The Future of the Women's MovementSwanwick, Helena M. (Helena Maria)
General
The Future of the Women's Movement
Swanwick, Helena M. (Helena Maria)
Women -- Social and moral questions; Women's rights
Now, at last, there are signs that the light is breaking. Knowledge is
showing men that neither their own happiness nor the welfare of the child
can ever be served by the subjection, the crippling or the thwarting
of women. And intelligent men are coming over in their thousands. Even
a very rough crowd in the Midlands, that had been stoning the women’s
suffrage pilgrims, because they were supposed to be militants, cried
out to them as they went home, after a meeting, “We are all for it!”
meaning they were all for the enfranchisement of women, although they
felt so shocked at the violence of the militants that they felt impelled
themselves to resort to worse violence.
Men have said to us over and over again, “You are quite right. You ought
to get it, and you will get it. Go on fighting. It is a woman’s question,
and you women must solve it for yourselves.” It is strange to women that
such men have not seen the baseness of this attitude. It is strange that
they cannot see that they alone have the power, and that, under their
fair words, they are in effect saying, “Get it, if you can,” for all the
world like a bullying big boy who has stolen the smaller boy’s bread. It
is strange that they should be willing in this matter to show themselves
so inferior to women; for when did women ever say to their menfolk: “Your
freedom, your dignity, your ideals are nothing to me. These are men’s
questions; let them settle their affairs without our help”? Just as
women have carried men in their arms, when they were weak and whimpering
and ugly, till they could run alone; just as women have nourished the
babes at their breasts, and given their lives for them, so have we women
(in the words of Miss Anna Shaw) “carried all the weak causes in our
arms, until they were strong and could run alone, and then—then—they
forgot us!” In the French Revolution, at Peterloo, in the American
crusade against slavery, among the Boers in South Africa, in the Chinese
revolution, in Ireland now, when did women ever separate their lives and
interests from those of men?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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