Women’s Suffrage Movement, Part 2

This series has three easy 5 minute installments. This first installment: Why Women Suffrage Now.

Introduction
This the second part on the Women’s Suffrage Movement prior to World War I.

The selections are from:

• his article in Hearst’s Magazine by David Lloyd-George published in August, 1913.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbert_Hubbard by Elbert Hubbard published in August, 1912.

For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

There’s 2 installments by David Lloyd-George and 1 installments by Elbert Hubbard.

We begin with David Lloyd-George (1863-1945). He was the great liberal leader and Prime Minister of Great Britain during World War I.

Time: Before 1914

I have long been a convinced advocate of woman suffrage and am now firmer than ever in supporting it. It seems to me a necessary and desirable consequence of the vast extension of the functions of Government which the past century and a half has witnessed. The state, nowadays, enters the homes of the people and insists on having a voice in questions that individual men and women, acting together, taking counsel together, used to settle for themselves in their own way. Education and the training and feeding of children, the housing and sanitation problems, provision against old age and sickness, the prevention of disease — all these are questions that formerly were dealt with, of course, in a very isolated and inadequate way, by cooperation and discussion between the heads of each household. What reason is there why the same cooperation should not continue now that these matters have been raised to the sphere of legislative enactments and official administration?

Laws to-day affect the interests of women just as deeply as they do the interests of men. Some laws — many laws — affect them more gravely and intimately; and I do not believe you can trust the welfare of a class or a sex entirely to another class or sex. It is not that their interests are not identical, but that their point of view is different. Take the housing problem. A working man leaves home in the morning within half an hour after he wakes. He is not there all day. He turns up in the evening and does not always remain there. If the house is a poor, uncomfortable, dismal one, he very often seeks consolation in the glare and warmth of the nearest public-house, but he takes very good care that the wife shall not do as he does. She has got to stay at home all day, however wretched her surroundings. Who can say that her experience, her point of view, is not much better worth consulting than her husband’s on the housing problem? Up to the present the only and the whole share of women in the housing question has been suffering. Slums are often the punishment of the man. They are almost always the martyrdom of the woman. Give women the vote, give them an effective part in the framing and administration of the laws which touch not merely their own lives but the lives of their children, and they will soon, I believe, cleanse the land of these foul dens.

All sorts of women’s interests were affected by the National Insurance Act, and all sorts of questions sprang up in connection with it on which women alone could speak with real authority. But, being voteless, there was no way in which their views could be authoritatively set forth. Four million women workers and seven million married women have come under the operation of the Act, yet not one of them was given the opportunity of making their opinions known and felt through a representative in the House of Commons. It was the experience of every friendly society official I consulted that had it not been for the women and their splendid self-sacrifice, the subscriptions of the men would have lapsed long ago. Yet these women who had thus kept the societies going were not considered worth consulting as to their status under the Act. The House of Commons itself insisted on there being at least one woman Commissioner. But if a woman is fit to be a Commissioner — a very heavy and difficult position involving enormous responsibilities and demanding great skill and judgment and experience — how can she be said to be unfit to have a vote?

What is the meaning of democracy? It is that the citizens who are expected to obey the law are those who make the law. But that is not true of Great Britain. At least half the adult citizens whose lives are deeply affected by every law that is carried on the statute-books have absolutely no voice in making that law. They have no more influence in the matter than the horses that drag their lords and masters to the polling-booth.

The drunken loafer who has not earned a living for years is consulted by the Constitution on questions like the training and upbringing of children, the national settlement of religion in Wales and elsewhere, and as to the best method of dealing with the licensing problem. But the wife whose industry keeps him and his household from beggary, who pays the rent and taxes which constitute him a voter, who is therefore really responsible for his qualification to vote, is not taken into account in the slightest degree. I came in contact not long ago with a great girls’ school in the south of England. It was founded by women, and it is administered by women. It is one of the most marvelous organizations in the whole country, and yet, when we had, in the year 1906, to give a national verdict on the question of education, the man who split the firewood in that school was asked for his opinion about it, while those ladies were deemed to be absolutely unfit to pass any judgment on it at all. That is a preposterous and barbarous anachronism, and so long as it lasts our democracy is one-sided and incomplete. But it will not last long. No franchise bill can ever again be brought forward in this country without raising the whole problem of whether you are going to exclude more than half the citizens of the land. Women have entered pretty nearly every sphere of commerce and industry and professional activity and public employment; and there never was a time when the nation stood more in need of the special experience, instincts, and sympathy of womanhood in the management of its affairs. When women get the vote the horizon of the home will be both brightened and expanded, and their influence on moral and social and educational questions, especially on the temperance question, and possibly on the peace of nations, will be constant and humanizing.

Elbert Hubbard begins here.

More information here and here and below.

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