executive Government of the country. The disability is not equally salient in respect of all these vocations; but it is |