In this manner, concludes Audrée Téry, this dialogue can be continued indefinitely.
Recently the middle-class women have begun to show an interest in woman’s suffrage. A woman’s suffrage organization was formed in Brussels in 1908; one in Ghent, in 1909. Together they have organized the Woman’s Suffrage League, which has affiliated with the International Woman’s Suffrage Alliance.
Woman’s lack of rights and her powerlessness in public life are shown by the fact that in Antwerp, in 1908, public aid to the unemployed was granted only to men,—to unmarried as well as to married men. As for the unmarried women, they were left to shift for themselves.
ITALY
| Total population: | 32,449,754. |
| Women: about | 16,190,000. |
| Men: about | 16,260,000. |
| Federation of Italian Women’s Clubs. Woman’s Suffrage League. |
National unification raised Italy to the rank of a great power. Italy’s political position as a great power, her modern parliamentary life, and the Liberal and Socialist majority in her Parliament give Italy a position that Spain, for example, does not possess in any way. Catholicism, Clericalism, and Roman custom are no match for these modern liberal powers, and are therefore unable to hinder the woman’s rights movement in the same degree as do these influences in Spain. However, the Italian woman in general is still entirely dependent on the man (see the discussion in Alaremo’s Una Donna), and in the unenlightened classes woman’s feeling of inferiority is impressed upon her by the Church, the law, the family, and by custom. Naturally the woman attempts, as in Spain, to take revenge in the sexual field.
In Italy there is no strict morality among married men. Moreover, the opposition to divorce in Italy comes largely from the women, who, accustomed to being deceived in matrimony, fear that if they are divorced they will be left without means of support. “Boys make love to girls,—to mere unguided children without any will of their own,—and when these boys marry, be they ever so young, they have already had a wealth of experience that has taught them to regard woman disdainfully—with a sort of cynical authority. Even love and respect for the innocent young wife is unable to eradicate from the young husband the impressions of immorality and bad examples. The wife suffers from a hardly perceptible, but unceasing depression of mind. Innocently, without suspicion, uninformed as to her husband’s past, the wife persists in her belief in his manly superiority until this belief has become a fixed habit of thought, and then even a cruel revelation cannot take him from her.”[89]
In southern Italy,—especially in Sicily,—Arabian oriental conceptions of woman still prevail. During her whole life woman is a grown-up child. No woman, not even the most insignificant woman laborer, can be on the street without an escort. On the other hand, the boys are emancipated very early. With pity and arrogance the sons look down on the mother, who must be accompanied in the street by her sons.