This International Council of Women is the permanent body promoting the organized international woman’s rights movement. It was organized in Washington in 1888.
The woman’s suffrage movement, a separate phase of the woman’s rights movement, has likewise organized itself internationally,—though independently. Woman’s suffrage is the most radical demand made by organized women, and is hence advocated in all countries by the “radical” woman’s rights advocates. The greater part of the membership of the National Councils have therefore not been able in all cases to insert woman’s suffrage in their programmes. The International Council did sanction this point, however, June 9, 1904, in Berlin.
A few days previously there had been organized as the International Woman’s Suffrage Alliance, likewise in Berlin, woman’s suffrage leagues representing eight different countries. The leagues which joined the Alliance represented the United States, Victoria, England, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Since then the woman’s suffrage movement has been the most flourishing part of the woman’s rights movement. The International Woman’s Suffrage Alliance, which was pledged to hold a second congress only at the end of five years, has already held three congresses between 1905 and 1909 (1906, Copenhagen; 1908, Amsterdam; 1909, London), and has extended its membership to twenty-one countries (the United States, Australia, South Africa, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland, Russia, Hungary, Austria, Bulgaria, Italy, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Servia, and Iceland). The first president is Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt.
The chief demands of the woman’s rights movement are the same in all countries. These demands are four in number.
1. In the field of education and instruction: to enjoy the same educational opportunities as those of man.
2. In the field of labor: freedom to choose any occupation, and equal pay for the same work.
3. In the field of civil law: the wife should be given the full status of a legal person before the law, and full civil ability. In criminal law: the repeal of all regulations discriminating against women. The legal responsibility of man in sexual matters. In public law: woman’s suffrage.
4. In the social field: recognition of the high value of woman’s domestic and social work, and the incompleteness, harshness, and one-sidedness of every circle of man’s activity (Männerwelt) from which woman is excluded.
A just and happy relationship of the sexes is dependent upon mutuality, coördination, and the complementary relations of man and woman,—not upon the subordination of woman and the predominance of man. Woman, in her peculiar sphere, is entirely the equal of man in his. The origin of the international woman’s rights movement is found in the world-wide disregard of this elementary truth.
The subject which I have treated in this book is a very broad one, the material much scattered and daily changing. It is therefore hardly possible that my statements should not have deficiencies on the one hand, and errors on the other. I shall indeed welcome any corrections and authoritative information of a supplementary nature.[3]