Compiled and edited for The Scrap Book.
HOW FEMALE SUFFRAGE WORKS IN NEW ZEALAND.
Even Maori Women Vote, But Only Men Hold Office—Lack of Servants Keeps Fair Sex Home.
What about woman in New Zealand? We are arguing for and against woman suffrage in the United States with almost as much theory and as little practical knowledge of the proposed conditions as was the case thirty years ago. Some of us are positive in the conviction that the right to vote would unsex the sex—would harden motherhood and sisterhood into a sedulous mannishness.
Others believe that womanly intuitions would soften the sheer practicality of politics and induce gentleness where roughness has ruled. And for a dozen years we need only have looked to the Antipodes to learn how woman suffrage might work out in practise.
Lady Ward, wife of the premier of New Zealand, during a recent visit to the United States, said to a representative of the New York Tribune that the women of New Zealand, despite their participation in colonial politics, are very feminine. She added:
Sometimes women do speak at political meetings, but it generally turns out afterward that they are visiting Americans, or perhaps English women. No, we don’t sit on juries, and we don’t run for Parliament. The law would have to be changed before we could do so, but I don’t believe we want to. Perhaps some time in the future it will come to that, but I think it will be a long time.
We did have a mayoress once in a town in the northern part of the colony, but no one seems inclined to repeat the experiment. In fact, we are very busy with our domestic affairs, and are quite content for the present to leave the management of public affairs to the men.
The women of New Zealand place their homes before every other consideration, and their domestic problems are just as serious as those of any other country. Our young women would rather be stenographers than domestic servants, and we have not found any way of getting on without servants.
But don’t imagine that we are not interested in politics and that we don’t vote. There isn’t a woman in New Zealand who doesn’t know every member of Parliament either by sight or by reputation, and there isn’t one who can’t talk intelligently about political questions. Out on the farms and in the villages it is just the same as in the cities, and it makes life very much more interesting.