Facts and Fictions of Life

by Helen H. Gardener

That instant words lose all par value. That instant all men, including those who have but just waxed eloquent over the injustice and the real danger of permitting inequality before the law, become aristocrats. Claiming to be the logical sex, man throws logic to the winds. Claiming to have fought and bled to enthrone "liberty," he forgets its very name! Asserting that in his own hand alone can the scales of justice be held level, he makes of justice, of liberty and of equality a mockery and a pretense! He has so far read all of those words in the masculine gender only. He has not yet learned to think them in a universal language. He stultifies his every utterance and makes of his mind a jailer, and of his laws slave drivers, for all who cannot by physical force wrench from him the right to their own liberty and to their human status of equality of opportunity.

Men have everywhere grown to believe that they have been born and that they rule women by divine right. Woman is a mere annex to and for his glory. She exists for him to rule, to think for, to adore, to tolerate or to abuse as he sees fit, or as is his type or nature. Her appeal must not be to an equal standard of justice which she has helped to frame, administer and live by; but it must be to his generosity, his tenderness, his toleration or his chivalry—in short, to his absolute power over her. "No people can be free without an equal legal footing for all of its citizens!" exclaims the statesman, and drums beat and trumpets blare and men march and countermarch in enthusiastic response to the sentiment. "We must have a government of the people, by the people, for the people" is cheered to the echo whenever heard, and nobody realizes that what is meant always is a government of men, by men, for men, with woman as an annex.

Only three weeks ago all of our papers had leaders, editorials and cablegrams to announce that "universal suffrage has been granted in Belgium." They all grew enthusiastic over it. One of our leading New York editors said (and I use his editorial simply because it is a very good example of what almost all of our important journals said):

"The triumph of the Belgian democracy is an event of the first significance. The masses had long appealed in vain for a removal of the property qualification which restricted the right of suffrage to 140,000 persons out of a population of over 6,-000,000 but the chambers, dominated by the wealthy classes, resolutely refused to comply with the demand until a dangerous revolution was inaugurated.

"Even how the change in the constitution granting universal suffrage is coupled with the right of plural voting by the property-owners, but it is quite certain that this obnoxious feature will be soon abandoned by the chambers and universal suffrage will prevail, as in the adjoining nations of France and Germany.

"When these newly enfranchised electors choose the next legislature important changes may be expected in the laws applicable to the employment of labor, which have hitherto been framed solely in the interest of the mine-owners and the manufacturers. Fortunately for the king, he seems to be in sympathy with this effort of the masses to acquire a fair representation in the government. In the recent riots the hostility of the people was directed against the assembly rather than against the crown. It is very evident that the democratic spirit is gaining ground throughout Europe. Its influence is manifest in the home rule movement in England, in the hostility to the army bill in Germany, and in the rapid changes of the ministers of France. It steadily advances in every direction and never loses ground once acquired. It progresses peacefully if it can, but forcibly if it must. Its triumph in Belgium is one of the signs of the times in the old world."

"The people" are all male in Belgium, in France, Germany and America, or else all of these statements are mere figures of speech, are wholly untrue, for the women of Belgium, of France, of Germany—and, alas! of democratic America, were not even thought of when the words "people," "citizens," "masses," "laborers," etc., were used. They are counted in the estimates of the population as all of these. They are used to fill vacancies, to swell estimates, to round out statistics, but in the result of these arguments and statistics, in the victories won for liberty to the individual, woman has no part. She is the one outlaw in human progress. In a recent magazine this passage occurs:

"Austria.—On April 2 Dr. Victor Adler, a socialist leader, spoke to about 4,000 workingmen in favor of universal suffrage. He said that two-thirds of the adult men had not the suffrage. Only half-civilized countries, like Russia and Spain, now placed their citizens in such inequality before the law. The workingmen of Austria had never before this winter suffered such hardships, and now in Vienna 26,000 workmen were without shelter."

Yet there is no report that Dr. Adler nor the editor of the magazine, who waxed eloquent over it, saw any special "hardship" or "inequality" in a degraded status for all women. "Universal suffrage," indeed! And has Austria no women citizens? Were the working women who have not the ballot, better sheltered than the men? Or do they need no shelter? Another editor says: "Don't talk about a free ballot while the bread of the masses is in the giving of the classes."

Yet, had a venturesome girl type-setter made it read, "Don't talk about a free ballot, a democracy or freedom while the bread of women is in the giving of men," the editor would have said: "She is insane, and besides that, she is talking unwomanly nonsense."