E-text prepared by MWS and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org) Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/futureofwomensmo00swan THE FUTURE OF THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT by H. M. SWANWICK, M.A. With an Introduction by Mrs. Fawcett, LL.D. President of the National Union of Women’S Suffrage Societies [Illustration] London G. Bell & Sons Ltd. 1913 TO F. T. S. PREFACE Women in the movement often wish that the word humanist had not been appropriated, because it would far more properly connote the women’s movement than the word feminist. It is significant of much that there is in the English language no commonly used substantive corresponding to “_homo_.” There is need, of course, for the words man and woman, but there is also need for a word denoting the species, irrespective of sex, and I have been driven to make use of a locution not common in English, in writing “a human.” But the common pronoun is non-existent and I have not used the neuter, lest it should alarm nervous persons. Perhaps when we have got over the panic fear of unsexing ourselves, we may find it safe to speak of a human, just as we do of a baby, as “it.” There may seem to be a disappointing lack of prophesy in a book avowedly dealing with the future; but since I believe the women’s movement to be a seeking for knowledge and good, to show what is reasonable and good in the movement is to show what will persist and triumph. Through all our faults and mistakes, we women are aiming at better understanding and co-operation with men, and a better adaptation to one another of conditions and persons. We are having to hammer out for ourselves the right principles of government. We can take them ready-made from no man. Doubtless we shall flounder considerably, as men have done—and do. But there is little fear that in the long-run the best minds of men and women will not have a common principle.