Woman and the Republic / A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost Advocates

by Helen Kendrick Johnson

These two Suffrage leaders will have to settle between themselves the question which they have placed in dispute. It serves to point the moral of dilemma that attends an attempted adjustment of unnatural claims. Meantime government is caring for the weak, and chivalry is doing justice. The Labor Law that went into effect in this State on September 1st provided that children be classified so that those under fourteen years should not be employed in mercantile pursuits. Children between the ages of twelve and fourteen will be permitted to work in vacation, if they can show that they have attended school through the year. The girls between fourteen and twenty-one are not to be allowed to work more than ten hours a day. Their employment before 7 A.M. and after 10 P.M. is forbidden. Women and children are not allowed to work in basements, without permits from the Health Board as to the condition of the basement. Seats are to be provided for woman employees, forty-five minutes given them for luncheon, and proper lunch and toilet rooms to be secured. Penalties, ranging from a fine of $20 for the first offence to imprisonment, are prescribed for violation of the law. In his last report, published in January 1897, the New York Commissioner of Labor considers the low wages and petty wrongs of working women and girls in New York City. He advises the formation of unions among themselves for their better protection.

Mr. Brooks does not agree with those who claim that possession of the ballot would raise wages. Mrs. Ames and Dr. Jacobi think it would only raise them through the indirect influence of the greater respect in which the worker would be held. This is safe ground again, because it is debatable; but the domestic servants of those who hold the former opinion might give them an object-lesson. Unfranchised as the servants are, they have only to make a threat of leaving to secure better wages.

Harriette A. Keyser, who was the special Suffrage champion of the working- woman before the Committee of the Constitutional Convention, gave not one fact or figure to show that the working-woman, where she had the ballot, had already been helped by it, or that it was likely to help her, or how and why it might help her. Among the generalities she uttered was the following; "But the greatest value of the working-woman, to my mind, is that without her economic value this present demand for equal suffrage could never be made. Indeed, the suffrage of the world is due to her. Do I mean by this that every working-woman in the country sees her own value so clearly that she demands enfranchisement? I could not say this with truth. I make this statement irrespective of what any individual working-woman may think. It is based upon what she is. As through the last half century the contention for equal rights has continued, the working-woman has been the great object-lesson. It was not from women of leisure, having all the rights they want, that inspiration has been received. It has been caught from the patient worker, healing the sick, writing the book, painting the picture, teaching the children, tilling the soil, working in the factory, serving in the household. Every stroke of these workers has been a protest against a disfranchised individuality." Miss Keyser has mentioned most of the classes in this country, for, so far as my experience goes, there is no such thing as a leisure class, in the sense of an idle class, of women. Women are almost universally industrious, and it is a mistake to suppose that their early industry in the house was not as much appreciated and counted in the general fund of work as their more public activity now. It is well for Miss Keyser to make her estimate of the Suffrage value of the working-woman one that shall have no reference to the expressed views of the working-woman herself; because the working-woman seems almost universally not only unconscious of but indifferent to her attitude as a great object-lesson in favor of the ballot. But here is something new. Suffragists have first claimed that there could be no working-woman unless there was a ballot in woman's hand; then they claimed that, although there was a working-woman despite the fact that she had not been enfranchised, she was made by the agitation for the ballot; and now comes Miss Keyser to say that, not only is the working-woman not due to the ballot, or to ballot-seeking, but "the suffrage of the world is due to her," for "without her economic value this present demand for equal suffrage could never have been made!" Tar baby ain't sayin' nuthin'.

Dr. Jacobi, in "Common Sense," says: "Whatever may be the personal privileges of their lot, whatever the legal protection accorded to their earnings, the public status of such a class remains strictly that of aliens. At the present moment this vast and constantly growing army of women industrials constitutes an alien class. The privation for that class of political right to defend its interests is only masked, but not compensated, by its numerous inter-relations with those who have rights." So they are conceded to have personal privileges, and legal protection for earnings. The alienism is then purely political, and works no hardship but what Suffragists conceive to be in the mental attitude of the worker.

Foreign capitalists who own land or plant in the United States are unfranchised. We have large numbers of men working in trades and professions who never have been naturalized, but we do not dream that all these constitute an alien class of industrials. No distinction is made in business opportunity between the voter and non-voter. Neither is any social distinction made regarding worker or employer on account of the relations of either to the ballot. Market value is not measured by suffrage, except in dishonorable transactions, and the women "with ballots in their hands" are not the Government's preferred creditors. The men in the District of Columbia are not conscious of lower wages and industrial ostracism. Again, Dr. Jacobi says: "The share of women in political rights and life—imperfect and deferred during the predominance of militarism— has become natural, has become inevitable, with the advent of industrialism, in which they so largely share."

Industrialism has no more power to change the basis of government than the abolition movement had when certain advocates of it shouted that it was "sinful to vote or hold office, because the government was founded upon physical force and maintained itself by muskets." Industrialism is bringing into this country some of the gravest problems it has ever met. The sympathy of the people is on the side of labor that uses honorable means; but Cleveland and Leadville are among the places that suggest afresh the fact that industrialism must be kept in order for its own sake, for the sake of general peace, and for the sake of its increasing ranks of "alien" women who look to it for "every whit of protection," save that which their own self-respect and that of public opinion can win them.

Again, Dr. Jacobi says: "Notwithstanding the repression of women's civil rights, and their absolute exclusion from even the dream of a political sphere, the women of France engage more freely than anywhere else in business and industry." There is a moral here deeper than can be read at a glance. The first thought suggested is, that industrial success for woman is not in the least dependent upon the vote. The second is, that industrial progress does not command the vote. The third is, that American freedom has worked in the opposite direction from French unstable republicanism. And the fourth is, that industrious France stands appalled at the lack of increase of its population. There are many forces that sap its national life, but perhaps the most conspicuous is the socialistic and anarchistic tendency of its labor organizations. The woman-suffrage idea was first openly proclaimed during the French Revolution. In 1851 the annual Suffrage Convention in this country was called by Paulina Wright Davis, to meet in Worcester, Mass. Ernestine Rose read to the convention two letters addressed to that body through her, written by Jeanne Deroine and Pauline Roland, from a Paris prison. During the revolutionary movements of 1848, these women had played conspicuous roles. One of them had attempted to nominate the mayor in her native city, the other to be a candidate for the Legislative Assembly. They wrote: "Sisters of America! Your socialist sisters of France are united with you in the vindication of the right of woman to civil and political equality. We have, moreover, the profound conviction that only by the power of association based on solidarity—by the union of the working-classes of both sexes in organized labor, can be acquired, completely and pacifically, the civil and political equality of woman, and the social right for all."

I know the feud, and the grounds for it, between socialism and anarchy. But both are enemies of the social order, and both are favorers of woman suffrage. How "pacifically" the labor movement that originated in France in 1848, and spread throughout Europe, was likely to proceed, we may judge by its constant outbreaks kindred to the recent bomb-throwing in Paris. In the German Working-man's Union, Hasenclever, for many years the leading socialist in the German Reichstag, said: "The Woman Question would be taken by the developed, or, more correctly speaking, the communistic state, under its own control, for in this state" (which was to consist of men and women with equal vote) "when the community bears the obligation of maintaining the children, and no private capital exists, the woman need no longer be chained to one man. The bond between the sexes will be merely a moral one, and if the characters do not harmonize could be dissolved." The "Social Democrat" of Copenhagen has for mottoes: "All men and women over twenty-one should vote." "There should be institutions for the proper bringing up of children." All the communistic and anarchistic labor organizations in Germany, France, Switzerland, Denmark, and England proclaim woman suffrage as a prime factor, and the disruption of the family as its corollary.

There are many who remember the visit to this country of the socialist, Dr. Aveling, and his (so-called) wife, the daughter of Karl Marx. His legal wife had been left in England. Miss Marx said, in reply to the question of a Chicago lady, that love was the only recognized marriage in Socialism, consequently no bonds of any kind would be required. Divorces would be impossible; for when love ceased, separation would naturally ensue.

At a meeting of the Woman's Council held in Washington, in 1888, Mrs. Stanton said: "I have often said to men of the present day that the next generation of women will not stand arguing with you as patiently as we have for half a century. The organizations of labor all over the country are holding out their hands to women. The time is not far distant when, if men do not do justice to women, the women will strike hands with labor, with socialists, with anarchists, and you will have the scenes of the Revolution of France acted over again in this republic."