The Great Events by Famous Historians

Nevertheless, in spite of this lack of perception, women all over the world are claiming and receiving a place in representative government because they insist that they will not cease to perform their traditional duties, simply because these duties have been taken over by existing governments.

The contemporaneous "Votes for Women" movement is often amorphous and sporadic, but always spontaneous. It not only appears simultaneously in various countries, but manifests itself in widely separated groups in the same country; in every city it embraces the "smart set" and the hard-driven working women; sometimes it is sectarian and dogmatic, at others philosophic and grandiloquent, but it is always vital and constantly becoming more widespread.

In certain aspects it differs from former efforts to extend the franchise. We recall that the final entrance of the middle class into government was characterized by two dramatic revolutions, one in America and one in France, neither of them without bloodshed, and that although the final efforts of the working men were more peaceful, even in restrained England the Chartists burned hayricks and destroyed town property. This world-wide entrance into government on the part of women is happily a bloodless one. Although some glass has been broken in England it is noteworthy that the movement as a whole has been without even a semblance of violence. The creed of the movement, however, is similar to that promulgated by the doctrinaires of the eighteenth century: that if increasing the size of the governing body automatically increases the variety and significance of government, then only when all the people become the governing class can the collective resources and organizations of the community be consistently utilized for the common weal.

DAVID LLOYD-GEORGE

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.