The Women Movement
9781465636560
301 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
There can be little doubt that at the present moment what is called the “Woman’s Movement” is entering a critical period of its development. A discussion of its present problems and its present difficulties by one of the most advanced leaders in that movement thus appears at the right time and deserves our most serious attention. The early promulgators of the Woman’s Movement, a century or more ago, rightly regarded it as an extremely large and comprehensive movement affecting the whole of life. They were anxious to secure for women adequate opportunities for free human development, to the same extent that men possess such opportunities, but they laid no special stress on the abolition of any single disability or group of disabilities, whether as regards education, occupation, marriage, property, or political enfranchisement. They were people of wide and sound intelligence; they never imagined that any single isolated reform would prove a cheap panacea for all the evils they wished to correct; they looked for a slow reform along the whole line. They held that such reform would enrich and enlarge the entire field of human life, not for women only, but for the human race generally. Such, indeed, is the spirit which still inspires the wisest and most far-seeing champions of that Movement. It is only necessary to mention Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labour. When, however, the era of actual practical reform began, it was obvious that a certain amount of concentration became necessary. Education was, reasonably enough, usually the first point for concentration, and gradually, without any undue friction, the education of girls was, so far as possible, raised to a level not so very different from that of boys. This first great stage in the Woman’s Movement inevitably led on to the second stage, which lay in a struggle, not this time always without a certain amount of friction, to secure the entry of these now educated women to avocations and professions previously monopolised by the men who had alone been trained to fill them. This second stage is now largely completed, and at the present time there are very few vocations and professions in civilised lands, even in so conservative and slowly moving a land as England, which women are not entitled to exercise equally with men. Concomitantly with this movement, however,—and beginning indeed, very much earlier, and altogether apart from any conscious “movement” at all,—there was a tendency to change the laws in a direction more favourable to women and their personal rights, especially as regards marriage and property. These legal reforms were effected by Parliaments of men, elected exclusively by men, and for the most part they were effected without any very strong pressure from women. It had, however, long been claimed that women themselves ought to have some part in making the laws by which they are governed, and at this stage, towards the middle of the last century, the demand for women’s parliamentary suffrage began to be urgently raised. Here, however, the difficulties naturally proved very much greater than they were in the introduction of a higher level of education for women, or even in the opening up to them of hitherto monopolised occupations.
