Catherine Beatrice Phillips

“ There are bodies, such as the Women's Industrial Council and the Women's Economic and Industrial Union of Boston, Mass. which are employed in this indispensable work of research and vocational training; and it is very much to be regretted that money and energy should be diverted from this important constructive work to barren controversy and petulant agitation, based on insufficient knowledge and having no clear aim in view. ”

“ The educated and the uneducated women—not to speak of the half-educated women—the women of the working classes and of the middle classes, the woman who is wholly self-supporting and she who is only partly so, the married and the unmarried woman, the women with children and the women without them—all these classes offer very varied problems depending in each case on different factors ”

“ Another consideration which is not sufficiently borne in mind in feminist literature—whence, no doubt, arises much of its vagueness and impracticability—is that there is not one women's problem, but many women's problems. ”

“ Colquhoun, in her chapter on "Modern Women in Politics," in spite of much dogmatic and irrelevant political generalizing, certainly goes far towards showing that the female vote would be very unlikely to square with the present party system; yet if we attempt to fix in words any conception of a separate Feminist Party, we find it almost impossible to sketch a programme for it. We look at the existing suffragist societies and see, on the one hand, the Conservative suffragists, standing for the right of property ”

“ The fact is, that comprehensive treatises which attempt to deal with every aspect of the woman's question—sexual, sociological, biological, economic, or political—are bound to be rather inconclusive and futile. ”

“ She does not really face the problem, which not even the most domestically minded can afford to shirk, that a growing number of women are driven by the pressure of circumstance to seek a greater or lesser degree of economic independence. ”

“ Swanick's panacea is the liberation of women by men from the state of subjection in which she considers that they are still kept, and the throwing open to women of all careers which are now closed to them. Unlike many suffragists, she admits the average inferiority of women's work to that of men, and admits that where the two sexes come into competition men must generally command higher wages ”

“ There seems to be no reason why women should not take in hand many matters, of great importance both to the community and to the individual , for which their particular gifts would seem to qualify them. ”

“ But cutting across these ordinary party divisions comes a series of subjects upon which woman claim to be especially competent to express an opinion, and, if they get the chance, to be legislate—for instance, such matters as public morality, the relations of the sexes, and questions affecting the family, the status of the wife, and children. ”

“ There are many who consider that the excessive preoccupation of the present generation of women the political side of the question has tended to increase this confusion. It is still by no means satisfactorily demonstrated that women as a sex have interest apart from and antagonistic to those of men, or whether there are merely a number of feminine groups-interests arising from the peculiar conditions of women's work, Mrs. ”

“ There are, moreover, the complicated questions arising from legislation affecting the work of women. Much compromise would obviously be necessary before any sort of coherent party could be formed out of all the heterogeneous elements. ”