CHAPTER VIII.

THE STRUGGLE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

IN ancient Greece there was a certain symbolic ceremony of a very picturesque character in connection with one of the great festivals. A lighted torch was to be conveyed to a distant altar, and a series of horsemen had to discharge the ceremony. Along the line of frantic riders, from the exhausted hand of one horseman to the fresh grasp of the next, the fiery symbol was handed, until the last of the procession placed it in triumph on the destined altar.

Our story of the evolution of woman's position recalls this old ceremony. For nearly three thousand years, at least, the torch has passed from rider to rider, and the altar is in sight. The struggle of the later Egyptian women re-appears in Greece, crosses the sea to Italy, is raised again in the revival of ancient culture, passes on to France, when the Italian States decay, and reaches at length the vigorous hands of England, Germany, and the United States. In one respect, however, the parallel fails. It is true that the cause has moved onward through the ages, but there have been years, even centuries, when the torch was almost, if not quite, extinct. There have been times when the distant altar seemed to be forgotten, and women sank back into uncomplaining subjection. Such a period was the appalling stretch between the fifth and the twelfth centuries, between the murder of Hypatia and the living death of Heloise. The eighteenth century, compared with the promise of its predecessors, is another such period, in most countries. The first quarter of the nineteenth century is another, and the last. Then the torch flames out again, and, for reasons I will give presently, can never more be extinguished until it is laid on the altar.

After the fall of Napoleon in 1815 Europe closed the mouth of the pit, as it thought, and dreamed soft dreams of continued despotism. The Holy Alliance had a sharp ear for murmurs of rebellion against any received ideal, and enforced submission everywhere at the point of the bayonet. It would be futile for women to chafe at their bonds in that world. Happily, the world was wider than the sphere of the Bourbons, the Hapsburgs, and the Pope. England contemplated their "white terror" with instinctive resentment; though England had shuddered at Jacobinism, and in the main was more disposed than before for coercion and subjection. But the United States maintained its theoretic scorn of despotism, and little British colonies which dotted the blue southern ocean promised the same spirit of independence.

It was in the United States that the modern struggle for the enfranchisement of nations began. The appeals of Mercy Warren and Abigail Adams were almost forgotten, and the masculine ideal was firmly incorporated in the American constitution, when a young Scotchwoman, Frances Wright, used the comparative freedom of the country to start a brilliant and fiery campaign for the rights of women. How she was presently joined by the talented Polish Jewess, Ernestine Rose, and the devoted Quaker women, Abby Kelly and the Sisters Grimke; how the democratic Americans jeered and howled at them, and the clergy branded them, and the little company grew larger and larger--all this may be read in Mrs. Cady Stanton's _History_. By 1837 the great American poet, Whittier, took up arms for them against their clerical opponents. They had proved their capacity for public life by their share in the anti-slavery campaign. They did not take the view of Carlyle.

In the meantime the second Revolution had taken place in France, and the second democratic wave passed over Europe. Its chief expression was the passing of the great Reform Bill in England in 1832. With singular logic the men who had prepared forests of pikes to withstand Wellington, the men who had met in gatherings of 200,000 to sing "Hail, dawn of liberty," and threaten to march on London, now turned on their less militant women and expressly excluded them from political life. James Mill had laid it down in 1825 (_Essay on Government_) that women's interests were bound up with men's, and so Radicals could justly exclude them from the franchise. In their resentment of the notion that a superior class should dictate to them how they were to be represented, the men of England had sacked cathedrals, challenged the troops, and trampled on the portrait of the king; then they turned about and dictated to the women, who would not do these things, how _they_ were to be represented. The Reform Bill made the electorate exclusively male for the first time in the history of England; and the Reformed Parliament went on, in 1835, to exclude women from the enfranchising clauses of the Municipal Corporations' Act.

I have already described the influences that had for centuries been undermining the older English ideal, but this open violation of it, at the very time when streams of oratory were flowing all over England on liberty and the value of representation, naturally led to a reaction. The agitation for the Reform Bill had itself re-awakened in women the desire of sharing in public life, and the injustice shown by the reformers would not allay it. There were not wanting gospels for the new cause. Mary Wollstonecraft had published a _Vindication of the Rights of Women_ in the height of the French Revolution (1792), and a political writer who had great influence with Liberals, William Godwin, had supported her. William Thompson had issued a spirited reply to James Mill in 1825. Robert Owen, who had immense influence in England by 1840, adopted the same view. Women also joined in the Corn Law Agitation, and some of its chief leaders acknowledged that they proved their capacity for public life. Cobden and Villiers favoured their claim. W. J. Fox, one of the most brilliant of the Free Traders, minister of South Place Chapel (London), warmly espoused their cause. About 1850 pamphlets and magazine articles began to appear, advocating the enfranchisement of women.[12]

By the middle of the century there was a strong feeling in England and the United States for the enfranchisement of women. The number of agitators was very small, but the life of the world was now developing rapidly, and the new tendencies were putting an entirely new complexion on the question of woman's position in the State. It will be convenient to note these tendencies here--warning the reader that they increase in later decades--in order to understand the real logical strength of the modern movement.

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.

As is known, four States in the Union have granted the suffrage to their women. In 1869 Wyoming admitted women to vote on the same terms as men. The predictions of the Conservatives were so far falsified that in 1893 the State Legislature forwarded to the Legislatures of the other States in the Union an official resolution to the effect that the change had "wrought no harm, and done great good in many ways," and added: "As the result of experience we urge every civilised community on earth to enfranchise its women without delay." Wyoming has a remarkable record of social improvement, and the Legislature acknowledges great aid in this from the women. Divorce is far less frequent than in other States, so that the predicted disruption of domestic peace seems not to have followed. Nor have women tired of the vote they won, for to-day, after forty years' possession, ninety per cent. of them vote.

Colorado granted woman franchise in 1893, and it has since had a fine record of social legislation. Judge Lindsey declared in 1906: "No one would dare to propose its repeal; and, if left to the men of the State, any proposition to revoke the right bestowed upon women would be overwhelmingly defeated. Many good laws have been obtained in Colorado which would not have been secured but for the power and influence of women."

The evident success of the reform stimulated neighbouring States (who should be the most competent judges), and in 1896 Idaho and Utah adopted it. Their leading public men speak in the same terms of the effect, and a healthy stimulus has been given to social legislation. In 1906 the same proposal was submitted to the male electors of Oregon, and it was only lost by ten thousand votes. The loss was easily accounted for by the violent opposition of the saloon-keepers in the State. Ex-President Roosevelt has repeatedly advocated the reform in his own State, and the movement is steadily gaining ground in the other States.[13]

In England the movement has advanced far beyond the dreams of the women of half a century ago. Miss Blackburn gives an ample chronicle of the progress made since 1850, but I have (in writing the biography of George Jacob Holyoake) been able to see a good deal of correspondence of the period that throws light on the early group. Holyoake, a faithful disciple of the great Owen, had endeavoured for many years to stir women to revolt. As early as 1847 he had drawn up a programme (published in the _Free Press_), according to which they were to found a journal, hold meetings with women speakers, and agitate for legal and political justice. Ten years later, when he was in close relation with Miss Harriet Martineau, Miss Bessie R. Parkes (later Mrs. Belloc), Miss Barbara L. Smith (Mrs. Bodichon), Mrs. Stansfeld, Mrs. Crawford, and many other advanced women, they founded the _Woman's Journal_, and began to increase. In the same year the rights of women figured prominently for the first time in an election-manifesto--that issued by Mr. Holyoake in his abortive campaign at Tower Hamlets. He had also issued as a pamphlet Mrs. J. S. Mill's article, "Are Women fit for Politics?" Mill himself lent his powerful advocacy to the cause, and in 1869 issued his famous _Subjection of Women_.

The growing feeling was now stimulated by the agitation over the second Reform Bill in 1866-7, and strong parties were formed in Manchester and London. Disraeli himself assented to the principle, and within a fortnight a petition obtained 1,499 signatures. A great public meeting was held in Manchester (where Miss Lydia Belcher had been then working for two or three years) in 1868, and was addressed by Dr. Pankhurst and other well-known public men. Mr. Jacob Bright was another staunch supporter in the North. At London, in the following year, a very striking meeting was addressed by Professor Fawcett, Charles Kingsley, John Morley, Lord Houghton, Charles Dilke, P. A. Taylor, James Stansfeld, and Professor Masson. Mrs. Fawcett and Viscountess Amberley were now associated with the movement, and Professor Francis Newman and Mr. J. Chamberlain were quoted in favour of it.

In 1869 the first victory was won, when the municipal franchise was restored to women; and in the following year the School Boards were set up, and--apart from the metropolis--women could vote for and serve on them. With such prominent and eloquent supporters, the women movement now made rapid progress, and it was decided to open the long, historic siege of Westminster. The first Bill to be presented had the support of a petition of 134,000 women, and passed the first reading. But Gladstone was hostile, and it was rejected on second reading by 220 votes to 94. It would be impossible here to follow the long and spirited struggle in detail, and I must refer the reader to Miss Blackburn's chronicle. From 1875 to 1879 a Bill was presented annually, and never failed to secure more than a hundred votes. John Bright, unhappily, thundered against it with all his eloquence, and in 1878 and 1879 the opponents made the most unsparing efforts to win the members. Even in 1879, however, the Bill had 103 supporters and 217 opponents. In 1883 a resolution in favour was supported by 114 members against 130. In 1884 an amendment to the Reform Bill was lost by 136 votes (271 to 135), but it was well known that scores of Liberal members merely voted against it owing to the threats of Mr. Gladstone. At the General Election of 1886 there were 343 friends of women suffrage returned to the House, and a fresh attempt was made in 1892. On the side of the supporters were now Mr. Balfour and Sir G. Wyndham, while Mr. Asquith began his career of hostility, and Mr. Gladstone threw his influence against it. The voting showed 152 friends to 179 opponents. The General Election of 1892 reduced the friends of the cause to 229, but the number rose to 232 in 1895, 274 in 1900, and to the extraordinary number of 420 in the present Parliament, which passed the second reading of Mr. Stanger's Bill by a majority of 179.

No one who reflects seriously on the growth of the demand for woman suffrage since G. J. Holyoake quixotically expressed it in his manifesto of 1857 can hesitate in forecasting the future. In half a century the movement has expanded from a small group of a score of women writers to a body that can force 420 Members of Parliament to promise their support, can fill Hyde Park with half a million demonstrators, and can hold thousands of meetings throughout the country in the course of the year. No agitation, with anything like the same resources, ever made such advance in the course of thirty or forty years. Possibly two other organisations show a more imposing record--the early Free Trade movement and the modern Tariff Reform movement. But both these had enormous financial resources, dealt with a material issue, and had the organisation of existing great political parties to draw upon. The spirit of the age has borne women on as it advanced, and the future is assured. It is hardly too much to say that only the prejudice of _one_ man prevents the granting of the demand to-day in England.

It will be in entire harmony with its early history and its finer traditions if England is the first great power to grant woman franchise, as it promises to be. Meantime, instances are multiplying in which smaller communities admit their women to political life with a happy success. In 1881 the miniature State of the Isle of Man granted a restricted franchise to women in the elections for the House of Keys. In Canada the question has been agitated since 1883, when Sir J. A. Macdonald inserted a clause enfranchising women in the Electoral Bill which he submitted to the Dominion Parliament. But the large Roman Catholic population of French Canadians blocks the way for the present in the Dominion.

In Australia and New Zealand the more independent and progressive spirit of the colonists needed little pressure to realise that men who resent the despotic dictation of other men have no title to dictate despotically to their women. New Zealand very early caught the echo of the struggle in England. In 1878 an Electoral Bill, enfranchising women ratepayers, was put through the House of Representatives by the Government, but failed--not exactly on the woman issue--to pass the Legislative Council. The women organised in 1886, and saw their Bill in 1891 carried by a majority of thirty-two to seven in the lower House, but lost by two votes in the Council. In 1893 it passed both Houses, and of the 109,000 enfranchised women no less than 90,000 voted at the next general election.

In most of the other colonies the victory has come with even less struggle. South Australia debated and carried a resolution in favour as early as 1885, though there was practically no demand on the part of the women. As a two-thirds majority was needed, the women began to educate and agitate, and the franchise was secured in 1894. In New South Wales the question was brought forward by Sir H. Parkes in his Electoral Bill of 1890, and a powerful organisation of women took up the demand in the colony. By 1901 the measure passed the House of Assembly by a large majority (fifty-one to seven), but was rejected by a small majority (twenty-six to twenty-one) in the Legislative Council. In the following year it passed into law. West Australia passed the reform almost without a struggle. The Women's Franchise League of that colony was formed in the spring of 1899, and the suffrage was obtained the same year. In Victoria, during a ten years' brisk agitation, a measure has passed the lower House six times with increased majorities, but is blocked by the Legislative Council. Tasmania granted the franchise to women in 1903, and Queensland in 1905. Finally, the franchise for the Federal Parliament of Australia was granted to women, after a very brief struggle, in 1902.[14]

To these victories won by the principle in the English-speaking world must be added the granting of the municipal franchise in Denmark, the enfranchisement of tax-paying women in Norway, and the concession of the right, not only to vote, but to sit in the Diet, in Finland. At the first election under the new Finnish constitution nineteen women were returned to the Diet, and the number increased to twenty-five in the following year (1908). Their colleagues willingly testify to the advantage of their presence in passing the beneficent series of Bills that the Tsar prevents them from carrying into law.

These are the triumphs of a single generation against one of the deepest-rooted prejudices of social life. One thinks instinctively of some iron-bound coast, where the wavelets ripple feebly to the foot of the beetling cliffs, and where even the fiercest storms fling their waters impotently on the adamantine front. And one day there occurs a convulsion of the crust, the culmination of a slow alteration of level, and the storms begin to tear wide breaches in the enfeebled barrier. From that day the confining rock is doomed. There has been an alteration of level in the social, industrial, and political life of the world. Large breaches have been torn in the ring of prejudice that confined the life of women. Here it has been the granting of municipal franchise or the power to serve as Poor Law Guardians; there it has been the right to vote for the national Parliament; at one place the right to sit in Parliament. The confining bonds are doomed. The political evolution of woman is running in a channel that it had never reached before in the history of the world, and all the abortive rushes of earlier ages have no moral for the present time. The only question now is, how long can the reef of prejudice survive? Nay, we are not talking of unconscious stone, but human hearts and minds, and the real question is: Which great nation will win the honour of recognising first that the age of despotism is over and the position of woman in the commonwealth radically changed?