Part 23 (2/2)
Sixteen years later, 1883, the attempt was again made in the Lower House to grant women the suffrage. A motion to that effect was defeated by a majority of 16. A further attempt in 1884 was defeated in a fuller House by more than 136 votes. But the minority did not evacuate the field. In 1886 it succeeded in carrying to a second reading a motion to grant women the suffrage; but the dissolution of Parliament prevented a final vote being taken. Again, on April 27, 1892, the Lower House defeated with 175 votes against 152, the second reading of a motion on the subject presented by Sir A. Rollit, and which provided as follows:
”Every woman who in Great Britain is registered or ent.i.tled to be registered as an elector for a Town Council or County Council or who in Ireland is a rate payer ent.i.tled to vote in the election of Guardians of the Poor, shall be ent.i.tled to be registered as a Parliamentary elector, and when registered, to vote at any Parliamentary election for the county, borough, or division wherein the qualifying property is situate.”
On November 29, 1888, Lord Salisbury held a speech in Edinburgh, in the course of which he said: ”I earnestly hope that the day is not far distant when women also will bear their share in voting for members in the political world and in the determining the policy of the country.”
And Alfred Russell Wallace, celebrated as a naturalist and follower of Darwin, expressed himself upon the same question this wise: ”When men and women shall have freedom to follow their best impulses, when both shall receive the best possible education, when no false restraints shall be imposed upon any human being by the reason of the accident of s.e.x, and when public opinion shall be regulated by the wisest and best and shall be systematically impressed upon youth, then shall we find that a system of human selection will arise that is bound to have a reformed humanity for its result. So long as woman is compelled to regard marriage as a means by which to escape poverty and avoid neglect, she is and remains at a disadvantage with man. Hence, the first step in the emanc.i.p.ation of woman is the removal of all restraints that prevent her from competing with man on all the fields of industry and in all pursuits. But we must go further, and allow woman the exercise of her _political rights_. Many of the restraints, under which woman has suffered until now, would have been spared to her, had she had direct representation in Parliament.”
In most sections of England, married women have the same political rights as men in the elections for the School Boards and Guardians of the Poor, and in many places are themselves qualified for election. At the county elections, _unmarried_ women have the right to vote under the same restrictions as men, but are not themselves qualified for election.
Likewise did all independent tax-paying women obtain the right to vote by the Reform Act of 1869, but are not qualified for election. _Married women_ are in virtue of a court decision, rendered in 1872, excluded from the suffrage, because _in English law woman loses her independence by marriage_--a decided encouragement for women to keep away from the legal formality of legitimate marriage. Seeing that also in other respects unmarried or divorced women in England and Scotland are clothed with rights denied to married women, the temptation is not slight for women to renounce legitimate unions. It is not exactly the part of wisdom for the male representatives of bourgeois society to degrade bourgeois marriage into a sort of slave status for woman.[156]
In Austria, women who are landed proprietors, or conduct a business, to which the suffrage is attached, have the right to exercise the privilege _by attorney_. This holds both for local and Reichstag elections. If the woman is proprietor of a mercantile or industrial establishment, which gives the right to vote for the Chamber of Commerce, her franchise must be exercised by a business manager. In France, on the contrary, a woman who conducts a business, has a right to vote at the election of members for the tribunals of commerce, but she cannot herself be elected.
According to the law of 1891 of the old Prussian provinces, women have the suffrage, if the landed property that belongs to them conveys the right to vote, nevertheless they must exercise the privilege through a male representative, neither are they eligible themselves. Likewise according to the laws of Hanover, Brunswick, Schleswig-Holstein, Sachsen-Weimar, Hamburg and Luebeck. In Saxony, the law allows women the suffrage if they are landed proprietors and are _unmarried_. If married, the woman's vote goes to her husband. In all these cases, accordingly, the right of suffrage does not attach to persons but to property--quite a light upon existing political and legal morality: Man, thou art zero if moneyless or propertyless; knowledge, intellect are secondary matters. Property decides.
We see that the principle of denying woman the suffrage on the theory of her not being ”of age” is broken through in fact; and yet objection is raised to granting her the right in full. It is said that to grant woman the suffrage is dangerous because she yields easily to religious prejudices, and is conservative. She is both only because she is ignorant. Let her be educated and taught where her interests lie. For the rest, the influence of religion on elections is exaggerated.
Ultramontane agitation has. .h.i.therto been so successful in Germany only because it knew how to join _social with religious interests_. The ultramontane chaplains long vied with the Socialists in uncovering the social foulness. Hence their influence with the ma.s.ses. With the close of the Kulturkampf, the influence of the Catholic clergymen upon the ma.s.ses waned. The clergy is forced to discontinue its opposition to the Government; simultaneously therewith, the rising cla.s.s struggle compels it to consider the Catholic capitalist cla.s.s and Catholic n.o.bility; it will, accordingly, be compelled to observe greater caution on the social field. Thus the clergy will forfeit its influence with the workingmen, especially at such critical junctures when considerations for the Government and the ruling cla.s.ses drive it to approve of, or tolerate actions and laws directed against the interests of the working cla.s.s.
The same causes will, in the end, have their influence upon woman. When at public meetings, through newspapers and from personal observation she will have learned where her own interest lies, woman will emanc.i.p.ate herself from the clergy, the same as man has done. The fiercest opponent of female suffrage is the clergy, and it knows the reason why. Its rule and its domains are endangered.
That the movement for the political rights of woman has not been promptly crowned with greater success is no reason to withhold the ballot from her. What would the workingmen say if the Liberals proposed abolis.h.i.+ng manhood suffrage--and the same is very inconvenient to them--on the ground that it benefits the Socialists in particular? A good law does not become bad by reason of him who wields it not yet having learned its right use.
Naturally, the right to be elected should go together with the right to elect. ”A woman in the tribune of the Reichstag, that would be a spectacle!” we hear people exclaim. Our generation has grown accustomed to the sight of women in the speaker's tribune at their conventions and meetings; in the United States, also in the pulpit and the jury box--why not, then, also in the tribune of the Reichstag? The first woman elected to the Reichstag, would surely know how to impose respect. When the first workingmen entered the Reichstag it was also believed they could be laughed down, and it was claimed that the working cla.s.s would soon realize the foolishness it had committed in electing such people. Its representatives, however, knew how to make themselves quickly respected; the fear to-day is lest there be too many of them. Frivolous witlings put in: ”Just imagine a pregnant woman in the tribune of the Reichstag; how utterly unesthetic!” The identical gentlemen find it, however, quite in order that pregnant women work at the most unesthetic trades, at trades in which female dignity, health and decency are undermined. In the eyes of a Socialist, that man is a wretch who can crack jokes over a woman with child. The mere thought that his own mother once looked like that before she brought him into the world, should cause his cheeks to burn with shame; the thought that he, rude jester, expects from a similar condition on the part of his wife the fulfillment of his dearest wishes should cause him, furthermore, to hold his tongue in shame.
_A woman who gives birth to children renders, at least, the same service to the commonwealth as the man who defends his country and his hearth with his life against a foe in search of conquests._ Moreover, the life of a woman trembles in the scales at child-birth. All our mothers have looked death in the face at our births, and many succ.u.mbed. _The number of women who die as a result of child-birth, or who as a consequence pine away in sickness, is greater than that of the men who fall on the field of battle, or are wounded._ In Prussia, between 1816-1876, not less than 321,791 women fell a prey to child-birth fever--a yearly average of 5,363. This is by far a larger figure than that of the Prussians, who, during the same period, were killed in war or died of their wounds. Nor must, at the contemplation of this enormous number of women who died of child-birth fever, the still larger number of those be lost sight of, who, as a consequence of child-birth, are permanently crippled in health, and die prematurely.[157] These are additional reasons for woman's equal rights with man--reasons to be held up especially to those, who play man's duty to defend the Fatherland as a decisive circ.u.mstance, ent.i.tling them to superior consideration to women. For the rest, in virtue of our military inst.i.tutions, most men do not even fill this duty: to the majority of them it exists upon paper only.
All these superficial objections to the public activity of woman would be unimaginable were the relations of the two s.e.xes a natural one, and were there not an antagonism, artificially raised side by side with the relation of master and servant between the two. From early youth the two are separated in social intercourse and education. Above all, it is the antagonism, for which Christianity is responsible, that keeps the s.e.xes steadily apart and the one in ignorance about the other, and that hinders free social intercourse, mutual confidence, a mutual supplementing of traits of character.
One of the first and most important tasks of a rationally organized society must be to end this unhallowed split, and to reinstate Nature in its rights. The violence done to Nature starts at school: First, the separation of the s.e.xes; next, mistaken, or no instruction whatever, in matters that concern the human being as a s.e.xual ent.i.ty. True enough, natural history is taught in every tolerably good school. The child learns that birds lay eggs and hatch them out: he also learns when the mating season begins: that males and females are needed: that both jointly a.s.sume the building of the nests, the hatching and the care of the young. He also learns that mammals bring forth live young: he learns about the rutting season and about the fights of the males for the females during the same: he learns the usual number of young, perhaps also the period of pregnancy. But on the subject of the origin and development of his own stock he remains in the dark; that is veiled in mystery. When, thereupon, the child seeks to satisfy his natural curiosity with questions addressed to his parents, to his mother in particular--he seldom ventures with them to his teacher--he is saddled with the silliest stories that cannot satisfy him, and that are all the more injurious when he some day does ascertain the truth. There are probably few children who have not made the discovery by the twelfth year of their age. In all small towns, in the country especially, children observe from earliest years the mating of birds, the copulation of domestic animals; they see this in closest proximity, in the yard, on the street, and when the cattle are turned loose. They see that the conditions under which the heat of the cattle is gratified, as well as the act of birth of the several domestic animals are made the subject of serious, thorough and undisguised discussion on the part of their parents, elder brothers and servants. All that awakens doubts in the child's mind on the accounts given him of his own entry into life.
Finally the day of knowledge does come; but it comes in a way other than it would have come under a natural and rational education. The secret that the child discovers leads to estrangement between child and parents, particularly between child and mother. The reverse is obtained of that which was aimed at in folly and shortsightedness. He who recalls his own youth and that of his young companions knows what the results frequently are.
An American woman says, among other things in a work written by her, that wis.h.i.+ng to answer the repeated questions of her eight-year-old son on his origin, and unwilling to saddle him with nursery tales, she disclosed the truth to him. The child listened to her with great attention, and, from the day that he learned what cares and pains he had caused his mother, he clung to her with a tenderness and reverence not noticed in him before, and showed the same reverence toward other women also.[158] The auth.o.r.ess proceeds from the correct premises that only by means of a natural education can any real improvement--more respect and self-control on the part of the male toward the female s.e.x--be expected.
He who reasons free from prejudice will arrive at no other conclusion.
Whatever be the point of departure in the _critique_ of our social conditions, the conclusion is ever the same--their _radical transformation_; thereby a radical transformation in the position of the s.e.xes is inevitable. Woman, in order to arrive all the quicker at the goal, must look for allies whom, in the very nature of things, the movement of the working cla.s.s steers in her direction. Since long has the cla.s.s-conscious proletariat begun the storming of the fortress, the Cla.s.s-State, which also upholds the present domination of one s.e.x by the other. That fortress must be surrounded on all sides with trenches, and a.s.sailed to the point of surrender with artillery of all calibre. The besieging army finds its officers and munitions on all sides. Social and natural science, jointly with historical research, pedagogy, hygiene and statistics are advancing from all directions, and furnish ammunition and weapons to the movement. Nor does philosophy lag behind. In Mainlaender's ”The Philosophy of Redemption,”[159] it announces the near-at-hand realization of the ”Ideal State.”
The ultimate conquest of the Cla.s.s-State and its transformation is rendered all the easier to us through the divisions in the ranks of its defenders, who, despite the oneness of their interests against the common enemy, are perpetually at war with one another in the strife for plunder. Further aid comes to us from the daily-growing mutiny in the ranks of the enemies, whose forces to a great extent are bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh--elements that, out of misunderstanding and misled, have hitherto fought against us and thus against themselves, but are gradually becoming clearsighted, and pa.s.s over to us. Finally we are aided by the desertion of the honorable elements from the ranks of the hitherto hostile men of thought, who have perceived the truth, and whose higher knowledge spurs them to leap their low cla.s.s interests, and, following their ideal aspirations after justice, join the ma.s.ses that are thirsting for freedom.
Many do not yet realize the stage of dissolution that State and Society are in. Hence, and although the dark blotches have been frequently pointed out in the preceding chapters, a separate treatment of the subject is requisite.
FOOTNOTES:
[151] Louis Bridel, ”La Puissance Maritale,” Lausanne, 1879.
[152] In the presentation of these civil rights we have merely followed Louis Bridel's work: ”Le Droit des Femmes et le Marriage,” Paris, 1893.
[153] How correct this view is transpires also from the comedy of Aristophanes: ”The Popular a.s.sembly of Women.” In that comedy, Aristophanes depicts how the Athenian government had reached the point when everything was going at sixes and sevens. The Prytaneum put the question to the popular a.s.sembly of the Athenian citizens: ”How is the State to be saved?” Thereupon a woman, disguised as a man, made the proposition to entrust the helm of State to the women, and the proposition was accepted without opposition ”because it was the only thing that had never before happened in Athens.” The women seized the helm, and forthwith inst.i.tuted _communism_. Of course, Aristophanes turns this condition into ridicule, but the significant point in the play is that, the moment the women had a decisive word in public affairs, they inst.i.tuted communism as the only rational political and social condition from the standpoint of their own s.e.x. Aristophanes little dreamed how he hit the truth while meaning to joke.
[154] The above two paragraphs are left as they appear in the text, although they seem to be subject to corrections.
A diligent search in the libraries of this city for the original of the above ”Address to the Parliaments of the World,” stated to have been issued by the Legislature of Wyoming in 1894, having proved vain, the Secretary of the State of Wyoming was written to. His answer was:
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