| Natal and Cape Colony[55] | |
| Total population: | 1,830,063. |
| Transvaal | |
| Total population: | 1,354,200. |
| Woman’s Suffrage Association for all three countries. |
In South Africa, Natal was the leader in the woman’s rights movement. In 1902, through the work of Mr. and Mrs. Ancketill, the Woman’s Equal Suffrage League was organized, which endeavored primarily to interest and educate its members. Later, in 1904, public propaganda was begun. In June a petition was presented to the Lower House by Mr. Ancketill. When he presented the matter in the form of a motion, it was not put to a vote, owing to the newness of the subject. The agricultural population opposes woman’s suffrage; the urban population favors it. The woman’s rights movement is made difficult in South Africa by the following circumstances: An enervating climate “that makes people languidly content with things as they are.” The lack of educated and independent women (women teachers are state employees); the lack of a numerous class of workingwomen; difficult housekeeping, owing to the untrustworthiness of the natives as domestic servants; the peculiar position of men as taxpayers (men only pay a poll tax) and as arms bearers (all men must serve in the army).[56]
In Cape Colony similar conditions prevail. The Women’s Enfranchisement League was formed in 1907; and in July, 1907, there took place the first woman’s suffrage debate in Parliament. The woman’s suffrage societies of Natal, Cape Colony, and the Transvaal have formed an association and have joined the International Woman’s Suffrage Alliance. In Natal and Cape Colony women taxpayers exercise the right to vote in municipal affairs. The regulation of the suffrage qualifications for the Federal Parliament is being considered. The South African delegates in London (1909) expressed the fear that women would not be given the federal suffrage.
THE SCANDINAVIAN COUNTRIES
Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark will be grouped together since they are so closely connected by race and culture; repetition will thereby be avoided, and clearness promoted.
All four countries have the advantage of having a population largely agricultural,—a population scattered in small groups. Clearly, the problem of dealing with congested masses of people is here absent. Everywhere there is an eagerness for education. The educational average is high. The position of woman is one of freedom, for here have been kept alive the old Germanic traditions which we [the Germans] know only from reading Cæsar or Tacitus. An external factor in hastening the solution of the question of woman’s rights was the very unusual numerical superiority of women. The foreign wars, which took the majority of the men away from home for long periods of time,—first in the Middle Ages, and then again in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,—and the fact that the Scandinavian countries themselves were afflicted with wars only to a small extent, explain the freedom of the Scandinavian women. Like the English women, they had for centuries not known the significance of war for woman. In the absence of the men, women continued the transaction of business and industrial enterprises. In the name of the feudal law and as heads of families they administered affairs, exercising rights that were elsewhere denied to women.
SWEDEN
| Total population: | 5,377,213. |
| Women: | 2,751,257. |
| Men: | 2,626,456. |