Woman in Political Evolution

by Joseph McCabe

The struggle is, in essence, a conflict of two ideals—the new ideal and the old belief, not so much that “woman’s place is the home,” but that she shall have no interest beyond it. How far men have a right to dictate their position to women, or how far one group of women have the faintest pretension to dictate to another group, I need not waste time in inquiring. I chance to be one of those males who have never discovered the slenderest moral or rational base for the assumed right to tell women what is best for them, and force them to do it. But I need not linger over this, as the old ideal was framed in harmony with a world that has passed away for ever, and it is as odd and discordant as any other medieval survival in our world.

I admitted that when political life, or the practice of settling social or corporate issues, first arose it was quite natural that it should fall exclusively into the hands of the men. The social decisions usually concerned migration, or war, or some other extra-domal matter, in the execution of which woman was, from the nature of things, much less interested than man. I need not run over the intermediate stages of political life, and will merely point out a few of the ways in which the old division of home-work and State-work broke down in the nineteenth century. The industrial development made the first great breach in the old standard. The early political system was obviously founded on the early division of labour. Woman worked in and about the home, owing to the natural tie of the children, and man worked further afield. The factory system entirely discarded this old division, and encouraged women to leave their homes and work by the side of men. Long before the middle of the nineteenth century tens of thousands of women were performing the same work as men, as far from the home as men. Then workshops, shops, and offices took fresh groups of women away from the home; and journalism and other professions further extended the process. In 1851 there was not a woman photographer or book-binder in England, and there were only 1,742 shop-girls. In 1861 there were 130 women in the photographic trade, 308 in book-binding (1,755 in 1871), and 7,000 in shops. To what proportions the extra-domal employment has reached I need not describe. One-fourth of the women and girls of England now have other than domestic employment. More than a million married women are so employed.

With this enormous and increasing employment of women in view it is impossible to continue to talk of woman’s place being the home, and quite ridiculous to make that threadbare phrase a ground for the limitation of woman’s interests. To refuse them a right that only the most desperate stretch of imagination could represent as taking women “out of the home,” and at the same time to acquiesce in an industrial development that effectively takes millions of them out of it, is a quaint aberration of reasoning. It would be more sensible to recognise that the phrase, “woman’s place is the home,” belonged to an older civilisation. Assuredly, it is a strange phrase to use to-day as an argument against the suffrage. The old division of labour has broken down. The old political division that was built on it must follow.

Side by side with this economic development there was proceeding a political evolution that no less thoroughly undermined the old ideal. In the first place, the base of political power grew broader and broader throughout the century. In 1848 the middle-class revolt, that had succeeded in England in 1832, broke out over most of the Continent, and triumphed. Though there was a reaction in some countries, the basis of political life was generally and permanently broadened, and millions of professional men and higher workers won a share in the control of the affairs of their country. Towards 1870 (speaking generally) a fresh and larger class clamoured for enfranchisement, and secured it. And as the century went on ever fresh demands were made, and the enfranchised few found no principle on which they could decently resist. In most of the countries of Europe the overwhelming majority of the adult and literate males have the vote.

This development of political life puts the modern demand of the women in a position entirely new and incalculably stronger than it ever had before. Only in ancient Athens was there a somewhat similar situation, and in that case decay followed too quickly upon full bloom to allow the natural consequence. In most other cases the women had no specific political disability. Their husbands and brothers had, as a rule, no more political right than they. A woman-franchise movement was inconceivable in any earlier period—apart from Athens, where it was evidently preparing—and it was just as inevitable in modern times. When you extend the control of national affairs to tens of millions of men—the Socialists alone count between seven and eight million votes on the Continent—you disfranchise as many tens of millions of women. You impose the sex-disability in its most offensive and least defensible form.

Nor is this the only aspect of political evolution that exhibits the cant phrase about woman’s place as a medieval survival. So long as political life was mainly concerned with issues, like trade or war, that fell in the men’s sphere of work, the primitive division of political responsibility remained more or less plausible. It is no longer even plausible. National defence is, and must be, a primary concern of politics; but in England at least this concerns women just as much as men. The vast majority of our men do not share in the work. A select body undertakes it, and the other men have just as much, and no more, interest in controlling them than women have. Trade, commerce, and industry are still main objects of political concern; but women are included in vast numbers in the industrial world. And the new and broader conception of the task of an administration has completed the annihilation of the old ideal. Social reform—questions of housing, temperance, pensions, etc.—obviously concern women as much as men, and are in no sense whatever masculine issues; while the recent extension of legislation to the home and the child has made it quite futile to talk of the woman’s home as her sphere, in the sense that she must have no interest in the public life beyond it. Once she really was mistress in the home; now, happily, the law has invaded every corner of it. It controls the birth of her children, controls their infancy in a score of ways, controls their beds and fires and food, controls their punishment, their recreation, their education, and their early employment. This is a colossal change in the objective of political life, and it necessarily involves a surrender of the older idea of enfranchisement.

Finally, we have in yet another way enfeebled the old idea of woman’s sphere. No one seems yet to have reflected that, while the Churches have been the most serious opponents of feminism, they have done more than any to give woman an interest outside the home. But Church affairs and missionary enterprise and charity bazaars were quickly succeeded or supplemented by other interests. As late as 1840 Londoners forbade a group of devoted American women from speaking at the Anti-Slavery Convention on the express ground that woman’s place was the home. It seems centuries remote from our day of women’s clubs, literary societies, golf, and the hundreds of organisations in which women are on equal terms with men. But the last and most ironic departure from the old ideal was when the great political bodies formed feminine annexes to their organisations, and pressed women into active service in the electoral campaign. The psychology of the Conservative or Liberal who approves of the Primrose League or the Women’s Liberal Federation, and the employment of women at elections, yet, when these ladies ask for the vote, murmurs that their place is the home, is a thing too turbid or too insincere for analysis. One could, at least, understand a man urging still the old phrase who would press for the exclusion of women from our industries and professions, from all political organisations, permanent or temporary, from all clubs, bazaars, entertainments, and educative societies; but such a man would be deemed little short of insane. Yet the right to cast a vote once in five years, and to maintain a sufficient interest in politics to do so reasonably, would lay no more strain on a woman’s domestic energy than any single one of these admitted activities.

At all events, these four radical changes that have occurred in the nineteenth century have given an entirely new complexion to the demand of women. The extension of the franchise to the general male population has laid a specific sex-disability on woman: the extension of the sphere of legislation has completely eliminated whatever trace of justice there was in the primitive political division; the economic evolution of woman has made her a sharer in the nation’s life, apart from the home, and involves a share in the control of that life; and the deliberate encouragement of her to occupy herself with public life has made the old phrase ring somewhat hollow and insincere. These are the causes of the modern suffrage movement. We have educated woman and developed her personality. It is too late to tell her to remain a child in all but maternal duties. We have ourselves destroyed the rigid partition that once divided the life of the home from the life of the State, and it is ludicrous to ask woman to imagine that it still exists. The present revolt of woman is not the mere effect of a sudden concession of education. Its roots run deep into the most characteristic elements of modern life. It cannot possibly be eradicated, but must grow on to its fulness.

It is in this spirit that we must approach the political evolution of woman in the last half-century if we are to understand it aright. It has advanced more rapidly in that half-century than in all preceding time, and the reason is that human life itself has evolved more rapidly and remarkably. It is not so much that women are assailing an old social ideal. The old ideal is dead, and they demand a live, just, and rational adjustment of their position to the new conditions.

It would be quite useless to attempt a review of the struggle that has been conducted in the last half-century, and I must be content to summarise the steps of progress in England and record the victories already gained abroad. The story is equally long and eventful in the United States, but cannot be told here. Frances Wright (later Mme. D’Arusmont), Ernestine Rose, Abby Kelly, and the other pioneers, fought a stern missionary fight in the first half of the century. When England refused a hearing to their finest anti-slavery workers in 1840 the resentment of that piece of medieval folly led to the holding of the first Women’s Suffrage Convention in the States, and the cause has gradually gained in public feeling. The assertion of Mrs. Humphry Ward that it has recently lost ground is astounding. She might have read, in the current number of the Englishwoman’s Year Book, that within the last few years about five hundred men’s organisations have declared in favour of women suffrage, and that this number includes such powerful bodies as the American Federation of Labour and the United Mine Workers. Indeed, her statement was quickly followed by the announcement in the Press that the women of New York were preparing a fresh and far more active campaign, and that another of the States (Oregon) is re-considering the question of granting it.