Looking back now, we can see that whatever thinkers and statesmen fifty years ago may have argued for as best meeting the immediate needs of the hour, the organized suffrage movement in all the most advanced countries should long ago have broadened their platform, and explicitly set before their own members and the public as their objective not merely "the vote," but "the political, legal and social equality of women."
We are not abler, not any broader-minded nor more intellectually daring than those pioneers, but we have what they had not, the test of results. Let us briefly glance at what has been the course of events in those states and countries which were the earliest to obtain political freedom for their women.
In none of the four suffrage states first enfranchised in this country, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho and Colorado, in Australia or in New Zealand, did any large proportion of women ask for or desire their political freedom. In that there is nothing strange or exceptional. Those who see the need of any reform so clearly that they will work for it make up comparatively a small proportion of any nation or of any class. Women are no exception. Note Australia. As the suffrage societies there, as elsewhere, had been organized for this one purpose, "to obtain the vote," with the obtaining of the vote all reason for their continued existence ceased. The organizations at once and inevitably went to pieces. The vote, gained by the efforts of the few, was now in the hands of great masses of women, who had given little thought to the matter previously, who were absolutely unaware of the tremendous power of the new instrument placed in their hands. A whole sex burst into citizenship, leaderless and with no common policy upon the essential needs of their sex.
Except in Victoria, where the state franchise lagged behind till 1909, the women of Australia have been enfranchised for over twelve years, and yet it is only recently that they are beginning to get together as sister women. Those leaders who all along believed in continuous and organized work by women for the complete freeing of the sex from all artificial shackles and unequal burdens are now justified of their belief. New young leaders are beginning to arise, and there are signs that the rank and file are beginning to march under these leaders towards far-off ends that are gradually being defined more clearly from the mists of these years. But they have much ground to make up. Only so lately as 1910 there were leading women in one of the large labor conferences who protested against women entering the legislature, using against that very simple and normal step in advance the very same moss-grown arguments as we hear used in this country against the conferring of the franchise itself.
Nowadays, it is true, no quite similar result is likely to happen in any state or country which from now on receives enfranchisement, for the reason that there are now other organizations, such as the General Federation of Women's Clubs here, and the active women's trade unions, and suffrage societies on a broad basis and these are every day coming in closer touch with one another and with the organized suffrage movement. But neither women's trade unions nor women's clubs can afford to neglect any means of strengthening their forces, and a sort of universal association having some simple broad aim such as I have tried to outline would be an ally which would bring them into communication with women outside the ranks of any of the great organizations, for it alone would be elastic enough to include all women, as its appeal would necessarily be made to all women.
The universal reasons for equipping women with the vote as with a tool adapted to her present day needs, and the claims made upon her by the modern community, the reasons, in short why women want and are asking for the vote, the universal reasons why men, even good men, cannot be trusted to take care of women's interests, were never better or more tersely summed up than in a story told by Philip Snowden in the debate in the British House of Commons on the Woman Suffrage Bill of 1910, known as the Conciliation Bill. He said that after listening to the objections urged by the opponents of the measure, he was reminded of a man who, traveling with his wife in very rough country, came late at night to a very poor house of accommodation. When the meal was served there was nothing on the table but one small mutton chop. "What," said the man in a shocked tone, "have you nothing at all for my wife?"
XIII
TRADE UNION IDEALS AND POLICIES
Trade unionism does not embrace the whole of industrial democracy, even for organized labor and even were the whole of labor organized, as we hope one of these days it will be, but it does form one of the elements in any form of industrial democracy as well as affording one of the pathways thither.
The most advanced trade unionists are those men and women who recognize the limitations of industrial organization, but who value it for its flexibility, for the ease with which it can be transformed into a training-school, a workers' university, while all the while it is providing a fortified stronghold from behind whose shelter the industrial struggle can be successfully carried on, and carried forward into other fields.