CHAPTER XIII
WOMAN AND THE STATE
“I do not wonder at what men suffer; I wonder at what men lose.” And Ruskin was not alone in his amazement. Surely if the country realised what it loses by shutting out of its high offices its women, it would hasten to remedy the appalling fault!
Only since the year 1865 have women been permitted to vote at municipal elections, and to this day they may not submit themselves for election to these bodies. For County Councils they may vote, but they may not yet be members. School Boards, on which they were permitted to sit, have been abolished, and they may have no part as elected persons in the work of the present Education Committees. They may sit on District and Parish Councils, and be Guardians of the Poor. Very occasionally they are appointed on Royal Commissions; but they may not sit in Parliament.
Women are now permitted in small numbers to serve the State in a variety of useful ways not enumerated in the foregoing chapter. There are women Sanitary Inspectors, women Education Inspectors, and women Factory Inspectors. In the interests of women directly, and of the community indirectly, this should be; and to a far greater extent. Ten women Factory Inspectors is not a sufficiently large number to look after the interests of a vast army of women workers in factories, estimated in 1901 to be 650,142, besides 36,511 children working half-time. Women Sanitary Inspectors in greater numbers would help to remove the dense ignorance of the masses upon matters of health; and more women Inspectors of Schools would be of great benefit to women teachers, who would not be fearful of consulting one of their own sex.
It is not possible to suggest what form local and national government will take under Socialism. There will certainly be no Boards of Guardians, as we know them at present, for compulsory and thriftless indigence will have disappeared. The poor person under Socialism will be poor because, from ethical or religious motives, he chooses to be poor, when he will be respected for the sake of his adherence to his principle; or he will be poor because he is lazy, when he will be allowed to starve.
The number and nature of the public bodies in a Socialist State will depend upon the exact tendency and character in detail of Socialist institutions, and the rate of development of Socialist undertakings and enterprises.
But whatever the nature of its governing bodies, women will help to elect its representatives by voting with the men, and women will have their share of the representation. With what horror and indignation will the august legislator, chancing upon this book, cast his eye upon this page, with its prophecy that the benches of the National Chamber may yet be seen accommodating three hundred and thirty-five intelligent women, bent on speeding up the legislative machine so that in their time, something may be done to improve the lot of themselves and their children!
Nothing can prevent the coming of such a time eventually. And it will be well when it is so. The nation cannot afford to go on losing the intelligence, the energy, the culture, the affection, and the devotion of more than half its population. The country cannot prosper which does not properly represent in its domestic, its administrative, and its legislative life, the point of view of its womenkind. The State cannot spare from its high councils the deep wisdom of its mothers and the comradeship of its wives. Not for what it suffers, but because of what it is losing, will a wise community enfranchise its women and admit them to the ministry of their fellows from the seats of the elect.
In his book, "The Subjection of Women," John Stuart Mill expresses the nation's need in words of moving eloquence. "Is there," he asks, "so great a superfluity of men fit for high duties, that society can afford to reject the service of any competent person? Are we so certain of always finding a man made to our hands for any duty or function of social importance which falls vacant, that we lose nothing by putting a ban on one half of mankind, and refusing beforehand to make their faculties available, however distinguished they may be? And even if we could do without them, would it be consistent with justice to refuse to them their fair share of honour and distinction, or to deny to them the equal right of all human beings to choose their occupation (short of injury to others) according to their own preferences, at their own risk? Nor is the injustice confined to them. It is shared by those who are in a position to benefit by their services. To ordain that any kind of persons shall not be physicians, or shall not be advocates, or shall not be members of Parliament, is to injure not them only, but all who employ physicians, or advocates, or elect members of Parliament.”
It is a “consummation devoutly to be wished,” though not to be definitely asserted of the coming Socialist society, that Party politics will have become a thing of the past. That men and women will judge of a question or a candidate for office purely on its merits or on his or her qualifications for the office to which he or she seeks election. Certainly if anything will help in this direction it is the enfranchisement of women. Not for a time, probably, will the balance of present political parties be much altered. Until they begin in great numbers to realise the power and responsibility of the vote they have won, many women will, doubtless, ask advice as to the use of their votes, of their long-enfranchised male relations. But common-sense far more than the exigencies of Party, and the general good far more than the fate of Governments, will guide the women of the future in the placing of their suffrages. The domestically-trained and religiously-developed minds of women will move on lines of domestic and moral reform, and woe betide the adventurous profligate or ignorant upstart who ventures before their keen eyes, or submits himself to their searching examination in his candidature for office. Men who would so aspire will have to be manly men, with great ideas, with good records, and with the will to do righteously in all things, serving the State.
The great country will be the country of free and honoured women joining hands with their men comrades in the service of their common cause and the land of their love:—
Where they enter the public assembly and take places the same as men . . .
Where the city of the cleanliness of the sexes stands,
Where the city of the healthiest fathers stands,
Where the city of the best-bodied mothers stands,
There the great city stands.”