Representation of the People

From the Illustrated London News, 26th January 1918.

LADIES' PAGE.

It has taken just half a century of effort to get sex removed from the disqualifications for citizenship.  Fifty completed years precisely have passed since John Stuart Mill first challenged a vote of the House of Commons on the equal right of women to the franchise.  From that date to the present, women have carried on an unceasing propaganda in favour of the equality of their sex in representation as well as in taxpaying and obedience to the laws made by Parliament.  In the meantime, many things bearing on the subject have happened.  The Married Women's Property Act was an important step.  Several of the States of the American Union have fully enfranchised their female citizens, beginning with Wyoming in 1870, and now including wealthy and leading States such as Colorado and California; and in every case the change has proved able to gain the approval of the leading men and of the people as a whole.  Then our own Australasian colonies followed suit, beginning with New Zealand in 1894, and culminating in the Confederation of Australia in 1906, and just recently a part of Canada.  The admission of women to higher education, and the brilliant success many of them gained in abstruse subjects, such as mathematics, is another notable fact that has helped in changing opinion.  But finally, of course, the part taken by women in this terrible war is the immediate reason for the general agreement now expressed that we ought to be recognised as citizens sharing in the corporate life of the nation.  As the Archbishop of Canterbury said, in the House of Lords debate, the vote is not being given as a reward for the work done by women—for it is not a privilege so much as a trust to fulfil—but as a recognition of the ability and devotion that they have shown and that have proved them to be a valuable portion of the nation's forces.

The Lord Chancellor, opposing the enfranchisement, suggested that women voters will be more ready than men to make “an inconclusive and hasty peace, throwing away all for which we had fought.”  As George Eliot said wittily, “Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error,” and any assumptions as to what women will do with the vote are necessarily of that order.  But, as the old herbalists believed that the bane and the antidote always grew near one another, the next page of the Times to that recording Lord Loreburn's prophecy bore its contradiction, in the record from Canada as to the recent election there in which the one and only question was conscription— “the appeal for reinforcements for the Canadian army.”  We are told by the impartial Times correspondent that “possibly 400,000 women voted, of whom at least 70 per cent. cast their ballot for the Union candidates.  The appeal to support the men in the trenches was very influential with the women.  They were better organised than the men voters, and their speakers were very effective.”  Nor did it, in fact, need this last-hour proof that women are willing to give the sacrifices necessary in a righteous and defensive war, for every one of the splendid New Zealand boys whom we have seen in our midst was brought up by a voting mother, and, when the need of the Empire arose, those mothers not only voted their money, but gave their darling sons to the war in a manner that alone should have defended women from Lord Loreburn's imputation.  New Zealand was the first of our Colonies, before the war, to vote the cost of a battle-ship to the Imperial Navy, and in the war her contributions have been exceptional.

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Of course, the vote is now given on different terms from those on which we have always asked for it. Our claim has always been “Votes for women on the same qualification as they are given to men.”  I still believe that this would have been a much better basis.  It would have enfranchised all women paying taxes on their own account, who would have been mainly single or widowed, but including some married women in business or owning property; but the whole number would have been far less than will come in by the present arrangement.  The absurd restriction of women's votes to persons over thirty years of age would also not have had to be devised, as the only scheme for somewhat lessening the flood of new and inexperienced electors.  However, the working men objected to the preponderance of propertied and well-educated women amongst those who would have been enfranchised “on the same terms as men”; and the present change, illogical as it is, at least removes being of the female sex from the list of disqualifications for voting, where it previously stood with lunacy, crime, pauperism, and childishness. —FILOMENA.

[The Representation of the People Act of 1918 granted the vote to women over the age of 30 who met a property qualification.  The same Act gave the vote to all men over the age of 21. It became law in February 1918.

Until the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1870, and later extensions, married women effectively could not own anything – it belonged to the husband. The acts allowed her first to control any money she earned, and then to keep any property she had before her marriage, and any that she inherited during the marriage.]