On Women Who Vote

of what he said was very simple. But what interests him now is that the sequel of his deplorable obstructionism ought to be very simple indeed. Despite his desperate conspiracy with charwomen and mothers and such riff-raff, women did obtain the Vote, and have now had it for very much more than a decade. If it was valuable enough to be worth the frantic efforts of the years during which it was being sought, we may well suppose that it has been equally valuable during the long stretch of years after it was obtained. The whole point of the position of the Suffragists and the Women's Freedom League was that the electoral franchise was the determining political power, without which woman was powerless, and with which woman would be powerful. Therefore, since she has now got that power, we may presume that it is all over but the shouting; the shouting of happy and victorious Amazons, now ruling the world by right. So that is all as it should be. All is gas and gaiters, as the reporter said after the meeting of Broad Church Bishops to express sympathy with the Oxford Group Movement. All's well that ends well, as the hostess remarked when the brilliant raconteur became a Trappist monk. "All clear," as the railway porter shouted after reading a book by Miss Gertrude Stein. Woman has obtained the power to rule; and she is ruling.

But what does this mean, and what strange words are these? "... an increasing number of women are having a fierce struggle for economic independence and are becoming more and more embittered because of irritating discrimination against women workers.,.." But how can it be that more and more women are more and more embittered, and are yet impotent to remove the cause of their bitterness? Why do they not use all their lovely Votes and sweep it away? How can a mere leader-writer on the News Chronicle, a member of the miserable minority of males, stand in Miss Underwood's path in any particular? Why does she not lift her terrible Vote and fell him to the ground? There is evidently something very wrong in the situation; and I for one begin to wonder, in my perverse way, whether my charwoman and my mother may not have had a good deal of feminine intuition about the facts. I never said that the charwoman had no real grievances. I certainly never said that working women were not under various forms of economic oppression. On the contrary, I incessantly asserted that all the working people were under an economic oppression, and I asserted it in days when it was a far less fashionable doctrine than it is now. I did not think, and I did not think that they thought, that the economic evil could be cured by giving a franchise as a franchise to a female as a female.

A superficial reading o£ Miss Underwood's dark and mysterious complaints might easily mislead anyone into fancying that I was right.

To speak plainly, can the Suffragist lady now tell me exactly how she uses the Suffrage, either (i) to avoid being sweated by an employer; or (2) to avoid being excluded by a Trade Union? Whatever be the rights or wrongs of sex discrimination in economic organizations, whether capitalist or proletarian, exactly how does anybody alter the pressure of economic organizations today by means of the Parliamentary Vote? Does one do it by heckling one isolated local M.P., who is probably a perfectly helpless private Member, and badgering him into making promises which his own party will not allow him to keep? Does one think it sufficient to vote for an official Labour Party, probably led by Socialists as fiery and militant and swift in action as Mr. Ramsay MacDonald? Or must one abandon them in despair and vote for the Communists? Yet it is not necessary to agree with the Communists, in order to have either Miss Underwood's concern for sex equality or my own concern for greater economic equality. In any case, the vote has done precious little to help either of us towards any sort of economic equality. I think it was General Flora Drummond, the most militaristic of militants, who cried aloud in indignation because a great Coal Strike or Railway Strike broke out in the industrial field, in complete disregard of the success o£ Female Suffrage in the political field. She actually called it, I think, an insult to the Parliamentary power which she was wearing so proudly, like one of her military medals. In plain fact, she had only just discovered, in the example of the Strike, that the Vote she had won was as futile as the charwoman or I could have told her it was. In other words, the charwoman was right; and I was right about the charwoman.

I am not likely to delude myself with any fantastic hope that Miss Underwood would ever agree that the charwoman was right, and still less that I was right; but I might be tempted to add some further comment, for the benefit of anybody who can bring himself to believe that I might have been right then, or that I might possibly be right now. I might be disposed to point out that even the present grievance of Miss Underwood, though more practical and realistic than the vague romance of the Vote, is vitiated by being founded on certain false assumptions. It is very tenable that women and men should receive the same treatment when they are both in the same sense proletarians in the industrial market. But it is not self-evident that they are both equally fitted to be proletarians in the industrial market. And, above all, it is not self-evident that they ought either of them to be proletarians in the industrial market at all. Miss Underwood and her friends always talk as if being a wage-slave in the corrupt and decaying capitalist system were a sort of beatific benefit, first bestowed on men in a spirit of favouritism, and then withheld from women in a spirit of jealousy or repression. Even the happy and radiant condition of trade and commerce today cannot convince me that this view is to be accepted as a first principle.

In other words, there is just one little hitch between us: that what she calls economic independence I call economic dependence. The condition of dependence is involved in the condition of employment; especially under the extreme modern menace of unemployment. It is not an insult especially levelled at women; it is an insecurity and injustice belonging to the whole recent phase of the government of men. To found a saner society, in which men and women work on their own property and not only on the property of the rich, is a very steep and challenging sort of project. But I have never repented of having said that more Votes would do little to bring it about; nor should I think that the Suffragists had come any nearer to bringing it about, even if they could have turned all wives and mothers into the well-paid servants of a big Trust,

IX On the Fallacy of Eugenics

I SHALL go down to my neglected pauper's grave continuing to praise, honour, and glorify the name of Mr. H. G. Wells; even if he is by that time himself in the great Cosmic Crematorium and Pagan Pantheon, where will stand the sacred urns of the founders of the New State. And this will not be merely for the obvious reasons. It is not only, though it is very largely, because he filled my youth with the fairy-tales of science, which are so much more delightful when you have really discovered that they are faiiy-tales. It will not be only because he has interpreted the mind of the Englishman who, even by the confession of the modern newspapers, has been turned by modern conditions into what is called a Little Man. Alas, it is indeed his manhood that has become little. He is not allowed to have anything else on a small scale, except himself. He is not now allowed to be a small shopkeeper, or a small farmer, or a small craftsman; so, naturally, he has become a small man. But what H. G. Wells did bring out, in burning colours of reality, is the fact that even that small man can also be great. For though the