How Woman Won Her Freedom
Western woman did not gain her rights by submitting petitions to the chambers of deputies alone. Every shade of freedom has its price and its particular tax.
At this historic juncture of our life, as we demand these rights, it behooves us to cast a general glance over the history of the women's renaissance in the West, that we may perhaps find in it a lesson and a guide.
The European woman did not gain her rights merely in consequence of insistent petitions raised to the chambers of deputies; her victory was the fruit of a continuous struggle over half a century, in which she shouldered the gravest of responsibilities and tasks, and thereby won the sympathy of enlightened public opinion. The first book written on the subject of the emancipation of woman was composed by the English writer "Mary Wollstonecraft" in 1792; the first legislative decree granting woman a share of her civil rights in Europe was drawn up in 1838; and the first women's congress to discuss the emancipation of woman openly and comprehensively — the first of a number of successful congresses in her defense — was held by the Society of "Friends" in New York City in 1882. Before tracing the lines along which the women's renaissance moved, we would do well to feel out the intellectual climate in which it arose.
What were the chief causes that impelled woman toward emancipation?
The idea of emancipation sprang from the philosophy of self-government, the philosophy that achieved its first practical victory in the French Revolution. The Revolution was followed by what is called in England the constitutional movement, and this movement supported the demands of the citizen, man or woman, under the shelter of personal liberty. Revolutionary literature in France and England nourished the ideas of emancipation and directed them toward new horizons, in which woman's share was great.
If we return to the pages of history, we find that governments were constituted on the basis of military force even after the French Revolution: the chief thing demanded of those in authority was bodily capacity. The ruler, or the representative of the nation, was that person whose muscles enabled him to strike down when striking had its justification. The idea of physical leadership remained dominant in Europe for a long age, but the evolution of political thought made the task of the men of power the ordering of life and the conduct of society, and woman saw that she could contribute in this field.
And when government became a system embracing family and society, and the most important qualities of the ruler became moral and intellectual, the time had come for woman to have a voice in government.
The general right to vote was at first granted only to the man who owned land. Then matters developed, and voting became the right of everyone with a public interest, and the scope of the franchise kept widening until 1918, when it embraced every male citizen who had reached the age of twenty-one. The first decree was issued in England and the other European countries in 1832, the second in 1867, and the third in 1884 — this one granted certain elementary rights to employers — and then the last, final decree in 1918. Woman's entry into the field of politics resulted in the highest degree from her desire to share in the ordering of social life.
This desire for emancipation grew stronger after the failure of the many attempts made by man alone to preserve peace in Europe. Woman by her nature hates war and fears it; she alone knows what she suffers that her nursing infants may grow and come of age — how, then, can she watch them led like sheep to the battles and sacrificed on the altar of political greed?
In the nineteenth century woman worked to keep pace with man in thought and culture, and among the upper class women's associations were formed, aiming to spread culture and art among the women. And while one lady in America was riding in her carriage to her friend's house to attend one of these meetings, she suddenly took notice of the filth of the streets she was passing through and of the state of sanitation in a quarter inhabited by a lowly working class. She entered her friend's house then and said to the assembled ladies: What would you say if we left off talking about Dante and the Divine Comedy and talked about the cleanliness of the city? The idea was welcomed, and this cultural gathering turned into a society concerned with purely social affairs. Through this society and others like it, woman struggled to fight disease and epidemics, destitution and want, as she struggled to better the life of the worker, to clean the streets, to spread juvenile courts, and to build hospitals, reformatories, and modern schools where the child might live in an atmosphere of bodily and moral cleanliness. Yes — the women's social movement known as the women's club movement, which spread through the civilized countries, is the fruit of woman's awakening to her social duty in a world that acknowledges that politics is nothing but service to society.