The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 21: The Recent Days (1910-1914)
History
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 21: The Recent Days (1910-1914)
World history
The drunken loafer who has not earned a living for years is consulted
by the Constitution on questions like the training and upbringing of
children, the national settlement of religion in Wales and elsewhere,
and as to the best method of dealing with the licensing problem. But
the wife whose industry keeps him and his household from beggary, who
pays the rent and taxes which constitute him a voter, who is therefore
really responsible for his qualification to vote, is not taken into
account in the slightest degree. I came in contact not long ago with a
great girls' school in the south of England. It was founded by women,
and it is administered by women. It is one of the most marvelous
organizations in the whole country, and yet, when we had, in the year
1906, to give a national verdict on the question of education, the man
who split the firewood in that school was asked for his opinion about
it, while those ladies were deemed to be absolutely unfit to pass any
judgment on it at all. That is a preposterous and barbarous
anachronism, and so long as it lasts our democracy is one-sided and
incomplete. But it will not last long. No franchise bill can ever again
be brought forward in this country without raising the whole problem of
whether you are going to exclude more than half the citizens of the
land. Women have entered pretty nearly every sphere of commerce and
industry and professional activity and public employment; and there
never was a time when the nation stood more in need of the special
experience, instincts, and sympathy of womanhood in the management of
its affairs. When women get the vote the horizon of the home will be
both brightened and expanded, and their influence on moral and social
and educational questions, especially on the temperance question, and
possibly on the peace of nations, will be constant and humanizing.
Those are a few of the reasons why I favor woman suffrage. But because
I favor it I do not therefore hold myself bound to either speak or vote
for any and every suffrage bill that may be introduced into Parliament.
I voted against the so-called Conciliation Bill which proposed to give
the vote to every woman of property if she chose to take the trouble to
get it, and at the same time enfranchise only about one-tenth or
one-fifteenth of the working women of the country. That was simply a
roundabout way of doubling the plural voters and no democrat could
possibly support it, so long as there remained a single alternative.
The solution that most appeals to me is the one embodied in the
Dickinson Bill, that is to say, a measure conferring the vote on women
householders and on the wives of married electors; and I believe that
it is in that form that woman suffrage will eventually come in this
country. How soon it will come depends very largely on how soon the
militants come to their senses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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