Why Does the Illiterate Man Vote and Not the Educated Woman?

Here is a subject “in the air,” as they say in English. The phrase fits it, first, because it has been so for some time, since it formed one of the subjects of a parliamentary session whose members passed it by without a glance, while some newspapers and some circles of conversation took it up with a little comment and much coolness; then the curtain fell and it flew off into the air.

When the members of the Chamber rejected the proposal on the ground that it was premature and that woman among us is not fit to vote at the present time, not one of them thought — in all fairness — to examine whether all men among us are more qualified to vote than women. And if women have been denied this right on account of the spread of ignorance and illiteracy among them, is it not just that illiterate men be denied this right as well, and that voting be confined to the educated alone, men and women alike?

The subject of woman and her emancipation is almost a settled matter in the advanced Western circles; rarely do you come upon a subject in their magazines that takes up such a question as “Was woman created for the home?” or this other: “Is it permissible for a woman to work outside the home?” or “Does woman have the right to vote?”

And rarely do you find a Western magazine of general culture that sets apart among its sections a section for woman, because it leaves that to the women's magazines and because its studies treat woman and man alike in every branch of culture and work. The international magazine “Time,” for example, whose contents take up all the faces of modern life — politics, education, religion, science, art, cinema, sports, books — gives woman no special page; indeed its talk of famous women is no less abundant or important than what it writes of famous men, and the pictures of prominent women in it are no fewer in number than the pictures of men.

Some time ago one of the American magazines conducted a poll among married men, asking them, among other things: “Do you approve of the wife's working outside the home?” — and 90% of them answered: No. Yet despite this negative stand on the man's part, the number of married women working outside the home keeps growing day after day. The Western woman fills every minute of her time with some work; housework occupies her, since servants are few and their wages high in the Western lands; but as soon as she is done with it and finds before her a measure of leisure, she hastens out of the house to take up some work, for pay or as a volunteer, out of her belief in the necessity of her mental and cultural growth.

The progress of the modern woman moves with an astonishing speed to which the figures testify. The women of England struggled seventy-four years to obtain the right to vote (1846–1919), and the women of America struggled about a hundred years until they obtained it in 1920. In 1915 women's suffrage was confined to England, New Zealand, and Australia. But in the latest period, between 1915 and 1938 — that is, in less than twenty years — women's suffrage came to include twenty-five states, to which were added, after 1938, France and the two states of India and Pakistan.

And if our women recall what the strugglers among the leaders of the women's movement in Europe endured in the last century — man's persecution, his cruelty, and his mockery — the troubles they themselves meet from the partisans of reaction among us will seem light. An English researcher spoke on this subject,

describing woman's struggle in that era. She said: Women would stage violent, clamorous demonstrations in the streets, demanding their rights; they would burn mailboxes and smash shop windows; and when the government forbade them to demonstrate in the streets and to make speeches in “Hyde Park,” they took to the rivers instead of the streets and made pulpits of boats, and they invented means of publicity that would astonish the masters of publicity in our present age. Their opponents directed at them the worst kinds of criticism and mockery, and they met it with open hearts. When they demanded equality in civil employment — employment in the police departments, for example — some newspapers would print pictures of them in comical police uniforms, fleeing from the faces of thieves and lawbreakers, tripping over their skirts in sheer fright. And that did not stop them from pursuing their demands until they obtained them in full and were employed in the police departments as in the other departments of government, where they showed a competence the newspapers noted with praise.

This success that woman has achieved in obtaining her demands shows us that people are not so stone-minded as we suppose, and that old ideas, however long their hold on men's minds, must in the end wither and yield their place to new ideas.

But while we await this desired development, it is incumbent on us to redouble the efforts that bring us nearer the goal; and to this end I propose the founding of a women's organization made up of college women and graduates of the secondary institutes — and their number among us is not small — an organization of a new kind, whose members are marked by the spirit of emancipation, of renewal, and of orderly work, and who believe in equality of rights and of treatment between the two sexes. The purpose of this organization would be work for woman only. Thus it would be safe from collision with the other charitable women's associations of manifold aims. This organization would strive to carry out a program concerning woman, containing the following:

First — Amending the civil law concerning woman, including the laws of inheritance, guardianship, maintenance, marriage, divorce, and testimony, and what pertains to them. The amendment of this law is, in the view of thinkers, of greater importance than the winning of political rights — provided the latter not be neglected, but continue to be pursued.

Second — Making girls' schools equal to boys' schools in number, in the villages as in the cities, and establishing a number of vocational schools for girls.

Third — Abolishing the institutions that degrade woman, such as the houses of licensed prostitution, in which trafficking in women is permitted in a deplorable fashion, and in which woman sinks to a level beneath the level of the beast.

Its program would also include positive work, such as founding a women's club in the capital in solidarity with the other women's associations, and organizing scientific discussions that seek to solve some of the women's problems relating to work, housing, and family relations.

Finally: present circumstances press upon the educated woman to hasten to band together, for her culture will avail her nothing if she does not dare to storm what her predecessors retreated from, or if she proves incapable of the organized collective work for which we see her better prepared than any other.