Men are never mothers.
Women are not warriors.
From these ground facts, readily admitted by all, the reason for the present inferiority of women’s position emerges clear and unmistakable. Women are weaker than men. They are weaker because they are not in general built so strongly; because they have to bear and to rear children; because they are unarmed. There is no getting away from it, they are weaker; and one cannot doubt for a moment that their inferior position is due to this weakness. But—so runs an immemorial argument—however equal their opportunities might be, women will never be as strong as men! Why then, for sentimental reasons, disturb the present order of things, why equalize those opportunities? This is the plea which was used before married women were allowed separate property, before the decision in “Regina versus Jackson,” which forbade a husband to hold his wife prisoner. The argument, in fact, of expediency and force.
Now there are no finer statements of the case for the full emancipation of women than Mill’s “Subjection of Women,” and Miss Jane Harrison’s essay entitled “Homo Sum.” The reasonings in the former work are too well-known, but to the main thesis of “Homo Sum” allusion must here be made. The most common, perhaps most telling, plea against raising the social and political status of women to a level with that of men is this: Men and women are already equal, but in separate spheres of activity. The difference between their physical conformation and functions underlies everything in the lives of both. The province and supremacy of women are in the home; the province and supremacy of men in the State. Why seek to alter what Nature has ordained? A plea, in fact, which glorifies sex qua sex.
But the writer of “Homo Sum” is at pains to show that “the splendid and vital instinct of sex,” with all its “singular power of interpenetrating and reinforcing other energies,” is in essence egoistic, exclusive, anti-social; and that, besides and beyond being men and women, we are all human beings. “The whole women’s movement,” the writer says, “is just the learning of that lesson. It is not an attempt to arrogate man’s prerogative of manhood; it is not even an attempt to assert and emphasize woman’s privilege of womanhood; it is simply the demand that in the life of woman, as in the life of man, space and liberty shall be found for a thing bigger than either manhood or womanhood—for humanity.”
In fact the splendid instinct of sex—for all its universality, for all that through and by it life is perpetuated, for all its power of bringing delight, and of revealing the heights and depths of human emotion—is still essentially an agent of the rule of force. We cannot but perceive that there is in both men and women something more exalted and impersonal, akin to the supreme principle of Equity, to the divinity in things; and that this something keeps men and women together, as strongly, as inevitably, as sex keeps them apart. What is all the effort of civilization but the gradual fortifying of that higher part of us—the exaltation of the principle of Justice, the chaining of the principle of Force? The full emancipation of women would be one more step in the march of our civilization—a sign that this nation was still serving humanity, still trying to be gentle and just. For if it has ceased to serve humanity, we must surely pray that the waters may rise over this island, and that she may go down all standing!
If, then, women’s position is inferior to men’s, if the essential reason of this inferiority is her weakness, or, in other words, the still unchecked dominance of force, to what extent do the facts and figures of the movement towards removing the inferiority of women’s position prove that the idea of the full emancipation of women is, not petty and false, withering and dying, but large and true, holding fast and spreading?
In 1866, a petition for the vote, signed by 1,499 women, was presented to Parliament by John Stuart Mill.
In 1873, petitions for the suffrage from 11,000 women were presented to Gladstone and Disraeli.
In 1896, an appeal was made to members of Parliament by 257,000 women of all classes and parties.