Rosalind Nash

“ Married women, to be sure, seem in effect to pay taxes as well as single, and poor as well as rich. But then it has long been doubtful whether a married woman is altogether a person; and we always think of a taxpayer as a dignified householder on whom the collector calls, and not as a mere drinker of cheap tea or eater of sultana pudding, who pays his or her too heavy share of the house tax in the rent of a single room.
The trade unionists of the north of England were the first working women among whom an active suffrage movement began. ”

“ Women co-operators have naturally turned their thoughts to the Factory Acts, and amendments have repeatedly been urged in all the ways open to the voteless. The Public Health Acts, the land question, and housing are studied, and persevering attempts are made to support reform. It would amaze the educated people who are bored with almost everything to see with what eagerness hard-worked housewives of Lancashire, the West Riding, and scores of towns, great and small, will fasten on these economic and social questions, so dull and meaningless to women whose easy lives they do not touch. ”

“ Our everyday home life is touched by law at every point. Our houses are both our workshops and our homes, so that Housing and Public Health questions are specially important to us. Our incomes are affected by taxation and by laws relating to Trade Unions, Accidents, Old Age Pensions, and all industrial laws that go to secure the health of the workers. We, as a body of working women, appeal to you to do your best to give us this common right—the right of the Citizen." Many Guild members were in the procession to Downing Street. ”

“ There would have been no need to put it forward if the less wealthy married women were not excluded from present hope by the formula "on the same terms as men." If the vigorous life of the new movement had at first been poured from all quarters into the wide channel of adult suffrage, there would have been no need for troublesome grubbing to make way for wandering streams. No genuine suffragist wishes to create difficulties, and the Guild deferred to the prejudice against asking for adult suffrage so far as to state the claim in a form suitable to a limited Bill. ”

“ The local work of the Guild "branch" generally is helped by its own cooperative society, but depends mainly on the yearly shilling which is all that can be expected of a married working woman, for no other human creature above compulsory school age has less pocket money. Though a society of women only, the Guild has become so closely identified with the forward policy of the co-operative movement, with all that is soundest and most courageous in the application of the co-operative idea to new and old uses, that nobody would now question its right to official recognition. ”

“ The Bill would only establish sex equality in the narrowest legal sense. The position of the married working women in the home, where her work was the rearing of children and not the earning of rent, &c, was due to her sex, and if she were forbidden to vote unless she paid the rent, the result would be her exclusion in consequence of sex. A small property qualification inflicted no appreciable hardship on a man. Owing to the economic dependence of married women, it was entirely inapplicable to the majority of women on marriage. ”

“ Co-operation has never been merely a plan for making a little extra money for co-operators, and if it is not now as idealist as in the hungry years, it has got to the more modest and elderly stage of knowing its own limitations and holding out hands to trades unionism and politics. ”

“ But after youth single women have much personal independence. Married women are often, but by no means always, free from the necessity of self-support, and rich married women, for their misfortune, need do no work. But their minds and lives are not free. They are not expected to act or think independently of their husbands. Every one knows the obituary notice of a good political wife. "She entered sympathetically into every phase of her husband's work, and shared all his political aspirations. ”

“ And as for fitness, it is undeniable that among such working women as the co-operators a consciousness of their own right to political freedom has spread very fast of late years, and that a large number—all those who "count" as leaders of the rest—are already able and eager to use the vote for carrying out their own ideas of social justice. ”

“ No women could be better prepared for enfranchisement than the Guild members. The cooperative movement, with two and a quarter millions of members and a yearly trade of sixty million pounds, has been called, after another select people, "a State within a State." In this State women have votes. Thousands of women hold shares in their own names, and before the passing of the Married Women's Property Act co-operators used honourably and illegally to let married women assert the right to their own investments and dividends. In some societies women outnumber men. ”

“ Co-operative women belong to the number of wives who in thrift at least have not failed. They have worked and said nothing. Highly educated people sum up their class as having "no vocabulary." They have their own strong prepossessions, grown out of fundamental experience, and any new idea must suit itself with these, or be rejected. When such women desire the vote, it is not for nothing. The first sign of interest was in 1893, when Guild members obtained 2,200 signatures to a suffrage petition. ”

“ Co-operative women did not first concern themselves about the suffrage. Their minds are not encouraged to reach out towards the vague, and abstract ideas are foreign to them. How could it be otherwise? Lady Bell says of the iron-workers' wives (who are Yorkshire women, too) , that the majority have not the health and the capacity to bear successfully the immense burden laid on married working women by the conditions of their lives. ”

“ As it was believed that a Women's Enfranchisement Bill on the old lines would probably be introduced at the earliest opportunity, the General Secretary of the Guild wrote to the newspapers to propose a compromise which would enfranchise Guild members and might be accepted by the supporters both of limited and of adult suffrage. The suggestion was to give the vote to married women whose husbands had the occupier or lodger vote, as well as to women possessing the existing men's qualifications. ”

“ This spring the Committees of 246 Branches, with over 14,000 members, or seven-twelfths of the membership, have signed a declaration, circulated in some haste, that "We, the undersigned, desire the right to vote in Parliamentary Elections, and are in favour of the broadest measure possible which will give the vote to married and single working-women." ”

“ The "branches" take part in local elections, and co-operative women have done excellent work as guardians. In opposing Protection they have been fully as active as their husbands. They showed the effect of the sugar tax in a series of domestic budgets, and at their meeting of three thousand women in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, a resolution was passed strongly condemning Protection and regretting that without votes they could not make their protest effective. ”

“ They attend the quarterly business meeting, the legal governing body of the co-operative society, and vote there side by side with men, deciding questions of trade, employment, and the common use of funds. ”

“ In this and everything wives should assert their right to think for themselves. Parents give little thought to their daughters' careers; girls are less well educated than their brothers; they are paid less ”