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
Once the parliamentary vote is given to women, the same results would
follow in England as have followed elsewhere. Wages and hours of labour
are made just for women, as in many respects they have been now made for
men. The laws of divorce are the same. Mothers are made joint guardians of
their children with their fathers. The age of protection for girls is
raised to 18. [Footnote: At the present moment, by the English law, a girl
can contract a valid marriage at twelve years of age; a boy at fourteen.
(See _Legal Status of Women_, by H. H. Schloesser.)] In New South Wales,
after the women were given the vote, Dr. Mackellar brought in a bill to
deal with the protection of illegitimate children, which has answered
admirably; while in New Zealand and Australia the Wages Board, which the
women's vote helped to pass, has raised in both countries the wages of
women from 5s. to l6s. per week for the same amount of work done. And in
other respects it has abolished sweating--that crucial question of crucial
questions in England to-day.
There is another point, too, amongst many others, in which the vote helped
the national life in Australia in the giving of old age pensions. Perhaps
had women the vote here in England, the shameful system in which old men
and women are separated in the last years of their life, as the workhouses
ordain, would be altered. And this is a question which demands immediate
attention--_immediate_ attention; for more than £26,000,000 are paid by
taxpayers each year to be spent in great part on our wretched system of
poor laws.
Francis Newman was strongly against poor laws administered as they are in
England to-day, as, indeed, is every thoughtful man. He was also strongly
of opinion that there should be women on juries in some cases. And indeed
it is a fact that women magistrates, as well as women jurors, are most
certainly a _sine quâ non_ in those cases where, at the present moment,
owing to juries being composed of men only, common justice for the
unrepresented Englishwoman in relation with the other sex is not, in a
great proportion of cases, rendered her. But even were women made eligible
for these offices, it would be no new thing, for in Mary Tudor's reign
there were two women appointed justices of the peace; and, of course,
always there has been a provision in law for "a jury of matrons" in
certain cases.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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