If the eligibility of woman is really to benefit society, then the right of resignation must be unconditioned for mothers, and they themselves must understand that the parliamentary mandate is incompatible with motherhood so long as the children are still in the home; in like manner during the same period, the franchise of the mother of a family must not result in rushing into electioneering. The ballot in and of itself does not injure the fineness of a woman’s hand any more than a cooking receipt.
Because woman’s motherhood must be preserved, if she is to bring to the social organism a really new factor, so she must always continue to be found and to work in private life, in order to be, meanwhile, useful in public life. The genius of social reform which women will develop can complement that of man only if this genius is of a new order; if it originates thoughts which bring new points of view to the social problems, wills which seek new means, souls which aspire to new ends. Women could, if they received their full civic right before they lost their intuitive and instinctive power through masculinisation, effect the progress of culture as, for example, the entrance of the Germans influenced the antique world.
The sooner woman receives her political franchise, the more, on the whole, can be expected from it. The generation which has now fought the fight for suffrage is wholly conscious of the reforms that await woman for their final realisation. And this generation of women would introduce into the political life a new, fresh current. In any event, we can hope to secure from women new impulses and better organisation in political life, as has already been the case in social life. But every new generation of parliamentary women, who together with the men have been “politically trained,” would have—as long as the present economic conditions obtain—continually greater economic interests to advocate “parliamentarily,” and would also for other reasons evince the same parliamentary maladies as the men evince now. And as little as evil men lose their evil characteristics because of the franchise, quite as little will bad women lose theirs. The entrance of women into politics cannot therefore—as certain feminists maintain—signify the victory of the noble over the ignoble. But it signifies a great increase in noble as well as ignoble powers hitherto inactive in political life, which in the wider sphere that they there maintain oppose one another, now conquering, now yielding. Men and women together, however, will be able to enact more humane laws than men alone can enact. Questions concerning women and children can be treated with deeper seriousness by men and women together than is now the case. Men and women together will consider the social life from more significant points of view than can one sex alone. Government consisting of men and women together will be more profound than heretofore. No one who has observed the effects of masculine and feminine coöperation in fields already mentioned can doubt this. Who can deny that with the civic right of woman her feeling of social responsibility will increase and that her horizon will widen? And therewith her value as wife and mother of men will also increase? But she will increase in value for the men closely connected with her as well as in social respects. The woman of earlier times, for all of whom society might go to pieces if only her home and family prospered, was only in a restricted sense man’s help. In certain great crises she usually betrayed him simply because she wholly lacked the social feeling.
Obviously, the female member of Parliament cannot confine herself solely to questions which concern the protection of the weaker and the education of the new race. The more women concentrate upon the cause of justice against power, and of public spirit against self-interest, the more advantageous it will be for her herself and for the public life. But concentration is, unfortunately, exactly what modern parliamentarism does not promote; what it does promote is disintegration.
Woman has, however, where she has entered into parliamentary life as elector and eligible, shown thus far exactly this tendency toward concentration. She has worked for moral, temperance, and hygienic questions; for questions concerning schools and education of the masses; for mother and child protection; reform of marriage laws, and kindred subjects. What thinking man can maintain that all this does not belong to “woman’s sphere” or can say that these and similar social interests have been sufficiently attended to by an exclusively masculine government? Already the opposite danger appears in certain social spheres: an exclusively “feminine government.”
In the present forms of public life, however, much feminine power will without doubt be wasted. Only when man, upon a higher plane, has created a new kind of representation “of the people,” where professional interests in every sphere are represented, can the highest vocation of woman—motherhood—come into its rights.
It belongs to the necessary course of historical development that women also go through the stage of party-power politics in order together with man to reach the stage of social politics and finally that of culture politics.
But women cannot wait until this development has been attained; they must accomplish it together with man. Just as the best masculine powers sooner or later must be concentrated to transform increasingly untenable parliamentary conditions, so the best feminine powers will also work in the same direction, especially if the will becomes intense in mothers not only to awaken in their children the social spirit, but also to create for them better social conditions.
In later years, the movement for the suffrage of woman has not only filled the world with suffrage societies but the agitation has even achieved popular representation in eighteen European countries, in the legislative assemblies of a number of American States, in Australasia, in legislative assemblies in Canada and in the Philippines. In Iceland as well as in Italy, in Japan as in South Africa, the movement is in progress, and whoever thinks it will not attain its goal is politically blind.