Table of Contents
Eighteenth-Century France—Pioneers of the Woman's Movement—The Growth of the Woman's Suffrage Movement—The Militant Activities of the Suffragettes—Their Services and Disservices to the Cause—Advantages of Women's Suffrage—Sex Questions in Germany—Bebel—The Woman's Rights Movement in Germany—The Development of Sexual Science in Germany—the Movement for the Protection of Motherhood—Ellen Key—The Question of Illegitimacy—Eugenics—Women as Law-makers in the Home.
I
The modern conception of the political equality of women with men, we have seen, arose in France in the second half of the eighteenth century. Its way was prepared by the philosophic thinkers of the Encyclopédie, and the idea was definitely formulated by some of the finest minds of the age, notably by Condorcet, [52] as part of the great new programme of social and political reform which was to some small degree realized in the upheaval of the Revolution. The political emancipation of women constituted no part of the Revolution. It has indeed been maintained, and perhaps with reason, that the normal development of the revolutionary spirit would probably have ended in vanquishing the claim of masculine predominance if war had not diverted the movement of revolution by transforming it into the Terror. Even as it was, the rights of women were not without their champions even at this period. We ought specially to remember Olympe de Gouges, whose name is sometimes dismissed too contemptuously. With all her defects of character and education and literary style, Olympe de Gouges, as is now becoming recognized, was, in her biographer's words, "one of the loftiest and most generous souls of the epoch," in some respects superior to Madame Roland. She was the first woman to demand of the Revolution that it should be logical by proclaiming the rights of woman side by side with those of her equal, man, and in so doing she became the great pioneer of the feminist movement of to-day. [53] She owes the position more especially to her little pamphlet, issued in 1791, entitled Déclaration des Droits de la Femme. It is this Déclaration which contains the oft-quoted (or misquoted) saying: "Women have the right to ascend the scaffold; they must also have the right to ascend the tribune." Two years later she had herself ascended the scaffold, but the other right she claimed is only now beginning to be granted to women. At that time there were too many more pressing matters to be dealt with, and the only women who had been taught to demand the rights of their sex were precisely those whom the Revolution was guillotining or exiling. Even had it been otherwise, we may be quite sure that Napoleon, the heir of the Revolution and the final arbiter of what was to be permanent in its achievements, would have sternly repressed any political freedom accorded to women. The only freedom he cared to grant to women was the freedom to produce food for cannon, and so far as lay in his power he sought to crush the political activities of women even in literature, as we see in his treatment of Mme. de Staël. [54]
An Englishwoman of genius was in Paris at the time of the Revolution, with as broad a conception of the place of woman side by side with man as Olympe de Gouges, while for the most part she was Olympe's superior. In 1792, a year after the Déclaration des Droits de la Femme, Mary Wollstonecraft—it is possible to some extent inspired by the brief Déclaration—published her Vindication of the Rights of Women. It was not a shrill outcry, nor an attack on men—in that indeed resembling the Déclaration—but just the book of a woman, a wise and sensible woman, who discusses many women's questions from a woman's point of view, and desires civil and political rights, not as a panacea for all evils, but simply because, as she argues, humanity cannot progress as a whole while one half of it is semi-educated and only half free. There can be little doubt that if the later advocates of woman's suffrage could have preserved more of Mary Wollstonecraft's sanity, moderation, and breadth of outlook, they would have diminished the difficulties that beset the task of convincing the community generally. Mary Wollstonecraft was, however, the inspired pioneer of a great movement which slowly gained force and volume. [55] During the long Victorian period the practical aims of this movement went chiefly into the direction of improving the education of girls so as to make it, so far as possible, like that of boys. In this matter an immense revolution was slowly accomplished, involving the entrance of women into various professions and employments hitherto reserved to men. That was a very necessary preliminary to the extension of the franchise to women. The suffrage propaganda could not, moreover, fail to benefit by the better education of women and their increased activity in public life. It was their activity, indeed, far more than the skill of the women who fought for the franchise, which made the political emancipation of women inevitable, and the noble and brilliant women who through the middle of the nineteenth century recreated the educational system for women, and so prepared them to play their proper part in life, were the best women workers the cause of women's enfranchisement ever had. There was, however, one distinguished friend of the emancipation of women whose advocacy of the cause at this period was of immense value. It is now nearly half a century since John Stuart Mill—inspired, like Thompson, by a woman—wrote his Subjection of Women, and it may undoubtedly be said that since that date no book on this subject published in any country—with the single exception of Bebel's Woman—has been so widely read or so influential. The support of this distinguished and authoritative thinker gave to the woman's movement a stamp of aristocratic intellectuality very valuable in a land where even the finest minds are apt to be afflicted by the disease of timidity, and was doubtless a leading cause of the cordial reception which in England the idea of women's political emancipation has long received among politicians. Bebel's book, speedily translated into English, furnished the plebeian complement to Mill's.
The movement for the education of women and their introduction into careers previously monopolized by men inevitably encouraged the movement for extending the franchise to women. This political reform was remarkably successful in winning over the politicians, and not those of one party only. In England, since Mill published his Subjection of Women in 1869, there have always been eminent statesmen convinced of the desirability of granting the franchise to women, and among the rank and file of Members of Parliament, irrespective of party, a very large proportion have pledged themselves to the same cause. The difficulty, therefore, in introducing woman's suffrage into England has not been primarily in Parliament. The one point, at which political party feeling has caused obstruction—and it is certainly a difficult and important point—is the method by which woman's suffrage should be introduced. Each party—Conservative, Liberal, Labour—naturally enough desires that this great new voting force should first be applied at a point which would not be likely to injure its own party interests. It is probable that in each party the majority of the leaders are of opinion that the admission of female voters is inevitable and perhaps desirable; the dispute is as to the extent to which the floodgates should in the first place be opened. In accordance with English tradition, some kind of compromise, however illogical, suggests itself as the safest first step, but the dispute remains as to the exact class of women who should be first admitted and the exact extent to which entrance should be granted to them.
The dispute of the gate-keepers would, however, be easily overcome if the pressure behind the gate were sufficiently strong. But it is not. However large a proportion of the voters in Great Britain may be in favour of women's franchise, it is certain that only a very minute percentage regard this as a question having precedency over all other questions. And the reason why men have only taken a very temperate interest in woman's suffrage is that women themselves, in the mass, have taken an equally temperate interest in the matter when they have not been actually hostile to the movement. It may indeed be said, even at the present time, that whenever an impartial poll is taken of a large miscellaneous group of women, only a minority are found to be in favour of woman's suffrage. [56] No significant event has occurred to stimulate general interest in the matter, and no supremely eloquent or influential voice has artificially stirred it. There has been no woman of Mary Wollstonecraft's genius and breadth of mind who has devoted herself to the cause, and since Mill the men who have made up their minds on this side have been content to leave the matter to the women's associations formed for securing the success of the cause. These associations have, however, been led by women of a past generation, who, while of unquestionable
