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
have in the main acknowledged this, that the history of Great Britain has
been in the main a peaceful history.
The women’s movement is felt in all departments of life. In the education
and training of girls, and, since men are the sons and mates of women,
in the education and training of boys; in social, economic, religious
and political matters. Custom, opinion and prejudice are as important as
legislation; administration of law is sometimes vastly more important
than law-making. On all these lines, then, march the women, but not on
the old beaten paths. Roadmakers they are, and besides the toil of making
the roads, they have not infrequently to endure the harassment of the
stones and dirt which are hurled at them by those who are sitting in the
old track, and who resent their divergence from it.
In England the intensity of the political struggle is due to the fact
that women have made such great advances along the lines of personal and
social effort, while the recognition of them within the Constitution
is still withheld. Moreover, the causes of this continued exclusion
have been of late so merely political, so entirely the result of an
artificial party system, that the women who desire enfranchisement for
no party reasons at all, but from their consciousness of a deep human
need, are exasperated by the pettiness and futility of politicians, who
subordinate a great issue of social right and wrong to the miserable
party game of recrimination and retaliation, of power and office, of ins
and outs. The women who had for forty-six years been steadily building up
a majority in the House of Commons, and had kept a majority unbroken for
twenty-six years (a feat which can be recorded of no other reform party
in parliamentary history), found themselves apparently no nearer the
attainment of their object, for the morally insufficient but politically
overwhelming reason that their majority was composed of men from all
parts of the House.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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