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
vote would always be actually or possibly on the wrong side._” (Italics
mine.) The conversation of the wolf with the lamb in La Fontaine’s fable
is an admirable expression of this state of mind, but to call it “fair
and impartial” throws a queer light on Mr. Harrison’s own particular
quality of male mind. He alludes pathetically to the sufferings men have
endured at the hands of women when men have felt it their duty to oppose
something women desired. It is a pity when rancour and spite manifest
themselves, but have women never suffered at the hands of men? How about
the witch trials? Did men make the path of Joan of Arc, of Josephine
Butler, of Doctor Jex-Blake, even of Florence Nightingale a path of
roses? Are not suffragists even now having all sorts of preposterous
views and disastrous vices attributed to them? And is there one of us
that has not been pelted with mud and refuse from the hands of a man
(save the mark)? One murmurs “Marconi,” one glances at the Balkans, and
wonders if women could really improve on the language that has been used
by men of each other in political controversy.
We have had enough of this irrelevant talk about the inferiority of
women. Do we replace it by equally foolish assertions of the inferiority
of men? Not a bit of it. We base the women’s demand for a share in
government on precisely the same grounds as those on which men have based
their demands. The difficulties we all find in acting for others are,
broadly speaking, of two kinds. There is the difficulty of understanding
the lives of others as completely as we understand our own, and there
is the fact that our own affairs have a motive force which the affairs
of others have not. Only people desperately driven to excuse themselves
could pretend that men, any more than women, are unaffected by these
difficulties, and Professor Dicey, whose unsentimental mind revolts from
cant, has frankly admitted as much. “Under a representative government,”
he writes,[3] “any considerable body of persons who are not represented
in Parliament is exposed, at best, to neglect. In a country such as
England the views of the unrepresented are overlooked far less through
selfishness than through the stupidity or preoccupation of the voters
and their representatives.… Nor can any impartial critic maintain that,
even at the present day, the desires of women, about matters in which
they are vitally concerned, obtain from Parliament all the attention they
deserve.… Despotism is none the less trying because it may be dictated by
philanthropy, and the benevolence of workmen which protects women from
overwork is not quite above suspicion when it coincides with the desire
of artisans to protect themselves from female competition.” No suffragist
could put the argument better than this candid anti-suffragist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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