C. Despard

“ I think it probable that men, inspired by women, will take a higher view of their fatherhood. In these dark days the multitude of children means poverty to the mother. In that better era they will be her pride, her independence, her wealth. And this will follow naturally on the attainment by women of their economic freedom. The family is at once the unit and the symbol of the State. In the happy, well-constituted family there are the two heads—father and mother—who, having had different experience and training, bring these to the service of their children. ”

“ Broadly speaking, that for which we are fighting now is the emancipation of woman; her social freedom; her intellectual freedom; her economic freedom; her political freedom; and we believe that it is through the attainment of the rights of citizenship that all these doors will be opened to us.
I wish now, briefly, to show what, as I believe, the effect would be on society generally and on woman primarily if these her demands were granted; what, in fact, woman will be in the new era. ”

“ In India, to the present day, hosts of men and women worship the mother-father God, creator, preserver, and destroyer.
Turn now to nature interpreted by science. As I read its elementary truths, they teach the same. Here, also, we have the woman-principle brought prominently before us. Chemistry has its mysterious affinities, its rushing together of two elements with, as result, the production of a force which has qualities possessed by neither. Botany, which gives us the life-history of the plants, tells us plainly of the dual power, the mother-father, the eternal marriage of the worlds. ”

“ THE woman's question—woman as she is, woman as she will be! That is my subject; and I want, at the outset, to get away from woman as the individual, more or less pleasing, more or less aggravating, more or less useful. I want to study woman in the abstract: the great woman-principle in life, in thought, and in action. ”

“ For centuries this waste of women's lives has been going on; and the momentous part of the present situation is that women themselves are beginning to see this. Women have been proving lately that they possess the gift of courage-moral and physical-in a remarkable degree. I have a theory that, mind moulding body, we shall see, in the near future, an immense improvement in the physique of our women. So far as I have been able to read the history of life on our planet, I see no reason, in the natural order of things, why women should be physically inferior to men. ”

“ It is this vision which makes me feel, with my sisters of the Women's Social and Political Union, that life itself would be but a small price to pay for the joy of being one of the pioneers of a movement whose aim it is to prepare and reveal her. ”

“ There is being developed amongst them that which is, to me, the noblest of all our social virtues—the dear love and deathless loyalty of comrades. As I look round and forward I see this spirit growing. ”

“ Unless human nature undergoes an extraordinary change we shall still have wives and mothers. But, in the better era to which I look forward, it will be recognised that all women cannot marry, and that there are women, as there are men, who are unfit for family life. Then again, the woman who marries and has children is not occupied with husband and children during the whole of her life. ”

“ Some of the children may be of man's estate—strong, good-looking and clever; some may be very young; some may be weak of body and infirm in mind. In the well-ordered family none would be allowed to intrude upon the others; each would have his place and would be expected to fulfil his duty; but to the young, the weak and the ailing the greatest tenderness would be shown. So will it be in the State of the future when men and women work together in harmony. ”

“ The atmosphere of competition is inconsistent with loyalty; it makes combination impossible. Men know this perfectly well; they know also that the maintenance of their superiority depends on the rivalry and consequent subjection of women; and yet they have constantly twitted those whom they call the weaker sex on their inability to work in loyalty with their sisters. I believe that this has been done for the last time. To me one of the most profoundly important features of the present revolutionary movement amongst women is that they are proving their power to work together. ”

“ It has been said of women that they cannot combine, that they are incapable of true loyalty one for the other. I think it must have been in the prophetic spirit of those who see with apprehension the passing away of their dear old world of prejudice, yes, and of sex domination, that this fiction has been circulated. Women can combine for great causes. They are capable of ardent loyalty one for the other. ”

“ I think first of woman as mother, the independent, educated, well-developed woman of the future, choosing her mate freely, not because she wants protection, but because she wants to fulfil her highest function—to bring strong and capable children into the world. ”

“ And when through religions which, as I conceive them, are spiritual ladders to the discovery of intellectual and spiritual truth, and through science the way to the same truth on a different plane, we rise to humanity in its higher phases—human conscience, human society, human polity—we have still the two aspects—the eternal marriage ”

“ It is assumed by those who to-day oppose the entry of women into the larger life of citizenship that family cares and opportunities and joys are sufficient to fill up her days, and delightful pictures are drawn of women, as daughters, gladdening the home by their beauty and enriching it by their loyal service ”

“ Then again, the wiser women of the later day, trained by social and political freedom, will recognise that motherhood is a noble profession, to be prepared for carefully and when worthily followed to be honoured and rewarded. ”

“ Why is it that with all the wealth, refinement, and culture of our twentieth century we lack that which would be more precious to us than all the wealth of the world happiness, peace, contentment. Why? Because our lives are a discord. Because we are living a lie. ”

“ Others laid the blame on the lack of religion amongst the people. Selfishness, the drink habit, luxury, shiftlessness—all these were given as explanations. Not one of these writers seemed to see that the great wrong—the wrong at the heart of all our civilisation—is this: we are professing to be what we are not; we place before us a standard of righteousness which we do not attempt to follow. ”

“ Nay, even astronomy, perhaps the most abstruse of all the sciences, has its energy and inertia, one working with the other to produce that harmony of the suns and planets in their eternal progression, the order of whose movements was discovered and formulated by Sir Isaac Newton in his Law of Gravitation. ”

“ Free from cramping convention in dress and life-habits, educated liberally in the true, not the party sense of the word, having honourable, useful and happy careers open to them, they will be not only nobler in mind and character, but finer, stronger, healthier in body. ”

“ Catholicism also, which bears traces of the old pagan world, through conquest of which she gained her dominion, has her Virgin-Mother—her Queen of Heaven, her Divine Consolatrix; and all who know anything about the history of the Middle Ages will be aware of the effect of this aspect of religion on society. Abbesses, in those days, sat at State-Councils; ladies of high degree possessed the right of sending their chosen delegates to Parliaments, and holy women, like St. ”

“ Chiefly because it was impressed upon them from their childhood that they were dependent upon men. The girl who would live a comfortable life was tacitly taught that she would have to compete with other girls for the favour of men. ”