Memoir and Letters of Francis W. NewmanSieveking, I. Giberne (Isabel Giberne)
Religion
Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman
Sieveking, I. Giberne (Isabel Giberne)
Newman, Francis William, 1805-1897
"Not only with regard to _property_, also in regard to _children_, the law
is unjust to women. The mother has to undergo much in bringing a child to
maturity--the agony of childbirth... the countless cares of tending and
watching by night and day. The child becomes the darling of her heart, the
image of her dreams, the great centre of her thoughts and hopes; and after
all her toils, the law permits a husband to take the child permanently out
of her sight, and (if he choose) to put it under the charge of an enemy
... who will fill its mind with falsehoods and teach it to hate and
despise its mother. Such things are not possibilities merely and dreams;
they are stern realities, and the law gives her no redress."
When one thinks of all that these words mean, one is face to face with the
almost unthinkable fact that the case of the woman in England is unjust
beyond description, and for this reason, that, as Newman says, "Men, who
alone make the laws, make them with but little account of woman." At home
with her children she is defenceless. She has no power over them, and her
husband is not bound to "maintain" her, notwithstanding the sentence,
which English law has made absolutely meaningless, of his marriage vow to
her: "With all my worldly goods I thee endow."
In the world, if she have no husband or be unmarried, she is not a
"person" in a legal sense; and during election time her house is
described, in canvassing for votes, as having "no occupier"! In the world,
too, she is unable to obtain a fair wage for her work. She may do the work
as well as man, but nevertheless, in most cases, her pay is less. Mr.
Johnston tells us that the average male worker's wage has been calculated
to be about 18s., but the average woman worker's wage is only about 7s.
And when women find out these many injustices suffered at home and in the
world by their sex, as Miss Christabel Pankhurst says, they are absolutely
unable to right these wrongs, for "women have no political power."
Here is the pivot round which the wrongs of women revolve--her lack of
legal status, her voicelessness as regards the laws of her country, the
country which is so openly irrational as to count her a "person" when it
wants to get a tax out of her, but refuses to do so at any other time when
she has something to ask of it in return!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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