Ethel Snowden

“ It is too late in the day to argue that women cannot form a sound political judgment when, at election times, every political candidate clamours for the assistance of women in the work of persuading men to vote for him and the views he represents. It is, of course, the mass of women who come under this condenmation of Mrs Humphry Ward. It is inconceivable that the anti-suffragists include themselves when they say that 'the political ignorance of women is irreparable and imposed upon them by nature.' They are the great exceptions that prove the rule. ”

“ The last remnant of this ancient division of labour is to be found in the half-querulous, wholly resentful suggestion, the favourite retort of the anti-feminist, 'woman's place is the home.' Woman as woman, woman when she is performing the particular duties of her sex is, undoubtedly, in the best and safest place possible when she is at home—always presuming that the home is a home indeed, and that she can afford to be there. But sex duties are only a part of woman's work, only a part, indeed, of some women's work. ”

“ The suffragist demands only equality in politics; though she desires to use her vote to help the poor, she has not always, nor even generally, a clear idea of how this is to be done. The feminist knows both what she wants to see accomplished, and the way in which it has to be done. Liberty for women to develop all the perfection of which they are capable, she desires supremely. Equality for men and women she aspires to, in all those matters of their common humanity where sex does not enter and impose an impassable barrier ”

“ The sweated woman, the half-starved mother of children, the social outcast, and the deserted wife are the images summoned to confound the dreamers who talk of chivalry towards women. These women occupy no lofty pedestal surrounded with prostrate worshippers, from which they are to be dragged against their will into the dusty arena of politics. They are thankful when they can earn enough money to buy bread. ”

“ Being a woman of understanding she was able to strip the Revolution of all its terrible, but, in the circumstances, perfectly natural excrescences, and to lay hold upon the glorious idealism, the essential spirit of this great upheaval—the spirit of human freedom. ”

“ It is a pity to have dolls for girls and footballs for boys. The maternal instinct has no business to appear in a small girl-child more than in a boy; it surely should not be encouraged in either during very tender years. The game of life has to be played by both boys and girls in later years; but girls, because they are girls and must be petted, indulged, excused, and controlled, are seldom taught the rules of the game. Thus is sex-consciousness ripened in the girl, making her either the victim or the martyr of some one whom she meets and touches at one point of thought and feeling only. ”

“ An intelligent concern for the welfare of the race is bringing good men to the side of good women in a common endeavour to erect a new and better standard of conduct for both. These men, under the banner of a newer, finer chivalry, are no longer willing to accept the low standard thought good enough for their sex in the days that are rapidly passing away, but are cheerfully accepting the higher plane of life, and the same standard for the governance of their own lives which through all the ages have been set up for the guidance of women. ”

“ It is as necessary to the modern thinking woman as the sunlight is to the flower that she should find her place in the scheme of things, and be able by her deeds to develop her own character and justify her existence to herself and to the world. The busy working wife, with her limited means, her large brood, her vision frequently limited by the harassing cares and worries of her life, feels little sympathy with the feminist, whose gospel she has never understood. ”

“ A man is manly in proportion as he responds to that element in woman which is different from anything he possesses. A woman is womanly to the extent that she is permeated with sex-sensitiveness. In every other respect, in the world of morals, men are as women and women are as men, or at least there is no reason why they should not be so; that is, they share, though in proportions varying as infinitely as the stars, the virtues and the vices; they are equally human.
The world has many men whose tenderness is more than the tenderness of the most loving of mothers. ”

“ The vast distances that have to be travelled; the superstition that has to be overcome; the strange, blind worship of authority by the ignorant peasant; the unequal development in citizens of the same land; the censorship of the press and the difficulties of propaganda; the suspicion of the Government and the tyranny of the official—all these things, added to the native, instinctive idea, the product of generations of domination, of the inferiority of women, make the solution of the woman's question in Russia one of the gravest complication. ”

“ Feminism does not seek the extinction of strength and courage in men, nor of beauty and softness and tenderness in women, but the recognition that these fine and lovely qualities are the heritage of men and women alike—human qualities which all human beings have in germ, and which all human beings are entitled to cultivate and to use without question or reproof.
The chief purpose of feminists through all the years, and at the present time, is the achievement of freedom for womanhood and its equality of opportunity with manhood. ”

“ Far back in the dim days of the past, farther back than the mind and imagination of most can properly travel, when the human race had just emerged from the slime in which its animal progenitors had wallowed, when the tiger and the ape were king, and when the new-born soul of man struggled with the spirit of the jungle for its earliest expression, the two halves of humanity were equally endowed. ”

“ Many women are economically independent to-day, or, rather they are economically dependent upon a part of the community unknown to them, which works to supply them with dividends. In the sense that their income is tolerably secure, however, and that they have not to look to another for bread, these women are economically independent; but they are not economically free. Economic freedom means absolute security from want, a security which nothing short of the annihilation of the whole community could touch. ”

“ Wealth meant power, the power to command other men and women; and so the slowly-developing spirit of man sought power, admiration, worship. The value of woman as property, in these days of destructive wars, lay chiefly in her power to bear children. For this she was fed and protected, for this she was permitted a certain amount of freedom, though within clearly defined limits and in strict seclusion, unless she were a slave. In the number of his slaves a man's wealth was, in part, estimated; but the greater the number of the slaves, the less there remained for the man and his wife to do. ”

“ It is false to say that those who were not free have never fought against their own enfranchisement. Thousands of black men fought against the North in the American Civil War, preferring a life of pampered slavery to the unknown joys and terrors of freedom. The analogy, unflattering though it may appear, is not to be drawn between the men and the women of Great Britain, but between the white women of this country and the black men of the United States in the days of the Civil War. ”

“ The question of the labour of women cannot be considered apart from a number of grave considerations bearing upon the welfare of the race; but its consideration involves the recognition at the outset of the following hard facts.
The destiny of the normal woman is undoubtedly marriage and motherhood. This, under any form of government and in any system of society, is the life that the normal woman will choose. It is amazing folly to talk and write as though the natural work of women was so repugnant to them that only the compulsion of slavery could induce them to do it. ”

“ It is not a pleasant thought that, for the sake of incomes to be drawn, and by the competition of women to be endangered, clergy and ministers oppose the pulpit for women. It surely cannot be that Paul, the strict upholder of the customs, good and bad, of his country and of his times, holds higher place in the opinion of Christian leaders than the holy Founder of their Faith, who knew nothing of sex discrimination, and whose gentle spirit and teaching reveal nothing which warrants the prohibition of the woman who is moved to proclaim His truth. ”

“ Of course, equal pay for equal work must mean what it says. If women permit themselves privileges which are denied to the men workers in the same business or trade, regular days off for sickness, shorter hours, less responsibility, they must not call it 'equal work.' If women work hard and fit themselves for their work, and by their power to do it clearly demonstrate to an employer that it is to his interest to employ them, they will not be in such sore straits as they imagine. ”

“ Those who know the colonial women voters, or the women voters of Norway and Finland, would never dare to assert that the women of these countries are one whit less womanly, even in the narrow sense of that term, less fond of their homes and children, less capable as housewives, less women in short, than the women of any other country. Their behaviour is as modest, their conversation as intelligent, their dress and manners as attractive, and their charm as patent as in the women of any one of the lands where women do not vote. ”

“ Many mistake freedom of passion for the real freedom which ennobles and dignifies, and wreck themselves on the rock of self-indulgence before they discover that freedom is of the spirit and of the intellect rather than of the flesh. This is the freedom for which the feminist yearns.
Although feminism does not stand for the abolition of the marriage laws, but for the equality of man and woman in the married state, the supporters of the movement realise that, with communities as with individuals, there is no standing still ”

“ The equality in sex-relations for which the collective sense of women yearns must be yielded to them as an act of delicacy, consideration, and high chivalry.
There is nothing in the feminist programme about which the feminist feels so keenly as about the double standard of morality which governs the lives of men and women. The inevitable effect of it is the sad procession of women who nightly prowl about the public streets of every large city in the world. It is variously estimated that there are fifty to eighty thousand of such women in London alone. ”

“ Feminism has something to say upon the most intimate of human relationships, but it is not easy to express it, and when said it is liable to be much misunderstood. When a man and a woman decide to live together as husband and wife an equal partnership is formed, one in which each partner is necessary for the building up of the perfect home; but in that part of their lives in which they only, and no others, are concerned, a position of natural equality does not exist. No Act of Parliament can make any difference to that outstanding and important fact. ”

“ When her name is mentioned to-day, visions of a tender woman bending over the sick-bed, binding the broken limb or closing the dying eyes, a woman whose name soldiers breathe with their last breath, whose shadow on the wall they kiss, whose every movement they follow with their eyes, are what is seen in the mind's eye. ”

“ To this extent, therefore, the battle for women's freedom has been easier, for the atmosphere has been of the very breath of freedom, and no foolish respect for outworn theories and institutions has had the power to stop the onward march of progress.
Again the stern fight with savage nature, whether in the form of hard soil, or cruel drought, or native tribes, has drawn men and women nearer to each other in the bonds of a common need, and given a chance of growth to the sense of fairplay and justice, which is present, in however rudimentary a form, in the breasts of most. ”

“ There is no such thing as the inborn and inalienable right of a man to the vote. The only right that the woman can establish is the right to have what the man in the same circumstances and with the same qualifications enjoys. Men and women lunatics and criminals are equally without the right to inflict on the community the consequences of their insanity or their criminality. ”

“ THE WOMAN SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT
It would be as well to forestall criticism and say with great clearness that feminism and woman suffrage are not the same thing, though both, admittedly, are the offspring of the same idea. Feminism seeks to remove all barriers which oppose the perfect freedom of women as human beings, conventional, social, political, and economic. Woman suffrage would break down one of these barriers only—the political barrier. ”

“ But the spirit of freedom knows nothing of the boundaries which nations and clans have set up between one another. It leaps all obstacles, and throws open all doors, calling upon men and women alike to be free. ”

“ Will the mothers of the future be wiser than many mothers of the past generation, so foolishly eager to establish their daughters that they paid little heed to the character of the men who proposed to marry them? The hope of the feminist is that they will; that they will refuse to admit to the intimacy of their homes men of doubtful character, who hold themselves free to indulge in vice. ”

“ When the world ceases to be obsessed with sex and takes a cleaner, finer, broader outlook upon life and humankind, it will be seen that the best interests of the world and the State are served when the individual, man or woman, is doing that work which he or she can best do. The question to the feminist is not: Ought women or men to do this and that? ”

“ Where men require compulsion to work, it is very often because they are forced to work at tasks for which they have no taste, because they are overworked, or because their toil, by reason of the process of subdivision and the employment of machinery, has been robbed of all individuality and rendered so deadly monotonous that it has become repulsive and hateful to them. Monotony and the machine are together killing the natural love of productive, creative labour. ”

“ What is really meant by those who use this argument is, that women, as a whole, will not form the same judgment as they would themselves. Voting intelligently to them would mean voting as they vote. Orthodoxy is their doxy. Egotism, pure and simple, is the bottom fact of most of the opposition to the political emancipation of women—egotism, when it is not prejudice. If it were possible to demonstrate beyond all shadow of a doubt that the majority of the new voters would vote for either of the two dominant political parties, that party would enfranchise women at the earliest possible moment. ”

“ Women who do not want the vote, object because they have been taught to object. For many generations women have been told that politics was not their sphere, that public questions were not their concern, that to be actively interested in matters outside the home was undignified and unwomanly; and they have believed these things, and do believe them. They are afraid, too, of losing the esteem and affection of those dear to them if they interest themselves in public questions. A very beautiful and tender sentiment prevents some of them from helping the cause of woman suffrage. ”

“ The out-and-out feminist has very definite views on the subject of women's labour. She is in favour of throwing open to women all professions and occupations which are open to men. She is opposed to all legal restrictions and regulations of women's work which do not govern the work of their male associates, and she is emphatically in favour of equal pay for equal work, a formula which may mean something or nothing, as the case may be.
The admission of women to every profession, business, and trade is an idea very repugnant to a great many people. ”

“ The most rampant feminism would never accomplish the destruction of this natural and beautiful instinct towards life-giving and life-protecting inherent in all women. The pity of it is that so many women, for various reasons, some of them preventable, cannot with honour achieve the sphere towards which every instinct of their being calls them. Poverty so abounds that thousands of men dare not marry and take upon themselves new and unknown responsibilities. ”

“ When a woman loves a man but is not loved nor wanted by him, honourable motherhood is denied to her. She depends upon his love and desire for the honourable achievement of her natural ambition. And the exercise of her special function of maternity involves a sacrifice of personal freedom from which no human ingenuity can contrive to save her, and which it may safely be said, she scarcely desires to avoid. The father, if he be a genius, finds domestic responsibilities a clog upon his efforts, but the ordinary, average father is not so hampered as is every woman who is a mother. ”

“ Much of the opposition to woman suffrage on the part of wage-earning and professional men is born of the instinctive fear that it threatens in some mysterious way their means of living. Numerous inventions of labour-saving machinery of every variety have reduced the number of workers, the competition of the dispossessed has caused wages to fall, and life has become so hazardous for the workers that many of them, quite naturally, shrink from increasing the risks and difficulties of their position by encouraging an increase in the number of women competitors for their work. ”