The industrial revolution did extraordinary things to women. It drove them out of the shelter and subordination of the home and bluntly told them that they must compete for their lives in the open market with men. It taught them (a lesson which is hard indeed for women to learn, and which they are only learning very slowly) that only by the combination of individuals can progress be made in a world where no individuals, no loves count, and where there are no considerations but economic considerations. At the same time it gave them wages in hard cash for the work they had hitherto done as parts of the family organism, without wages in cash. These wages, for the most part shamefully inadequate for a human existence, have yet been unconditional and have produced in working women a sense of independence and a desire for “spending money” that, for good or evil, is having an immense effect in the comparison they make in their hearts between wage-earning and non-wage-earning employments. Lastly, the use of political pressure by working men, to further their industrial purposes, has slowly roused working women to desire power to put that same pressure on for their purposes.
All these effects have been slow in emerging and even slower in becoming clear; the aroused interest of more fortunate women has greatly helped in clarifying thought and bringing it to a practical issue. It is sometimes brought up against the suffrage movement that it is a middle-class movement, in the sense that women of education and some leisure were its pioneers. Undoubtedly it was so, in its inception. How could it have been otherwise? It is so no longer and it never was so, in the sense that middle-class women wished to secure something for themselves from which working women should be excluded; the very reverse was and is true, for, in demanding the franchise for all women on the same terms as men, privileged women are deliberately asking to be allowed to abandon some of their privileges. They are asking that the privileges of social influence which they now possess, and which the charwoman and the factory worker are without, shall be compensated for, to some extent at least, by the granting of a democratic franchise to less privileged women.
The entrance of women into money-earning employments has had two further effects of considerable importance. The Married Women’s Property Act was in part a result; for whereas it was plausible to hold that a woman had only a courtesy title to wealth which had been made and given or bequeathed to her by some man, it revolted everyone’s sense of fairness that, when a man had said at the altar, “With all my worldly goods I thee endow,” he should become entitled to the wages of the charwoman or the copyright of the novelist whom he had married. Another effect was that women began more consciously to compare their work with men’s work. So long as men always went out as “bread-winners” and women stayed in the home, it was possible to entertain extravagant notions of the arduousness of a man’s toil. Now that women are book-keepers, clerks, doctors and inspectors, they have a measure that they had not formerly, and to many women the peace, order, simplicity and convenience of office or factory may well have appeared in favourable contrast with the exacting and conflicting claims of the household, run too often with inadequate supplies, shortage of labour and antiquated tools.
Enough has been said in this very hasty survey to show the gigantic changes in the lives of women, the necessity for clear and unprejudiced thinking about those lives, and for a certain courage in experimenting with them. The women are thinking. What are they thinking about? About education and training; about marriage and parentage and prostitution; about custom and opinion and prejudice; about the economic and moral and religious side of all questions; about organisation and agitation, about politics and representation in politics; about laws and the administration of laws.
And the movement is world-wide. I shall speak mainly of the forms it has taken in England. They vary in every country. But the world is now so well in touch that the experience of one country becomes the experience of all, and what women undergo in one country smites the hearts of all women and rouses in them the sense of personal pride, of womanly dignity, of faith in woman’s work and soul. The women’s movement has brought about a solidarity unmatched by any other, a solidarity which represents a very high ideal of civilisation, a civilisation based upon the law of love and the knowledge of truth. As the president of the Woman Suffrage Alliance said at Budapest, women feel now that by the degradation of some women, all women are cheapened; that what is injurious to the human race is wrong, whether it be perpetrated in Chicago, in Singapore or in Brussels.
CHAPTER II
WHAT IS THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT?
“Ole Uncle S., sez he, ‘I guess
It is a fact,’ sez he,