The Future of the Women's Movement

by Helena M. Swanwick

CHAPTER V
DEMOCRACY AND REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT

“Did you, too, O friend, suppose Democracy was only for elections, for politics, or for a party name? I say Democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between men and their beliefs—in Religion, Literature, Colleges and Schools—Democracy in all public and private life.”—Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas.

Reference has been made to the half-heartedness of the school of physical force. While asserting loudly that physical force rules and always will rule the world, these people become very indignant if they are accused of immorality, or even of unmorality. Few have the moral courage to declare themselves unmoral, and the physical force apologists for the domination of man over woman always proceed to argue that this domination is not merely a “regrettable fact,” but is all for the best. They argue that men as well as women possess a moral nature (which is undeniable), and that they will direct their physical force in accordance with their moral nature, which is, in public affairs, superior to that of women. I have already touched upon the lack of foundation for this assertion of superiority. There is too little ascertained fact and far too much speculation and assertion on this point. Mr. Frederic Harrison (whose connection with Positivism has done little to modify his profoundly unscientific temperament) has published some essays on the women’s movement, in which he picks out certain ugly characteristics common to humanity and attributes them to women only. He professes such a respect for women, such admiration for their moral, spiritual and even intellectual qualities, that one really wonders how it comes that he thinks it necessary to scold them so much. He sees them acting in politics with “that spite and untruthfulness which is too often the failing of some good women,” showing “a rancour, an injustice towards persons, a bitterness of temper, which cause them to fling away common sense, fairness, truth and even decency.” Dear, dear! How bad these good women are, and who would have supposed that this passage was written by a philosopher who holds that women are, “as a sex,” morally superior to men? One would have supposed that to have accused good women of lying, spite, folly, injustice, rancour and indecency was not to leave much over to hurl at the bad ones. But he proceeds to say that it is woman’s very possession of higher qualities which makes her political judgments “untrustworthy and unstable.” One seems to have heard something very like this in the course of the Dreyfus case, when it became a reproach to be “intellectual.” But if these are the characteristics of women, according to Mr. Harrison, we may smile to see how he gives himself away, unintentionally, when he comes to those of men. He has just been alluding to the “fair, impartial temper” with which men “habitually weigh all sides of a question,” and declaring that “all political questions and all parliamentary elections really turn, or ought to turn, on nicely balanced judgments”; yet when he comes to anticipate what would be the effect of women’s enfranchisement upon the judicial mind, the fair impartial temper of men, he declares that it would weaken men’s respect for women’s opinion and even their respect for women: “The women’s vote would always be actually or possibly on the wrong side.” (Italics mine.) The conversation of the wolf with the lamb in La Fontaine’s fable is an admirable expression of this state of mind, but to call it “fair and impartial” throws a queer light on Mr. Harrison’s own particular quality of male mind. He alludes pathetically to the sufferings men have endured at the hands of women when men have felt it their duty to oppose something women desired. It is a pity when rancour and spite manifest themselves, but have women never suffered at the hands of men? How about the witch trials? Did men make the path of Joan of Arc, of Josephine Butler, of Doctor Jex-Blake, even of Florence Nightingale a path of roses? Are not suffragists even now having all sorts of preposterous views and disastrous vices attributed to them? And is there one of us that has not been pelted with mud and refuse from the hands of a man (save the mark)? One murmurs “Marconi,” one glances at the Balkans, and wonders if women could really improve on the language that has been used by men of each other in political controversy.

We have had enough of this irrelevant talk about the inferiority of women. Do we replace it by equally foolish assertions of the inferiority of men? Not a bit of it. We base the women’s demand for a share in government on precisely the same grounds as those on which men have based their demands. The difficulties we all find in acting for others are, broadly speaking, of two kinds. There is the difficulty of understanding the lives of others as completely as we understand our own, and there is the fact that our own affairs have a motive force which the affairs of others have not. Only people desperately driven to excuse themselves could pretend that men, any more than women, are unaffected by these difficulties, and Professor Dicey, whose unsentimental mind revolts from cant, has frankly admitted as much. “Under a representative government,” he writes,[3] “any considerable body of persons who are not represented in Parliament is exposed, at best, to neglect. In a country such as England the views of the unrepresented are overlooked far less through selfishness than through the stupidity or preoccupation of the voters and their representatives.… Nor can any impartial critic maintain that, even at the present day, the desires of women, about matters in which they are vitally concerned, obtain from Parliament all the attention they deserve.… Despotism is none the less trying because it may be dictated by philanthropy, and the benevolence of workmen which protects women from overwork is not quite above suspicion when it coincides with the desire of artisans to protect themselves from female competition.” No suffragist could put the argument better than this candid anti-suffragist.

How is it possible for a man to assert that he knows what a woman feels and wants as well as she herself? He would have to be more than man! Even women, who spend their lives in studying men, do not make the claim that they can feel a man’s passions as he can; and, in another mood, the man who claims to be the arbiter of a woman’s life will rail at her incomprehensible and fickle nature. “But women have tongues and know only too well how to use them! We may consult with women and be advised by them,” say the reactionaries. “Yes. And also you may not,” is the reply. Professor Dicey makes much of the distinction between civil, as distinct from political, rights. He speaks of reconciling his “enthusiasm for everything which promotes the personal freedom and education of women with the strenuous denial to them of any share in sovereign power.” But the male electorate is not all so enlightened as Professor Dicey, and civil rights depend upon political rights. Men less intelligent, less sympathetic than Professor Dicey are absorbed in their own affairs, and women have had to fight and are still having to fight for every miserable concession in personal freedom and education (and in such fights Professor Dicey has often been on the women’s side), and they have no security that they will be allowed to hold what they have won. Successive Local Government Acts have shown plainly how men will almost unconsciously sweep away the rights of women when their minds are concentrated on some reform for which men care. The Married Women’s Property and the Custody of Children Acts repealed cruel and unjust disabilities which had been imposed by men upon women. Are we to suppose that all injustices are of the past, and that from henceforth for evermore men will feel like women?

Besides the difference in relative values which men and women place upon things, and the vast gulf that there is between actually experiencing and only listening to an experience, there is the fact that even when people know what is right, they do not always do it without some external pressure, whether of public opinion, legal rights or political power. In truth, the reactionaries are too thin-skinned when they wail about the sex-antagonism of women who frankly declare this weakness in men. If we asserted it of men only they would have some right to complain. But we do not. The very existence of customs and laws and governments proves that men believe humanity needs these motives in addition to moral ones, and, unless you are an anarchist, you must agree that they do. When men get altogether away from women they forget women. It is natural. Therefore women, who suffer from being forgotten when their lives are at stake, require that men shall not in future be able to get altogether away from them when they are employed in governing them, as they do now in Parliament. Mr. Harrison gives us an interesting and touching little bit of information when he says, “To speak the truth, I only know one woman whom I would always trust to come to a right decision”; but this fact has really no general interest or value, and even if women did not, on the whole, represent the views of Mr. Harrison, this would not prevent them from representing their own, which is what matters in representative government. Mr. Harrison becomes appealing when he says, “Now I say frankly that I do not trust the average woman to decide these complex issues”; because that is just how we feel! We do not trust the average man to decide these complex issues. A fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind, and perhaps when Mr. Harrison has grasped this feeling of ours, he will see that the proper thing is for neither man nor woman to attempt to decide these complex issues alone.

We have only to consider the very different lives women lead, leaving out of account the debatable differences in nature, to see how impossible it is for a man to look on life with a woman’s eyes. To begin with, as long as he insists on being absolute master, there is the unbridgeable gulf between those who command and those who obey, and the tendency of this “division of labour” (as the reactionaries humorously call it) to result in making men conceive it is theirs to think and act and woman’s to feel. “Men must work and women must weep” is perhaps the most fatuous expression in all literature of this attitude. Men are rich and women are poor. Men are employers and women are employed. Wage-earning men think mainly of wages, women are more concerned with prices. Men enjoy fighting for its own sake, women only suffer from fighting. Men’s part in parentage involves only the satisfaction of passion and appetite; women’s part may involve these, but it also involves much suffering and long care. It follows from the apportionment of men’s and women’s work and interests that in the main men will be more concerned for property and women more concerned for the person, and our laws and administration amply bear this out. It follows also that men will spend money upon the things they care most about, and starve the things they care less about. We see millions lavished on war and destruction, on monuments of stone and iron, on pomp and circumstance: we see health wasted, human creatures neglected, education slighted. The titles and the honours go to those who make money and take life. “Things are in the saddle,” says Emerson, “and ride mankind.”

Those who defend the male franchise declare confidently that in England “the family is the unit,” and that the voter casts his vote after a balanced judgment of the interests of the family as a whole. This is, of course, entirely without foundation. The vote is not given to the family when the head of the family happens to be a woman; the vote is not refused to a man when he has no family; several votes are given to one man, although legally he cannot have several families. So that, even if, for the sake of argument, we allow that husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband, we still have a very large number of votes which represent men only, and those men bachelors. The evils of this in such a country as England are patent; in such a country as South Africa they are greater still. There the bachelor vote is unstable and indifferent to the permanent interests of the people, for the adventurous bachelor comes for what he can find, to make money, not a home; to take his pleasure where he can find it, among the women of an alien race, and leave in his track the degradation of sexual ethics, the embitterment of racial hatred, the burden of a fatherless race of half-breeds. All these ills fall upon the voteless women of South Africa, and are felt in their rebound by the English women at home.

The possession, by the people, of the parliamentary vote does not make a democracy. Many other things are necessary for that. But the vote is a piece of the machinery of democracy without which it cannot work, and it is lamentable to hear men who call themselves Liberals, and who use all the old catchwords of the democratic party, refusing to apply their Liberalism to women and bringing against the enfranchisement of women all the ragged old arguments which used to be brought against men’s enfranchisement and which are ragged from the shot wherewith the old reformers riddled them. “Men know better than women what is good for women!” Yes, and the slave-owner knew what was good for his slaves; and the employer knew what was good for his employees; and the landlord knew what was good for his tenants! But the slave and the employee and the tenant did not think so then, and no one dares say so now. The women’s day is coming too, and the people of the future will deride those Liberals of the early twentieth century who talked of the Will of the People and forgot the mothers; who boasted of their intention to enfranchise every person “of full age and competent understanding” and left out half the people; who declared that “citizenship” should be the basis of voting rights and denied these rights to all women, thereby admitting (what the women had been rebuked for asserting) that Britons, when they happened to be female Britons, were slaves. No external defeats could have so sapped the prestige of the political Liberal party as the fact that it failed altogether, as a party, to recognise the force and the progressive idealism of the women’s movement. There is now in England no movement that can compare in vigour, intelligence and devotion with the women’s movement. When the Liberal party acknowledges this and identifies itself with the movement, it will once more step into the line of progress; until then it is true to say that the progressive women and the Labour party which supports them are the only democrats. Moreover, the penalty of supporting reaction in one direction is that the logic of events drives men into the logic of thought. Many a Liberal who hoped he could restrict his illiberalism to women, is finding himself forced into general principles of reaction which will sooner or later—horrible to contemplate!—overwhelm men too.

On the other hand, the effect upon women of the agitation for the vote has been enlarging beyond even the most sanguine expectations. I myself have seen women of the middle class, who began by desiring the vote from a personal and quite legitimate sense of their own worth and claims, led, from a sense of justice, to entertain the claims of other less fortunate women, and by degrees find their desire redoubled on behalf of these women, whose needs, experience and sympathy gradually demonstrated as far exceeding their own. No less remarkable is the enlargement of the lives of these less fortunate women, by the growth of sympathy and understanding between the different classes and by the linking up of public and private duties and aims. “Since she’s been a suffragist,” I have heard a man say, “my wife has seemed to take more interest in the home. It hasn’t taken her thoughts off; it has only made her think more.” And I have heard a middle-aged woman use the pathetic phrase, “Since I began to think,” meaning, “Since I joined the suffrage movement.”