Helena M. Swanwick

“ But surely any great-grandmother of sense would not wish the twentieth-century man to be mated with a nineteenth-century woman. Even regarding women merely as complements to men, it is desirable that the wife should be of the same generation as the husband. And it is nothing short of cruelty to desire to see an early Victorian lady under modern conditions; it would be like nothing so much as the liberation of a cage-bred canary into a flock of ravenous starlings. ”

“ A manufacturing nation still thrills responsive to the call for further division of labour; that is to say, the dominant class, the employers do. But can we really produce a human being on the same system as we produce the pin beloved of early economists? Let us look a little further. Even if we make the huge admission that a woman, a human being after all, with a mind, to say nothing of a soul, would retain her bodily and mental health under so hideous a system,—can this woman produce a good child all by herself? ”

“ And the movement is world-wide. I shall speak mainly of the forms it has taken in England. They vary in every country. But the world is now so well in touch that the experience of one country becomes the experience of all, and what women undergo in one country smites the hearts of all women and rouses in them the sense of personal pride, of womanly dignity, of faith in woman’s work and soul. ”

“ Our faith would be weak if it could be dashed by the human faults in women, and of women in the movement as well as all the other women. It is cowardice, merely, to turn from the complex, fascinating, troublesome, real woman to a vapid ideal, or a devitalised norm. We must understand the real women and the real men, and have faith in them. Fear and distrust are no leaders for brave folk. ”

“ How is it possible for a man to assert that he knows what a woman feels and wants as well as she herself? He would have to be more than man! Even women, who spend their lives in studying men, do not make the claim that they can feel a man’s passions as he can; and, in another mood, the man who claims to be the arbiter of a woman’s life will rail at her incomprehensible and fickle nature. “But women have tongues and know only too well how to use them! We may consult with women and be advised by them,” say the reactionaries. ”

“ The day of the rule of man’s physical force over women is over in what are called the civilised countries—a relative term! There are, of course, very many unacknowledged relics of it, but they are disappearing, partly through the growth of reason, partly through the insistent hammering of the women and their men champions. But there is another source of dominance of man over woman, more insidious, more penetrating, much more difficult to abolish: this is the dominance of man by economic force. ”

“ The result is that we see women with the treble burden of child-bearing, wage-earning out of the home, and housework within the home. Small wonder when each of these is ill-done. The marvel is how well done they often are.
Sometimes, again, by the conditions under which the men choose to work, a monstrous burden is piled upon the housewife. The men who have been most persistent and most successful in obtaining an eight-hour day for themselves, have been those who have laid the heaviest burden upon the women. ”

“ Women die, and see their babies die, but theirs is no glory; nothing but horror and shame unspeakable, the slaying of those for whom they willingly risked their lives, when they brought them into the world, the destruction of all that is most precious to them. When men go to war, who remain behind to administer affairs, to be father and mother in one? When the men are killed, are their “responsibilities” killed with them? When the flower of manhood is destroyed, who are worthy to be the mates of the women and beget the men of the future? ”

“ Analogies are often misleading, but, in modern England, the picture is fairly correct which shows woman with a baby at her breast, one hand tied behind her by trade and legal restrictions, her eyes closed with the bandage of ignorance, her mouth gagged by the refusal of voting rights, hampered by the skirt of custom, having to struggle over the same rock-encumbered ground as man, unburdened, with head erect and limbs free. ”

“ She was true to the greater reality of sex. Now women are revolting against the necessity of telling even the lesser lie, and are insisting that they want to do their work unhampered by ignorance and meddling. If we take a large part of women’s work as being essentially social, the bearing and rearing of children, education and the care of the human family in all its wide interests of health and morality, how can anyone in their senses assert that a woman who has not the education and culture to know and appreciate facts is as helpful as one who has them? ”

“ It ought also to be studied by every intelligent man and woman who perceives that the women’s movement is one of the biggest things that has ever taken place in the history of the world. Other movements towards freedom have aimed at raising the status of a comparatively small group or class. But the women’s movement aims at nothing less than raising the status of an entire sex—half the human race—to lift it up to the freedom and valour of womanhood. It affects more people than any former reform movement, for it spreads over the whole world. ”

“ Doubtless it was the machine which served to make the lightning progress of the militant movement in its first years; it has been the machine, however, which has largely been responsible for the disasters of recent times. What was great and noble has become inextricably entangled with what the public has come to regard as a gigantic fake, and consequently the attitude of the public is either one of amusement, to see what fresh trick ingenuity will invent, what fresh show will be presented to the gaping crowd, or of exasperation at what seems to them like pointless mischief. ”

“ If sex-war has existed because the majority of men were tempted by their superior physical force to enslave women, and because the majority of women have retaliated by using the only power available to them, the power of sex, to get some of their own back, it is clear that much of the war on the women’s side was not overt. It is impossible, however, to believe that the women who have lied to men, and deceived them, and who have played upon their sex, have not in their hearts felt considerable contempt for the men they were entrapping through their grosser nature. ”

“ Above all, it made many women feel that, if they desired the enfranchisement of women, and if they did not like the methods of the W.S.P.U., the only respectable thing to do was to work as hard, and give as much for what they thought right, as these other women did. To the constitutional suffragists, it is a matter of complete indifference who gets the credit, when the vote is won; but it is a matter of the utmost import to them, not only that the vote should be won, but that both women and men should be prepared to make the best use of so great a reform. ”

“ Then came the militants, and, by smashing windows and arson and general terrorism, revived the ape in men, so that, for some years past, all women are once more in danger of violence from men. It is degrading to both men and women, and the only merit that I can see in the process is, that men who have so loved to exercise all the virtues vicariously in their women, are being a little shocked to see how ugly violence can be, and, from seeing it ugly in a woman may, by and by, turn to see it ugly in themselves. ”

“ And woman not only bears the child, but she is its natural protector and guardian. In the way civilised men regard assaults on children, in their helplessness to protect the child from bad men,—and women,—in the monstrous absurdity of the phrase “the criminal child,” and all the cruelties and stupidities involved in that phrase, one sees how men, with the best intentions, have failed, because they would insist upon doing women’s work. Man is legally, by the laws man has made, the only parent of the child, and the condition of the child truly reflects this legal fiction. ”

“ They abandon Ideal Woman; they offer you Normal Woman, and she turns out, on investigation, to be no other than average woman. They take from each woman what is peculiar or individual, what marks her out as different from other women; they select what is common to women, sex and motherhood, and they proceed to say that for sex and motherhood women must live and be trained. When some half-crazy Strindberg or wholly crazy Weininger asserts that woman does not exist as a person, he is really only putting clearly the logical result of this tyranny of thought. ”

“ As to the direct use of the vote in affecting legislation, it is quite ludicrous to find people denying it. Like any other tool, the vote is only of use if the owners use it, and that men have made bad or insufficient use of the vote only shows that men may do so; it does not show that men always will do so, nor does it show that women ever will. Now there is one idea that always seems to crop up in the minds of politicians when any women’s problem is presented to them: it is, to prohibit. ”

“ Do we not even find English people prophesying direst results if the causes for divorce are made equal as between men and women, and these people are left open-mouthed when informed that in the northern portion of Great Britain they are so? While others declare that the mere notion of a woman being a Member of Parliament, of a jury, or of the police force, must be the cause of inextinguishable laughter, thereby convicting themselves of bad manners towards two European nations and the United States of America. ”

“ In families where the women’s movement has opened the doors and windows, one sees delightful specimens of young women: jolly girls, whose noble bodies and cheerful rosy faces and frank eyes make older women happy to look on. One sees good fellowship with men and honesty and lively intelligence. One sees even the older women, some of them, gladly leaving off playing the lady and joining in the fellowship of sexes, classes and ages. ”

“ One is familiar with the idealistic assertion that no one can injure you except you yourself. It is a fine thing to hold to your sovereign will and force it to command your life, but who can look round on the world as it is and not see everywhere signs of how men and women degrade their fellows by cruelty, carelessness and greed? It sounds like cant to tell the girl and boy who have been reared in a slum and have never known decency that they need not have allowed themselves to be degraded. ”

“ No feminist tract can compare for propaganda purposes with The Trojan Women, or Medea. Tell a woman she has no concern with the great imperial matters of peace and war, and then give her the first to read! She will have a whole armoury of answers. Or try to crush a woman who has read the second with reproaches concerning the treachery and falseness of womankind! If the sex-war is as old as history, there have been—and herein lies our chief hope—men in all times who have read its causes. ”

“ It is a common assertion that a woman fulfils herself completely in motherhood, but this is manifestly not true of the woman who wants to think about the higher mathematics, or who has a genius for organising masses. This does not dismay me at all. Why, after all, should the genius be a mother? And if she be, could she not find motherly women to bring up the children? ”