WOMAN IN POLITICAL
EVOLUTION
CONTENTS
WOMAN IN POLITICAL EVOLUTION
CHAPTER I.
IS THE SUBORDINATION OF WOMAN THE PRICE OF EMPIRE?
The distinct aim which emboldened the author to add one more essay to the large class of works that deal with woman’s position throughout the ages was twofold. It seemed, in the first place, that there was a lack of connecting principle in the series of detached sketches that usually make up a work of the kind; that a continuous, panoramic view of human history would reveal such a principle, and one of very great importance for the proper appreciation of the present woman-movement. It has been possible to trace the action of a consistent law through all the historic spasms of feminist agitation, and to show that that law has reached a stage of final and irresistible pressure in our time. The underlying principles of the present movement are too rarely noticed, and a clear enunciation of them may contribute a little to the proper understanding of the struggle.
The second aim was to meet a serious concern that is expressed by thoughtful observers, when they note that the woman-movement is one of a score of agitations that ruffle the whole surface, and even stir the depths, of modern life. We have passed through a century of revolutions, yet we seem as far as ever from the peace that each one had promised to bring. Nations that had slept undisturbed through the political storms that shook Europe during three generations are now waking to revolt; classes that had witnessed the upheavals of the nineteenth century with dull indifference or shrinking apprehension now take up the world-cry of change with the energy of pioneers. The routine of daily life is distracted with the flash of a dozen new ideals. Placidity has fallen from the rank of virtues. What is the meaning of it all? What is likely to be the issue?
Those who read history shake their heads in concern. They say that they are familiar with the symptoms, and can recognise the malady. Through such spluttering of energy and iridescence of dreams every great nation passed as it neared the end. Such scenes were witnessed, and just such cries were heard, in the marble porticoes of Greece when its glorious life began to sink. The same cries rang through the fora of Imperial Rome, and were heard again in the piasse of medieval Italy, when the long-drawn shadows fell on their exhausted citizens. Do not nations run the cycle of birth and lusty manhood and decay, like individuals? And is not this restlessness the familiar token that the heart is slowing down and the frame failing to control the worn and hypersensitive nerves? Do not the fevered dreams, the ceaseless irritation, the rebellion of parts that had served so well in silence, warn us that the dissolution, of which we have read so often, is setting in? Can we do other than knit the frame close in its old fabric, repress the impatient elements, and close our eyes resolutely to the disordered dreams?
In this light many regard the agitation for a revision of woman’s place in the social order. “The subordination of woman is invariably one of the prices of Empire,” says Dr. Emil Reich, who has lately set out to correct our chinoiserie d’idées with the breadth of his historical lore. The British or the German Empire grew to its height when—if we can forget Elizabeth—woman tended the cradle and the home, while man wrought its industries, shaped its policy, and bore its defence. With the same sharing of labour among their men and women all earlier empires had grown to power, and it was only in the years of decay that woman impatiently clamoured for an enlargement of her sphere. This agitation, they conclude, is the mere play of distempered nerves in an enfeebled system. It must be cured by a sermon on self-sacrifice, a return to virility, a stern refusal of the demand in the interest of the race. They who listen to it cannot have scanned the memorial pages in which history has written the fate of even greater empires than ours.
I propose to show that this conservative attitude is inspired by an entirely false reading of history. True it is that the recent course of woman’s development recalls a drama that has been played on the planet’s stage time after time. In the first act we have the “womanly woman,” absorbed in the cradle and the distaff, clothed in quiet matronly virtues, content to hear news of the great world without from her stronger mate. In the second act new and disturbing types come on, women impatient of child-bearing, women that chafe at the barriers and cry for freedom and justice, women that would go out with man into the battle of life. The third act—the act in which men begin to listen—has so constantly ended in tragedy that many confidently look for the same issue now, if we dally with the demands of the women as those others did. It is a plausible anxiety, yet it arises solely from a superficial and perverse reading of history.