Dora B. Montefiore 1909
The following articles in Justice, the weekly organ of the Social Democratic Federation, by Dora Montefiore during 1909, were until March of that year from a section of the paper called “A Woman’s Point of View”, while from March onwards the women’s section was called “Our Women’s Circle”. The advertisements for publications on the Women’s page generally include August Bebel’s Women, Past, Present and Future, 1/-; Montefiore’s pamphlet Some Words to Socialist Women, 1d and, until June 1909, Woman Suffrage by Klara Zetkin also 1d,—all published by Twentieth Century Press. As far as I can see they are every item that she wrote under her name. If by chance I have omitted any I would be delighted to be informed via the Marxist Internet Archive.
The articles are of varying length but many are quite short and there are other contributors, both named and un-named, on the page. Some of the anonymous contributions may be Montefiore. All here are in date order with the date, and page number given. They give a more rounded view of her politics than has appeared hitherto in a variety of publications. She had a consistently socialist and class war point of view though it may well be that in private correspondence among bourgeois feminists “there were those who found her difficult”. Her sharpness and wit, as well as her accounts of a number of public meetings with such ladies are illuminating even if the accounts of her opponents about such meetings may not always be as detailed about her criticisms as one might wish.—Note by transcriber Ted Crawford
Source: Justice, January 9, 1909 p. 5
Section: “A Woman’s Point of View”
Transcription: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
I wanted to call the attention of English Socialist women to what is going on just now among Russian woman; and to point out that the conditions are exactly similar to those which have prevailed among women for some time in England, but that English working women have been lacking in the class-consciousness and clearness of reasoning which is nerving the Russian working women to resist the cajolery of their middle-class sister and is helping them, to stand side by side with their men comrades in the fight—not for crumbs of patronage, and grudging doles of charity, but for full access to the means of life. We have had in our midst for some years an organisation of middle-class women, (The International Council of Women) calling Congresses in various countries to discuss social, economic, and educational questions from the standpoint of privileged women seeking to improve conditions for the workers, in order that these workers may become more efficient wage slaves. This organisation has varied slightly in its outlook and programme in different countries, in accordance with the level of general education and culture among women; and in England, therefore, where the level of education among women is low, and where there is little respect for intellectual attainment, the National Council is an absolutely noxious, body over-ridden by Bishopesses, philanthropic “Great” ladies and “Little” Labour ladies, who would, if they could, abolish barmaids, and refuse State maintenance to the unmarried mother. This international organisation, when, it meets from time to time is not, therefore, an altogether happy family; for the Continental women, being better educated, and free from British puritanism, find it difficult to keep step with the English National Council, its Bishopesses and its Labour ladies. Lately, however, they have been struggling to form a National Council in Russia, where the “Haves” and the “Have nots” stand opposite each other in closer battle array than in other countries, because the great middle class, which helps elsewhere to confuse the issues, and gets blows and kicks from both sides, is there scarcely existent. In vain has the Women’s International Council spread its toils before the organised Social Democratic women of Russia. Madame Miliukoff and others, we are told by the correspondent of an English capitalist paper, “endeavoured to effect a reconciliation,” pointing out that “English women of all parties are uniting to obtain the franchise.” How idyllic that sounds, but how misleading that is, all English Social-Democrats know; but it is just as well, in order to help Russian Socialist women in their class-conscious protest, to state once m ore the truth of what is going on among English women, who are represented as being so united in their struggle for the franchise. To put the matter briefly, the English Conservative, Liberal and Labour women are united in the demand for a limited measure of franchise, which would increase the property vote and place about one and a-half million women on the Parliamentary register, in addition to the seven million men now on. The prominent and representative Labour women who are joining in the this Stuttgart Congress, where the resolution was passed forbidding such bourgeois alliances and undemocratic franchise demands; and they are now, in conjunction with Conservative and Liberal ladies, and in defiance of the above-mentioned resolution, agitating and working for a limited measure of political enfranchisement. The Socialist women of England are the only ones who are agitating for the full franchise for women on the basis of the Stuttgart Congress, and they are certainly not united, as Madame Miliukoff asserts, with the bourgeois women in their limited demand. Further, they welcome the fact that the Russian “women representatives of the working classes are refusing to co-operate with the delegates of the bourgeoisie, the former declaring that they are bound by the decision of the Social Democratic Congress at Stuttgart.” We English Social-Democratic, women marked the same line of cleavage when we helped last July organise, and attended, the Adult Suffrage Conference at the Holborn Town Hall, and joined with Socialist men in passing the resolution which was sent up to the Prime Minister That in view of the fact that two thirds of the adult population of this country is politically unrepresented, this Conference of Socialist and Labour organisations declares that no electoral reform will be satisfactory which does not extend the franchise to every adult man and women, and demands that the Government shall make this the basis of the Democratic Reform Bill foreshadowed by the Prime Minister. If the rank and file of the Labour women had been as class conscious as their Russian sisters they would have joined solidly in our Social Democratic demand; but, unfortunately, the majority of Labour women at the present juncture are no wiser than are the Labour men, and they still think that reform instead of revolution is going to enfranchise the workers economically and politically. As long as a majority of them are of that way of thinking, they are still playing into the hands of the capitalist, and putting off to a more distant date the coming of Socialism.
The protest of Victor Grayson was a symbolic protest, and stood emphatically for the line of cleavage and struggle between the “Haves,” who organise Parliamentary procedure, and the “Have nots,” against whom all the complexity of procedure and rules is directed. “Order, order!” cry Conservatives, Liberals and Labourites. “Can’t you be satisfied when we promise you a whole day’s debate in Parliament, either on the question of Unemployment or on that of Limited Franchise for women?” But the days of being satisfied with one day for an empty debate are gone by. It is no longer only ladies and Labourites who are knocking at the doors of Parliament. The hand of starving, disinherited Demos holds the knocker, and International Social-Democracy encourages the stout-hearted applicants.
In the same account of the Congress where the Russian Socialist women made their protest, I read that in the section dealing with the employment of women in factories the wages of the women range from 12s. to a month, while the rate of infant mortality among the children of female factory hands averaged 60 per cent. I happen also to know that many of the employers and foremen in Russian textile factories are Englishmen who, finding factory laws less stringent in a country where, industrialism is of later development than in England, remove their capital and energies to a country where sweated human labour can yield them a richer return. It is, therefore, more than ever necessary that the working woman in England, should learn solidarity with her working sisters in other lands, and should realise that it is not by alliances and compromises with the women of the master class that the hope of the workers will be realised, but by conscious and practical fellowship with the workers in other lands.
“Socialism is the hope of the workers,” but the hope will never be attained if the workers are turned aside from their purpose by those whose object it is to whittle away the Socialist programme, and unnerve the arm of the proletariat by crying “Peace! Peace!” when there is no peace. Until all English women unite in demanding the political franchise as a human right for every adult man and women, neither Madame Miliukoff, nor any other onlooker has the right to say, “English women of all parties are uniting to obtain the franchise.” The lot of the majority of the women of England and of Russia is life-long poverty, crushing toil when in work, and starvation when out of employment; insanitary dwellings, physical deterioration, joyless childhood, and premature death. Their interest, therefore, in demanding the franchise is an interest entirely opposed to that of the privileged women, who are demanding a limited franchise which, if granted, would shut out more hopelessly than ever the unprivileged masses. The working women of Russia have been true to their class and their class interests, and in so doing have held out to the working women of England the hand of comradeship. Will English working-women grasp the outstretched comradely hand, or will some of them continue to compromise and dally with the organised privileged women, whose interests, under the present system of capitalism, must necessarily be opposed to those of the workers, on whose labour they live? This conscious and loyal decision of the Russian Socialist women to abide by the terms of the Stuttgart Conference should help to stiffen our backs over here in England in our agitation against the Reform measures offered by the Whigs, in which the political emancipation of women is not to be included, though it can be brought in as an amendment by a private member. We Social-Democratic women do not care for this sort of political juggling, which leaves the fate of half the community to pure chance. We are out for Adult Suffrage for every man and every woman; our policy is an international one, and we, as Internationalists, mean to see that it is carried out.
DORA B. MONTEFIORE.
Source: Justice, January 16, 1909 p. 5
Section: “A Woman’s Point of View”
Transcription: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
At the meeting called by the Women’s Freodom League last week at the Queen’s Hall, the speeches of the two Finnish women were entirely for Adult Suffrage. Madame Malmberg is an excellent comrade of ours, and when in England last summer, spoke, under the auspices of the Adult Suffrage Society, one Sunday afternoon in Regent’s Park, and told how Socialist men and women, standing together in a well-organised general strike, had forced the hand of the autocrat Nicholas, and had wrested from him, not only Adult Suffrage, but the abolition of the Upper Chamber of Nobles, and had obtained the right for women to sit in the Diet on equal terms with men. Though Finland’s liberties are once more threatened by the reactionary counsels of those surrounding the bloodstained throne of Nicholas, and though the guns of the Fortress of Sveaborg are pointing their steel murderous mouths straight on to Helsingfors, the Finnish capital, yet the Finnish women are as determined as are the men to fight for their liberties, all the dearer to them now, because they all are full citizens, and have tasted the joy of freedom and of the power to make their own laws and administer their own affairs. There was a sob in her voice, but there was also supreme courage, as our Finnish comrade referred to the troubles ahead.
When, I wonder, will English men and women realise that though in their midst the people are not being hanged and beaten for daring to speak and spread the truths of Socialism, yet the people’s life blood is being slowly and inexorably drained from them in order that capitalism, the autocrat of England, may continue to exist? The horrible, prolonged torture of starvation is being applied to at least a third of the people, and our workers are cowed and downtrodden slaves, because they are not politically represented. Let us take example by the Finns, and learn solidarity in the struggle for the political weapon for every adult man and woman. Over £100 was subscribed the other day at the Queen’s Hall; but it was all given to help pass a Limited Woman Suffrage Bill. Where the wealthy can give their pounds, the workers can only give their pence; but the workers can do what the wealthy cannot do; the workers can bring the weight and mass of numbers to strengthen their demand. We shall call upon the working men and the working women later on to demonstrate for Adult Suffrage; meanwhile, we want every organisation of workers to affiliate to our society, so that when the time for the fight comes, we may have a strong, well-organised and well-disciplined army of revolt.
DORA B. MONTEFIORE
Hon. Sec. Adult Suffrage Society.
Source: Justice, January 23, 1909 p. 5
Section: “A Woman’s Point of View”
Transcription: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
DEAR COMRADE,—In order to make clear to the comrades what the attacks are, both outside and inside the Party against our policy in carrying out the Social-Democratic demand for Adult Suffrage, I shall be grateful if you will publish in “Justice” the enclosed correspondence. The letter signed “Frances Swiney” was published by the Women’s Freedom League (of which Mrs. Despard is President), in a paper called “Women’s Franchise,” the date, January 7, 1909; and my reply has been sent to the same paper. As, however, when going about the country, I often hear the complaint from comrades that they never know what the Adult Suffrage Society is doing, I thought it might interest them to know about these recent attacks on our work, and this knowledge may encourage them to carry on with ever-increasing zeal the propaganda for the cause of enfranchising politically every man and woman in the country.—Fraternally,
DORA B. MONTEFIORE,
Hon. Sec. Adult Suffrage Society.
The mask has fallen, and also the cloven foot has appeared. What many shrewd minds have long suspected is proved by the most potent of arguments—action. Mr. E. Belfort Bax is one of the signatories to an invitation widely issued to form a man’s committee for opposing Woman Suffrage. Thus one of the leaders of Social-Democracy would, in his ideal state, still deny woman citizenship, and keep her the irresponsible dupe, tool, toy, and slave of the brotherhood. Surely, I dreamt when I thought I read in an Essay on Socialism in the “Westminster Review,” for September of this year, “every infant that came into the world,” say Morris and Bax, “would be born into full citizenship, and would enjoy all its advantages, whatever the conduct of its parents might be.” It appears, however, that the infant must be male to be thus endowed; strict inheritance in the male line will still reign supreme in the social paradise, and Eve, the mother and the wife, will find the doors of equal opportunity-shut in her face, as of old, under the most autocratic of Imperial Governments.
Adult Suffrage means for the Socialist of the Belfort Bax type, male supremacy of a more marked and sex-biased character than that under which women now suffer, to the detriment and degradation of the whole community. Under the aegis of the Social-Democratic Federation, their last state would be worse than their first, and the nation at large would be under the iron hand of a soulless materialism, controlled by a brute beast force. What a travesty of terms will this Belfort Bax Republic represent—social reform with a subject womanhood, democracy with half of the people deprived of political power, federation that only binds the brothers and ostracises the sisters! Man, in fact, has become so corrupt through the long-continued degradation of woman that his very ideals have no justice, logic, reason, or wholeness in them.
They are simply the low aspirations of a sensualist and a degenerate, craving for the flesh-pots of Egypt and the whip of a slave-driver. Women, therefore, have not much to hope from the gospel of Bax and Co.
FRANCES SWINEY.
SIR,—Kindly grant me space to explain in the columns of your paper that the attitude taken up by Mr, Belfort Bax on the subject of the political emancipation of women in no way affects the attitude or the action of the political organisation (the Social-Democratic Party) to which he belongs. At the International Socialist Congress, held at Stuttgart, in 1907, strong resolutions were passed, urging Socialists in every country to initiate an active campaign in favour of votes for all men and all. Women—in other words, for Adult Suffrage. In pursuance of the policy proclaimed in that resolution the English Social-Democratic Party published, in 1907, a Manifesto to the same effect, and in 1908 held a Conference of Labour and Trade Union organisations, at which a strong resolution was passed, and sent up to the Prime Minister, calling on the Government to frame their promised Political Reform Bill on the lines of Adult Suffrage for every man and woman. If, in the face of this, an unofficial member of the S.D.P. chooses to ally himself with reactionaries of other parties in order to throw obstacles in the way of one of the vital points of the S.D.P. programme, he will be dealt with by the organisation itself, in which he has proved himself a backslider. As a proof of the attitude towards Mr. Belfort Bax of the S.D.P., I enclose the copy of a resolution passed lately by the Willesden Branch of that body; and I beg that you will, in fairness to the Executive and rank and file of the S.D.P., give the same publicity to this letter as you have done to the one attacking us.—Faithfully,
Hon. Sec. Adult Suffrage Society:
DORA B. MONTEFIORE,
[The resolution of the Willesden Branch of the S.D.P. has already appeared in “Justice.”]
Source: Justice, February 27, 1909 p. 6
Transcription: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
On Monday, February 15, Lady Frances Balfour issued, through the press, an invitation to Women Suffragists to assemble in Dean’s Yard, Westminster, from whence they were to proceed to the Abbey, and there petition or supplicate the Ruler of the Universe to lend a favourable ear to their prayers for the political emancipation of the Women possessing the necessary property qualifications for exercising the franchise. This appeal, which was responded to by several hundred ladies, denotes a new phase in the public propaganda of the elder, and (until now) non-militant suffrage societies. They have, by this action, stepped aside from constitutional agitation, and have called to their aid the “Power” whose help was sought in the past by the Israelites, under the title of the “God of Battles,” and whom Kaiser Wilhelm personally invokes nowadays to bless his, destroyers, armoured cruisers, and severely-disciplined conscripts.
The ladies will, no doubt, argue that the same “Power” is daily invoked in Parliament assembled at Westminster, before its out-of-date, lumbering old machinery starts to work, weaving the warp and woof of legislation; which fact proves that His attention is not entirely taken up with military matters, but that He has time to occupy Himself with civil questions. It is even possible that they may argue He finds time (as did the late F. Myers) to read the “Daily Chronicle” and the “Review of Reviews,” and has His own opinions about political parties and “fancy franchises.” This, for all I know, may be the case; but, taking the precedent of the daily prayers at Westminster for what it is worth, I would still remind the new militant Conservative ladies that these daily supplications in the House are of a very general character, and do not take the form of attempting to commit the “Power” to any definite line of action. The Tariff Reformers, for instance, have no special form of prayer, asking a divine blessing on the Fiscal Reforms, or Preferential Treatment arguments used so astutely by Mr. Austen Chamberlain and his golden-tongued disciples, who preach so ably that fascinating doctrine to the son of man, who has no place but the slum, or Salvation Army Elevator, wherein to lay his head. Neither do the Irish Nationalists insist on a special liturgy, demanding with ceaseless iteration that Jehovah should live up to his credentials of being a non-respecter of persons, and should at once and for all time remove from the sacred land of Ireland the hated grasp of the English oppressor. Neither do the Labour Party—but why insist further on the point? Privileged Primrose Dames will at once understand, the Labour Party being so intimately allied with the Methodist Connexion, how dangerous to the Established Church it might be if Mr. Philip Snowden started the day’s Parliamentary work with a revival meeting, and the whole Party marched on to the Nationalisation of the Railways, singing—
“There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Lloyd George’s veins!”
I have written enough to show the danger of the precedent introduced by Lady Frances Balfour, and the Primrose Dames. All is fair, we know, in love and war—but is all desirable? The members of these older and more conservative suffrage societies have, up till now, shaken warning heads at the ladies who have to be filed away from railings, grilles and balconies, or on whose shoulders the hand of a common constable has fallen in a gesture of arrest; but are these head-shakers, I would ask, playing the game when they go outside “constituted authorities,” as represented by King, Parliament, Judges, Magistrates, Heads of Police, Inspectors and Constables, and at attempt to get on their side that “Power” who, according to the priests and ministers, who interpret His will, punishes by earthquake, famine, and pestilence? Mr. Asquith may well be asking himself, “What does this latest move in the game portend? Are my enemies praying that Downing Street and the Clock Tower may share the fate of Messina; or that Harcourt and I may catch smallpox, or that Grey be doomed to slow starvation in the ranks of the unemployed?”
One more word of warning. It is rumoured in influential and wealthy circles that St. Paul’s Cathedral has been specially engaged by the Anti-Suffragists for a day of national intercession against the granting of the franchise to women; and it has been explained to me by a prominent member of the “Antis” (now, do not think it is Mr. Belfort Bax, because I have never spoken to him on the subject), that as long as only the “ladies” were asking quite prettily for the vote, and were only petitioning that “to her that hath should be given more abundantly,” the rest of the “Classes” do not think it worthwhile to trouble the deity on the subject; but that now that the women living in the shuns had actually the impertinence demand the vote, besides asking that their children should be fed; “why, you know, that’s the limit, and something must be done.” Then, in awed tones, I was reminded an Adult Suffrage Bill was coming up for second reading this Session, and on March 19, by the terms of which Bill “Even domestic servants would get the vote, don’t you know?” I replied, I did know, and rejoiced at the fact, because the vote was highly educational, and the possession of it would teach domestic servants they must not remain domestic servants.
Taking all things into consideration, I begin to have my doubts whether the conveners of that prayer meeting at the Abbey were quite so bent on vanquishing through prayer the Anti-Suffragists as they were anxious to get the private ear of the deity, in order to tell Him how wrong and thoughtless it would be on His part if He allowed the Adult Suffragists to get the second reading of their Bill carried. Though the Ruler of the Universe is said to be omniscient, it would appear that He requires to be constantly reminded of His duty by those who shuffle the political cards!
D.B.M.
Source: Justice, February 27, 1909 p. 12
Transcription: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
The Executive of the Adult Suffrage Society sent early in February a letter to the Prime Minister asking him to receive a deputation on the subject of the Electoral Reform Measure outlined by him last Session. On February 6 they received a reply from one of his secretaries acknowledging the receipt of the letter, and adding that he regretted his public engagements would not admit of his receiving a deputation from the Adult Suffrage Society.
In reply to a letter from our society, Sir Charles Dilke writes a suggestion that we should ask some Member of Parliament to bring in this Session an Adult Suffrage Bill, formed by cutting out of his Franchise and Removal of Women’s Disabilities Bill, all except Franchise. He adds that he has such a Bill ready; and several Members of Parliament have asked for, and have seen it. Our society’s Parliamentary work this Session will be to find a Member prepared to bring in such a measure, which we, on our part, will help forward by every means in our power.
On February 16, the day of the opening of Parliament, several of the members of the Canning Town Branch of the Adult Suffrage Society walked in the procession of women of the unemployed, carrying “sandwich boards” asking for the right to vote, in order to obtain the right to live. These women, who suffer so keenly from the lack of work, with its accompanying lack of daily bread, and all that that involves, understand very clearly that the laws are at present made by a governing class who have so arranged the existing franchise on a property basis, that the mass of the workers are entirely shut out from any share in the government of the country. Their demand, therefore, for the democratisation of the franchise is an intelligent demand, striking at the root of privilege and of property rights.
DORA B. MONTEFIORE.
Source: Justice, March 20, 1909, p. 5
Section: “Our Women’s Circle”
Transcription: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
The March number of the “Tribune Russe” contains the news that our militant comrade Catherine Brechkovsky is dying in the fortress of Peter and Paul at St. Petersburg. She is now 68, and for the last 45 years has carried on a ceaseless struggle in Russia against the organised forces of autocracy, oppression and reaction. She it was who roused and organised the peasants, and who helped to carry on the most dangerous propaganda of all among the soldiers and sailors of the Czar. She has been more than once sentenced to hard labour in the mines of Siberia, and after one of her escapes she reached America, where she lectured for some months, and succeeded in collecting large sums to help the Russian revolutionaries in their struggle for freedom. But like all true propagandists in that seemingly endless struggle between the powerful and privileged on the one hand, and the proletariat on the other, she has not been able to keep away from the danger zone of spies, prison, torture, and death; and for some months now she has been a prisoner in that terrible fortress, whose walls are washed by the icy waters of the Neva. In Gorki’s novel, which has been translated into English under the title of “Comrades,” but to which he himself gave the name of “The Mother,” he describes in vivid language the trial of a Social-Democrat, and puts into his mouth these words, which are the cry of our comrades all over the world: “We are Socialists! That means we are enemies to private property, which separates people, arms them against one another, and brings forth an irreconcilable hostility of interests; brings forth lies that endeavour to cover up, or to justify this conflict of interests, and corrupt all with falsehood, hypocrisy, and malice …. That very property, for the production and preservation of which it sacrifices millions of people enslaved by it—that very force which gives it the power over us—stirs up discord within its own ranks, destroys them physically and morally. Property requires extremely great efforts for its protection; and in reality all of you, our rulers, are greater slaves than we—you are enslaved spiritually, we only physically. You cannot withdraw from under the weight of your prejudices and habits the weight which deadens you spiritually; nothing hinders us from being inwardly free.” Gorki in that passage puts his finger on the immense reserve strength of the revolutionary Socialist demand in every country. Its members have stepped out from the ranks of the organised hypocrites, robbers, and slave-owners; and they are inwardly and spiritually free. It is only the man or woman who is inwardly free who can really fight for freedom for others; and Catherine Brechkovsky, as she lies dying in her cell in the Fortress of Peter and Paul, is still fighting the battle—not only of the oppressed Russian peasant, but of the sweated London and New York worker, the slum-dweller, the half-timer, and of the starving unemployed. That is why I dedicate the first paragraph in this column, to which I hope in time Socialist women of all nations will contribute, to a world-famed militant, who is prepared to seal her testimony with her life blood.
The Editor of “Justice” is prepared to give us Socialist women a couple of columns to ourselves in the Party organ, so that we may concentrate on the special side of Socialist propaganda, as it affects women, and interpret everyday events from the standpoint of Social-Democracy. Women comrades must remember that we have a bourgeois Press, organised to misrepresent, and in order, therefore, to keep clear the vital issues of the class struggle, we need every week (would that we could have it every day) a re-statement and re-interpretation, from the point of view of the interests of the working man and woman. Now, in consequence of the miserable travesty mis-called “education,” which is offered to the half-starved children of the workers, they have too often failed to understand the conspiracy of vested interests hedging them around, and stifling the life out of them. As Thorold Rogers writes in his “Six Centuries of Work and Wages,” “It is no marvel that the worker identifies the policy of the landowner, the farmer, and the capitalist employer with the machinery by which his lot has been shaped, and his fortunes, in the distribution of natural wealth, have been controlled. He may have no knowledge, or a very vague knowledge, as to the process by which so strange, so woeful an alteration has been made in his condition. But there exists, and always has existed, a tradition, obscure and uncertain, but deeply seated, that there was a time when his lot was happier, his means more ample, his prospects more cheerful than they have been in more modern experience. But he has never dreamed of making war on capital or capitalist This extract explains why the same process is going on in the women’s movement for conscious political expression as went on in the men’s movement. The working woman is too often either apathetic because she has no knowledge of the economic and other forces which have shaped her lot, or, if she has a glimmering of better possibilities, she listens to the voice of her middle-class sister, and believes that she can improve her lot by joining forces with a sex instead of with a class. The insular position of England encourage this lack of class-consciousness both among men and women workers; and if English Socialist women are to join in the international demand of their American and Continental sisters, they must have the opportunity of enlarging their circle of knowledge about the doings of their comrades in those lands. We look forward, therefore, to making this Socialist Woman’s Circle a means of spreading information that will link up the endeavours of class-conscious working women in every country; realising, as we do, that in helping forward the development of women we are helping forward the development of the race.
The question of Universal Suffrage, or votes for all women and all men, will be treated from time to time in this column as one of our stepping-stones towards the realisation of Socialism; and we shall endeavour to make it clear to Socialist women that the obtaining of the vote is not an end in itself—the gaining of more privileges for women as a sex; but it is desirable only as a means to an end—and that end is the revolutionising of Society for the benefit of all who are now exploited and oppressed. This restatement of what should be the aims of class-conscious working women is all the more necessary in view of the fact that the two militant organised bodies of women who are demanding a limited suffrage are avowedly organised, not only to obtain the Suffrage, but to hold together afterwards as a “Woman Party” for the purpose of promoting women’s interests, as opposed to those of men. Their large and daily accumulating funds, drawn from those who exploit both men and women workers, give them the power of the purse, and enable them, as I have already stated, to use the Press for purposes of misrepresentation. As an instance of this, I wish to draw the attention of working women to a report in “The Queen,” of March 3. “The Queen” is the paper that voices the interests of the wealthy women of the country; and in an article headed “The Demand for the Franchise,” an account is given of a meeting at the house of Viscountess Gort, where another Viscountess made “an interesting speech in favour of the removal of sex disability.” One of the speakers at the meeting said that “Working men had a great practical influence on legislation, and they were in many ways the rivals of working women, whose interests they could not, therefore, adequately protect. Chivalry to women was not traditional in this class of men, whose mercies to women were often cruel.” The inference is, of course, that working women had much better entrust their interests to the “kind,” aristocratic ladies gathered together in the drawing-room of Viscountess Gort than to the “cruel” working men who happen to be their fathers, husbands, or brothers. It would not be altogether inexcusable if working women took this point of view, for, as I said before, a certain number of working men seem to share it. We have Mr. Philip Snowden declaring in the pages of the “Englishwoman.” ”That he has no hesitation in saying that it is ludicrous to imagine that any Parliament likely to be elected in the near future would think of proposing Universal Suffrage as the first experiment in the enfranchisement of women …. No; the women’s demand for the vote on the same terms as men betrays a careful survey of the whole situation, with special consideration of the form of demand which is most likely to arouse least political opposition, and to secure the largest, measure of support from men of all parties.” There we have the “reformist” gospel in a nutshell; but it will be interesting at the next election to see if Mr. Snowden’s constituents sent him to Parliament to support the political point of view of Lady Frances Balfour who has publicly stated that she counts on the demand for the limited measure of women’s franchise to keep back the demand for Adult Suffrage. The misleading formula of asking for the suffrage for women “on the same terms as men,” when on those terms, having a property basis, women cannot in any large numbers qualify, may “arouse least political opposition” (to quote Mr. Snowden’s reformist formula) among the two bourgeois parties; but it arouses, and will arouse still more and more opposition from the organised ranks Labour and of Socialism; and Mr. Snowden may find himself “up against” that opposition when the workers of Blackburn ask him what he and his wife are doing constantly on the same platform as the avowed enemies of the liberties of the people.
I have received through the International Socialist Women’s Bureau an account of the recent Women’s Congress in Russia, at which the Socialist women made their formal protest against the attempt of the middle calls women to mislead them, in the same way as Lady Frances Balfour and Mr. and Mrs. Snowden are attempting to mislead our working women. The Congress was the first Congress of Russian women which has received any wide advertisement in the Press; and as it was held with the avowed abject of forming a bourgeois women’s movement, the Socialist women who attended only used the opportunity as a platform for giving public expression to their principles. The Russian Trade Unions of St. Petersburg issued a manifesto before the opening of the Congress in which they called attention to the fact that, though the bourgeois women might bring their own grievances before the public, they could not represent the needs of the oppressed woman worker, with her small earnings, and her bad social conditions. The working women must, therefore, have their own representatives, and stand for the following demands:—
Legal protection of labour.
An Eight Hours Day.
Higher wages.
Insurance against illness, old and unemployment.
Care of pregnant women and of mothers.
Universal Suffrage for Men and Women.
The women workers must further declare that their only helpers were the men of the working class, and that with them they would work for the emancipation of Labour. There were five delegates from the Textile Workers who attended the Congress, three from the Printing Trades, one apiece from the India-Rubber, Tobacco and Sugar-making Trades, from the Domestic, Servants, the Women Tailors, the Clerks, and Shop Assistants, the Jewish semptresses, the Shop Assistants of Wilma, and the Moscow Tailoresses. These working-class delegates, not being satisfied with the way the Congress was conducted, nor the way in which the vote was taken on important resolutions, eventually left the Congress in a body, and have since published a declaration, in which they state that the action of the President was neither constitutional nor worthy, inasmuch as she gave a ruling that the Congress might vote on an important resolution which had never been discussed in committee, but was sprung on the delegates without previous discussion. Some of the delegates have been attacked inside the Party for attending the Congress at all; but they defend themselves by replying that the opportunity was a good one for giving an object-lesson to the women proletariat in the necessity for joining more closely with the men in the class struggle, instead of trusting to middle-class women, who are bound in their own struggle to maintain class privilege. Women comrades read papers at the Congress on “Factory Work for Women,” “The Home Conditions of Working Women,” Insurance Provision for Pregnant Mothers,“ “Women in the Printing Trade,” “The Budget of a Woman Textile Worker,” “The Unmarried Woman Textile Worker,” “The Working Women’s Clubs in St. Petersburg,” and on “Women in Commerce.” If in Russia, where there is no freedom of speech, the women can be so greatly daring, how much more might we not accomplish in England if we possessed the real inner and spiritual freedom which inspires the Russian women comrades?
DORA B. MONTEFIORE.
Source: Justice, March 27, 1909, p. 5
Section: “Our Women’s Circle”
Transcription: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Our Editor has written me that he wants this Women’s Circle Column “to consist of the writings of as many women as can possibly be got to contribute ”; and that is exactly what I want also! I am the last person to wish to “spoon-feed” the women who read this Column I am only here to provide some sort of nourishment until they are “producing and distributing” for themselves. The Editor and I want news from the factory, and the workshop; news from the workhouse, and from those who fall under the tender mercies of the Relieving Officer; news from the prison (it is quite the fashion to go to prison nowadays, so no one need be shy about giving experiences); news from the Salvation Army shelters, where the destitute get much bible and little bread; news from the underpaid Post Office and telephone girls; news from the sweated East-End workers; and news from the domestic servants, the waitresses, the barmaids, and from any women workers who have a grievance against society as at present organised. Then we want reports from the secretary of the S.D.P. Women’s Educational Circles, and from the Socialist Women’s International Bureau, and from Secretaries of Women’s Trade Unions, telling us of their activities and of their growth. I hope, therefore, that before our next issue I shall have had communications from comrades in different parts of the United Kingdom, promising contributions and expressing interest in this new Column, which is to voice the demands and aspirations of Socialist women.
The fight between those who stand for the Limited Bill and those who are working for Adult Suffrage becomes every day more intense, and much light is thrown on the dark places of the “Limited propaganda” by the way in which they receive a practical measure for the enfranchisement of all women, as well as of all men. This Government, being pledged to Manhood Suffrage, Mr. Geoffrey Howard’s Reform Bill, granting the vote to women on the same terms as it will then be granted to men, is an interesting attempt to get a debate in the present House of Commons on what would be practically Adult Suffrage. It would appear only natural that those ladies who state constantly they are working for Women’s Suffrage “on the same terms as it is, or may be, extended to men,” would jump at this chance of a wider extension, and hasten to support a democratic measure. But, unfortunately, it would appear that where their “treasure” is, there must their principles also be, and that whoever it is who has paid the Suffragette piper demands that the tune they play shall be reactionary and non-democratic. A chorus of shrieks arises from Mrs. Fawcett, Miss Pankhurst, and their allies. “Mr. Geoffrey Howard has betrayed the women’s cause!” so say the militant suffragists. Mrs. Fawcett writes to the “Daily News” to say that “The whole body of women’s suffrage organisations repudiate the idea that this Bill is in the interest of Women’s Suffrage.” All this, being interpreted, means that Conservative ladies do not mean, if time, money, and influence can prevent it, to allow their working-class sisters’ enfranchisement. Mrs. Fawcett’s letter to the “Times” contains such gross misstatements that, as Secretary of the Adult Suffrage Society, I sent an answer to that paper, and asked them to insert it. This the “Times,” as representing property and privilege, refused to do, so I now publish my answer for the benefit of readers of the “Women’s Circle.”
Sir,—In Mrs.Fawcett’s letter on this subject in your issue of yesterday she makes the assertion, that “It is tolerably plain that there is no active demand for universal Adult Suffrage”; and she adds the astonishing information that “Any steady man, however poor, can get a vote now, if he wishes for one.” May I, as Hon. Secretary of the Adult Suffrage Society, traverse most emphatically both those statements. The demand for Adult Suffrage will naturally come from those who lack at the present time political power, and their demand is embodied in thousands of resolutions passed by Trades Councils, and. other Labour organisations (representing millions of workers) all over the country; which resolutions are being daily sent up to the Prime Minister, urging him to shape his promised measure of political reform on the lines of Adult Suffrage. The Adult Suffrage Society cordially welcomes Mr. Howard’s Bill as a measure brought, in by a private member to test the feeling of the House of Commons on the subject of Adult Suffrage, and hopes that all friends in Parliament in favour of a democratic extension of the franchise to women will be in their place at the House of Commons on March 19, and vote for the second reading.—
I am, Sir, yours faithfully,
DORA B. MONTEFIORE,
Hon. Sec, Adult Suffrage Society.
March 15, 1909.
Does not this expression throw a, searchlight on the way in which the propertied and privileged woman thinks of the workers? For her they are divide into two classes, “the steady” and “the unsteady.” The steady are useful to her as hewers of wood and drawers of water, as shopwalkers, coachmen, grooms, butlers, and men servants. The unsteady men are the reprehensible people, who have ideas of their own about the farces that elite their lot its. lifej or who have a temperament which prevents them from choosing any of these parasitic occupations. But alas, misfortune may dog the footsteps of the most “steady” man under present conditions of society; and loss of work may force him to move his home from one place to another, or even to accept the loathed relief of the Poor Law Guardians; and then, in spite of his superlative steadiness, and in spite of Mrs. Fawcett, he loses his vote. Mr. Herbert Samuels wrote recently in his book on “Liberalism” “The present law relating to the suffrage is, to a large extent, a deceptive and sham law. It has removed indeed the great class barriers, but it keeps up a number of petty fences and divisions that exclude without reason and disfranchise without method …. The balance of power is altered, and it is altered to the serious disadvantage of the working classes.” If the working classes are true to their own interests, they will see to it that the next Reform Bill removes these serious disadvantages of the workers, and that sex disability for all women shall go the same way as class disability for men.
Our comrade Robert Blatchford has opened in the “Woman Worker” an excellent column on “What Women are Thinking.” The subject he put before women last week was “How They Might Prevent War.” The answers appeared to me somewhat naive in their absolute belief that women as a sex are opposed to war. I only wish I could think this were the case; but I still have before me at present a recollection of the Khaki fever, which was epidemic among women of all classes quite as much as among men. Mrs. Despard writes: “Let our brothers free us that, while time is, with one voice we may protest.” Mrs. Philip Snowden remarks that “The women who desire universal peace should work for that ideal by securing complete citizenship for themselves.” And Miss Elizabeth Robins writes; “My conviction is that women should concentrate upon the franchise first. That won, peace will ultimately follow. Without that, never.” Now all these women are comparatively new-comers in the fight for the political enfranchisement of women, and, like most new converts, their horizon is filled with one idea and one only; they have either forgotten or overlooked the fact that the women of Australia and of New Zealand were fully enfranchised at the time of the Boer war; and that these women, living under free conditions themselves, deliberately voted to send Colonial contingents to help the Mother Country to crush out the existence of other free communities. They sent their men folk in hundreds and thousands to maim and kill the men folk of a white race in Africa with whom they should have had no quarrel; but only the community of interests that should link together all young, developing, and progressive communities. Neither must it be forgotten that Mrs. Fawcett, one of the leading workers for the Limited Bill, was the English woman who deliberately published a disgraceful report about the Concentration Camps, which libelled the Boer women, in order to save the face of English Imperialism. No! for ever no! The forms of freedom will never help enfranchised men and women to right thought and right action unless the love of freedom, not only for themselves but for others, is firmly planted in their breasts. Imperialism is daily crushing out of both English men and women that love of freedom which used to be their most precious inheritance. We Socialists desire the vote for all women and all men, because we realise in the past that women’s supreme indirect power has been unaccompanied with direct responsibility. We realise that power and responsibility should always go hand in hand, and we desire to make women think out for themselves, and apply their reasoning alike in economic, social, and Imperial questions. If we could get a preponderating number of working women to think soundly on these problems, it would not matter so much what the privileged women were thinking. Our object, therefore, as Socialists, must be to interpret for the working women the power that lies behind the vote in revolutionising economic conditions so as to put an end to the commercial necessity of modern warfare.
On March 14 Mr. Massie, M.P., presented to the House of Commons a petition, signed by 243,852 women of all classes, praying for the rejection of any measure that had for its object the granting of the Parliamentary franchise to women.
The second reading of Mr. Geoffrey Howard’s Bill was carried on March 19, by a majority 35. Sir Charles Maclaren, who seconded the motion for the second reading of the Bill, stated that one organisation for obtaining the vote for propertied women had spent £20,000 this year on the agitation!
He is also reported to have said: “There was a great mass of female domestic servants, and he would be willing to exclude from the franchise those who are in a position of dependence in the house where they work.”
Lady Knightley, President of the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association, writes in a letter to the “Morning Post” “Such a reform (limited franchise for women) would not interfere with the existing basis of the franchise; but, on the other hand, would greatly strengthen the case against manhood or universal suffrage.”
Mrs. Bentley, the Secretary of the Women Anti-Suffrage League, states that 79 out of a 84 wardresses at Holloway Prison have signed the petition against granting votes to women! Is it possible that they fear, like Othello, that their “occupation may be gone”?
Clara Zetkin, our German comrade, will speak at the demonstration in favour of Adult Suffrage at the Holborn Town Hall, on April 2
DORA B. MONTEFIORE.
Source: Justice, April 3, 1909, p. 5
Section: “Our Women’s Circle”
Transcription: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Like most Liberal measures, this so-called Anti-Sweating Bill is not even a half measure, it is less than a quarter measure. Its central idea is to establish district boards, which shall fix a minimum standard wage, and enforce that standard; but instead of making the Bill apply to all sweated industries and employments, it is only made to apply to five, which include:
Ready-made and wholesale tailoring;
Cardboard-box making,
Lace-making by machinery,
Net finishing,
Blouse making.
As it is 20 years since the Select Committee on Sweating made its report on the horrible evils that exist under capitalism, both among town and country workers, the Liberal-Tory Governments, whose duty it is to legislate in these matters, have had ample time for absorbing the information contained in the Committee’s Report, and for embodying their collective wisdom in a legislative measure. We are told by the Liberal press that “The Bill is carefully limited; it is experimental in scope, and its machinery is controlled by many checks. It thus exhibits those features of caution and moderation, which are in accord with the national character.” This being interpreted means that the lawyers have had a free hand in this “controlling by checks,” and, as generally happens, in English legislation, what is given to the people with one hand is taken away with the other. But when we come to think of it, how would it be possible for a Government, who themselves are accomplished sweaters, to deal effectually with an evil which is a necessary part of the economic system on which capitalist Governments flourish? The men workers at Woolwich Arsenal, and the women nurses at Woolwich Military Hospital, would be able to give some interesting facts about Government sweating of their employees. One feature of the promised Bill is that a “White List” will be published of employers who agree to be bound by the minimum wage. It would be interesting to know if a “Grey List” and a “Black List” might not also be published, and then the question would arise in which list the Liberal Government, as employers, would find themselves.
Our branch at Hull is in a flourishing condition, and is doing good work under the able chairmanship of Mrs. Nelson (the wife of our comrade Dr. Nelson, who has been made to suffer professionally, and is still suffering, because of his advocacy of Socialist principles). Miss Penn is the new Secretary, and she organised on Sunday, the 21st, a mass meeting in the St. George’s Hall, Hull, where C.N. L. Shaw, of the Clarion Scouts, and the Hon. Secretary of the London Adult Suffrage Society were the speakers. Our usual resolution calling upon the Prime Minister to frame his promised Political Reform Bill on the lines of Adult Suffrage was passed unanimously. On the evening of Saturday, the 20th, the two London speakers were entertained at a very pleasant social at the A.S.E. Rooms, when Dr. Nelson presided, and excellent recitations and music were the leading feature in the programme. Hull comrades follow closely the agitation both for the limited and the full measure of enfranchisement for women; and there is no doubt that the majority of 53 in the division on Mr. Howard’s Bill, which is practically Adult Suffrage, has stirred up intense interest in our cause all over the country.
At the recent municipal elections at Copenhagen, two Socialist working women were elected on the Town Council, Social-Democracy is better organised in Denmark than in any other European country, and when comrades meet there at the next International Socialist Congress in 1910, they will find a striking object-lesson of what a class-conscious proletariat can do through the machinery of a united Social Democratic Party. On the occasion of the recent elections, out of 42 seats the Socialist won 20, and two of the permanent paid Town Councillors are Socialists.
In Mr. Galsworthy’s play. “Strife,” now being acted in London, the message for the workers is that in every case of a long, aggravated strike it is the workers who “pay in full.” There is strong and concentrated thought in almost every line of the piece, and its “leit-motif” or message appears to me to be the same as that of the Report on the Poor Laws—that our existing economic conditions must go.
According to Mr. Chiozzit Money, 700,000 persons die every year in the United Kingdom, but only 80,000 possess property worth the tax-collectors’ notice. That is to say, 600,000 people go to their graves every year practically propertyless. How did those 600,000 persons live is the vital question for us Socialist women. The presumption is that if they died without property they lived in economic serfdom, and in continual dread of what to-morrow might bring forth.
I really think that the good people who pray incessantly against “battle, murder, and sudden death,” should change the last part of the petition to “unemployment.” Sudden death is far more merciful than intermittent or prolonged unemployment, with its certain results of sickness, physical deterioration, loss of moral fibre and of self-respect, slow starvation, and too often suicide or a pitiful pauper’s death and burial.
Clara Zetkin writes that she will help to make our demonstration for Adult Suffrage on April 26 as international as possible by obtaining declarations of fraternal sympathy with our cause from American, Russian, Dutch, Swiss, and other women) I hope organised Socialist women in England are thinking out how to give our German comrade the welcome she deserves.
DORA B. MONTEFIORE.
Source: Justice, April 10, 1909, p. 6
Transcription: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Being a harmless heathen, I had never, till to-day, perused the pages of the “Christian Commonwealth.” But a comrade sent me a copy of this week’s issue, bidding me read the article on the front page. I found it was an article on the “Prospects and Policy of Women’s Suffrage,” by Mr. Philip Snowden; and I gathered from the dedication on the same front page that the paper stood “for the advocacy of Good, Right, and Truth”—all spelt with capitals. Such an exalted inspiration gave me courage to pick my way through what seemed a very stodgy and ordinary restatement of the agitation for votes for middle-class women, mingled with feeble grumblings at the success of the recent debate and division on Mr. Howard’s Bill for Adult Suffrage. My mind kept wandering away from the too-well-known “Labour attitude” on questions affecting democratic interests, as my eye was again and again caught by “the advocacy of the Good, Right, and Truth.” Here, indeed, was a new ideal in journalism! This surely must be known as White journalism, to distinguish it from the Yellow type, which offends because it wanders so frequently and wilfully from those virtues—with capital letters. But the sub-conscious thought at the back of my brain all the time I was attempting to absorb this concentrated essence of all the virtues was, Why should my comrade have condemned me to this unaccustomed Nonconformist douche? Why should I be asked to read this recreant reactionary hash of a Labour Member who, having got his Parliamentary foot firmly down on the neck of the people, can use his right hand, when not stabbing his fellow-workers in the back, to waste a sentence like the following: “The ideal of Adult Suffrage is one to which every democrat looks forward, but in a country of such conservative traditions and instincts, it is not going to come but by stages towards it.” There are limits to my patience, even when the “Good, Right, and Truth” are being advocated, and a sentence such as “It is not going to come but by stages towards it” is neither good nor right, and is, therefore, an abomination. I was just about to remove the “Christian Commonwealth” and its rank offence with the tongs when I observed my friend had marked a passage, and I read on: “To checkmate the women’s demand for votes on the same terms as men an attempt was made to start an Adult Suffrage Society. But it has been a ludicrous failure. Even the Anti-Suffrage Society has attracted more support, and aroused more interest. There is no doubt about it, that what little demand for Adult Suffrage does exist, is, to a great extent, an anti-woman movement.”
Then it dawned upon me why my comrade had sent me this very “Christian Commonwealth”! Then I realised what “Christian” advocacy of the Truth—with a big capital—meant! The Labour Member of Parliament who gossips with waiters at Westminster in order to collect what he considers damaging information against a Socialist M.P., who publishes categorical slanderous statements against this young Socialist M.P., and then, when these statements are categorically refuted, neither withdraws nor apologises, is now slandering a Suffrage Society, under the cloak of advocating “Good, Right, and Truth”! If this is a specimen of what is to be expected under the “Christian Commonwealth,” the workers will have to close up their ranks and fight all they know for the Co-operative Commonwealth.
I think it was Christ who coined that most valuable expression, as applied to this sort of hypocritical gentry: “Oh, generation of vipers!” There is something about a slander that always suggest a wriggling, slavering snake. But if one fact more than another encourages us of the Adult Suffrage Society in our agitation, it should be the knowledge we are so successful that we have called down upon us this attack of Mr. Snowden! The demand for Adult Suffrage, as the only logical and democratic way of enfranchising the women of the country, is growing daily in intensity; therefore, Mr. Snowden, whose domestic comfort is bound up in the advocacy of the limited demand, declares the Adult Suffrage Society is a “ludicrous failure.” Judged by the standards of the rich and powerful of the day, the life and death of the Galilean whose name gives the title to the paper in which Mr. Snowden traduces English Socialists, were “ludicrous failures.” It is for the workers to pronounce their verdict on our agitation, not the man who again and again, by allying himself with reaction and privilege, opposes the class interests of the workers. Year after year the organised workers of the kingdom have, at the instigation of the Adult Suffrage Society, rejected the resolution for enfranchising women on a limited basis, and have reaffirmed their demand for Adult Suffrage. Does this look like “ludicrous failure”? This year our Society has circularised every Trades Council and Labour and Socialist organisation, throughout the kingdom, urging them to send up resolutions to the Prime Minister demanding that the promised Political Reform Bill shall be on the lines of votes for every woman and every man. The response has been hearty and generous; and the Government can be in no doubt as to the attitude of the organised workers on this subject. Those workers would do well to study carefully the wording of the sentence I have quoted from Mr. Snowden’s article. If his position were not so dangerous to the class-interests of the workers it would really be a mixture of the comic and the pitiful. Here is a man of the people, sent to Parliament to push the interests of the people, who has so entirely caught the tone of the wealthy and dominant classes that to him the money-splutter of the anti-suffragists bulks larger and appears of more importance than the democratic agitation supported by the pence of the people. “Even the Anti-Suffrage Society,” he writes “has attracted more support and aroused more interest.” “Whose support, and whose interest?” the workers should ask. Is it not the support of the “Times,” the “Telegraph,” and the “Morning Post”? Is it not the support of the ladies and gentlemen in evening dress who flock to hear the platitudes of a Lord Curzon, whose principal reason for refusing the vote to women is that “A woman is not a man.”
Mr. Edgar Jepson, in the “New Age” of this week, exactly hits off this Labour person, who is using his Nonconformist platform in order to preach reaction. “The weakness of the Labour leader is that when he has got into the House, bought a pair of ivory glove-stretchers, attended a royal garden party, and is drawing a regular salary, he has attained the supreme height of his ambition; he only asks to sit in peace and bask in his own glory. That is why he is found selling, with a delirious joy, other people’s birthrights for a strawberry ice, and then getting completely fuddled on it.” Mr. Jepson should give us another article on the “supreme ambitions of the wife of a Labour leader. We should then have some interesting psychology for the edification of the workers whose pence pay the Parliamentary salaries of those elected persons who do such excellent business in the way of selling the people’s birthright. Even the “drink-sodden democracy”, may turn some day; and when it turns it may haply find it has no further use for Labour leaders who advocate “Good, Right, and Truth” in the same smug way as did the Scribes and Pharisees of old. Maxim Gorki, the Russian Socialist, does not write “truth” with a capital T; but his message to the people is: “Thus far truth is the sworn enemy to the power of the rich, an irreconcilable enemy for ever! Our children are carrying the truth into the world …. thus far there are few of them; they are not powerful; but they grow in number every day. They put their young hearts into the truth, they are making it an invincible power. Along the route of their hearts it will enter into our hard life; it will warm us, enliven us, emancipate us from the oppression of the rich and from all who have sold their souls.” Let not the workers forget that an enemy, worse perhaps than the rich, are “those who have sold their souls.”
D.B.M.
Source: Justice, April 17, 1909, p. 5
Section: “Our Women’s Circle”
Transcription: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
I have been browsing among the 1,238 pages of the two Reports (Majority and Minority) of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, which has lately finished its work. All women who can should get a sight of this report (it must be obtainable at any local public library), and should study its pages; for there is much, very much in it that throws curious sidelights on the position of women generally before the law. One point in the Minority Report is especially remarkable. It would appear that under the Scotch Poor Law w an expectant mother, or a mother with infants, who is the wife of an able-bodied man, may not, however dire her necessity, lawfully be granted by the Destitution Authority, whether in the Poor House or in her own home, either medical or midwifery assistance, or food or other necessaries, so long as she is living with her husband …. On the other hand, the expectant mother, or the mother with infants, who is unmarried, or whose husband has deserted her, may, if destitute, not only be granted adequate medical assistance and maintenance, but can actually claim it as a legal right, whatever the Parish Council may decide in the matter, and can force this claim by summary appeal to the Sheriff. The Report goes on to say that this law, as it exists at present, “deliberately puts a premium on illicit sexual intercourse, on permanent unions without marriage, and on the desertion of wives and children by their husband and father. The grave results of this law are, we are informed, familiar to those acquainted with the lives of the poor in the great cities of Scotland. One of the least of these is the simulation of wife desertion which is frequently practised, with the wife’s connivance, by respectable husbands, who find themselves unable to pay the expenses incidental to another birth.” Here is another choice extract: “Expectant mothers (in a workhouse) are not even allowed to prepare for the coming event by making any clothes for the infant”, still less are they instructed how to do so. “It is,” we were informed, “against the workhouse rules” for expectant mothers to make the baby clothes, which are made in the sewing room by the elder women. “No instruction or help of any kind,” observes a lady Guardian, “is given to young mothers. There is no one to give it.” And again, “It is not an uncommon thing to find suckling mothers acting as ward attendants, which means they rarely, if ever, get into the open air for exercise, and their infants rarely or never go out of the sick wards, except in the arms of a convalescent into the airing courts …. In 64 workhouses, imbeciles or weak-minded women are entrusted with the care of infants as helps to the able-bodied or infirm women, who are placed in charge by the matron without the constant supervision of a responsible officer. When we remember that the Poor Law was instituted by the governing classes, and has been administered in the main by the governing classes up to the present time, the following description, in a few words, of that symbol of their united—wisdom and humanity—the Workhouse—sums up the accumulated responsibility of the privileged towards the unprivileged: “The moral atmosphere of a Workhouse is such that no young girl should be introduced into it, if we have any hope or wish to reclaim her.” And yet it is in this moral atmosphere that we have raked together indiscriminately the men, women and children whose misfortune it has been to fall into the hands of the administrators of our Poor Law.
Naturally, to revolutionary Socialists, who have made a study of the social and economic evils of the day, both inside and outside the Poor Law, the part of the Report to which we turn with eagerness is the Recommendations, both of the Majority and of the Minority Reports. But when we study these Recommendations we find but cold comfort. The Minority Report takes, it is true, a wider view of the reforms necessary for improving the system, which is absolutely, on its own showing, unimprovable. The most constructive part of the Minority Report recommendations is that on page 796, which deals with “The need for a unified service dealing with birth and infancy” but even in this respect those who sign the Report seem to pin their faith on a “continuous observation of the household, both before and after birth.” This is the usual bureaucratic idea of setting up machinery without providing means to help to, make that machinery effectual. We can quite imagine the “ubiquitous machinery of Health Visitors and house-to-house visitation, continuously observing the circumstances of the household, irrespective of temporary destitution.” And the ordinary person who is not a Fabian faddist may well ask: “Would it not be much simpler to give the members of every one of these “observed” households full access to the means of life, instead of keeping a board of Inspectors and Visitors, and a supply of “ubiquitous machinery” to spy on the expectant or suckling mothers, and to “continuously observe the circumstances of the household?” The workers of the United Kingdom, both its men and its women, must sweep on one side the majority of these fatuous recommendations, and must declare that they intend in future to have a direct share in the legislation which will set up new authorities for taking over the cruel chaos of the old Poor Laws; and the workers must furthermore show plainly that in the new administrative authorities to be set up in the future there shall be no co-opted, and so-called “specialist members,” but that those who sit on the Committees shall be placed there by the direct mandate of the people.
Comrade Alice Jones sends me the following from Camberwell:— “The women of Camberwell are up and doing, and they mean to make themselves felt. They opened their Circle on March 31, with a good number of keen and intelligent women. Comrade Mrs. Hendin read an interesting paper on the ‘Need for a Women’s Circle,’ there were plenty of questions and discussion, and all present spent a happy evening. We gave a very hearty invitation to all women, irrespective of their political opinions. Goodwill and comradeship prevailed.”
DORA B. MONTEFIORE.
Source: Justice, April 24, 1909, p. 5
Section: “Our Women’s Circle”
Transcription: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
If one fact more than another brings out both the lack of imagination and ingrained hypocrisy of the average Englishman, it is the gush in both Tory and Liberal papers over the advent of the first “Juvenile Court.” The Act provides that “A court of summary jurisdiction, when hearing charges against children and young persons …. shall sit either in a different building or room from that in which the ordinary sittings of the court arc held.” The reporter of the “Daily Telegraph” lets himself go in rapturous ravings about the “rich gilded borderings, the escutcheons, heraldic blazonings of the room of the Guildhall,” where half-a-dozen “very much overawed” small boys were gathered together last week, charged before Sir William Treloar with various artificial offences. The correspondent of the “Chronicle” remarks, with evident disappointment, that “As it turned out, in not a single case was there any vestige of real crime on the part of the child.” It was evidently a shock to this reporter to find that poverty and crime were not synonymous, and he becomes almost lachrymose in his attempt to justify the arrest of these poor little waifs. “But the pity of it, the pity of it! Hardly a case but revealed untold depths of poverty and of despair. Only two kinds of offences were to be numbered on yesterday’s list. These were absence from school and begging.” Of course, the reason in almost every case for these children being found in the street by the police was unemployment on the part of the father, a long, weary struggle on the part of the mother to keep the home together, and, finally, either sickness in the home, or want of decent clothes preventing the children from attending school. Our Tory-Liberal opponents accuse us Socialists of wanting to break up the home and do away with home life; but this, it is evident, is to be some of the daily work of those who are administering. the Children’s Charter. The mother of two little boys who had been found wandering by the police, pleaded passionately against the sending of the elder one to an Industrial School. “I don’t think it is ’ardly fair,” she cried, “it was only because they were two days unwell that I kept them away. I can tell you, Sir, I ’ave to struggle my very ’ardest to exist. There was four months we ’ad to live without a penny.” The Industrial School inspector confirmed the young mother’s story only too surely ….
Sir William tried in vain to assure her that it would be better for the boy to be sent to a school, which according to the official assurance was quite a pleasant place. What would a mother of the middle class or the aristocratic class think and say if her firstborn son was ruthlessly torn from her, and sent to an Industrial School? Yet this may happen to any working-class mother whose “crime” is poverty; and this is the justice meted out to the poor in “a gorgeous gilded chamber of the Guildhall.” As a mother, feeling in every fibre of my being the cruel wrong done to that mother, whose child is to be sent away against her wishes to an Industrial home, I fail to see where the mitigation of the cruelty comes in, because the tragedy takes place in “a beautiful rich room, the ceiling and walls glowing with the old gold of heavy gilt mouldings.” I repeat, it is the present system of capitalism, bringing unemployment, poverty, and. misery in its train, that is breaking up and destroying the homes of England; and which, through a Liberal-Tory Press organised and subsidised to mislead the people, slanders the Socialists who are attempting to interpret for the workers the causes and the results of their exploitation.
This same Press, organised to mislead, tells the workers that the law is henceforth to appear in a new role towards their children—that of godfather. Stepmother would sure be nearer the mark. For how could anyone with imagination and sympathy believe that an Industrial home, with its mechanical surroundings, its herding together of children coming from decent and corrupted homes, its segregation of boys from girls, and its violation of that human atmosphere necessary to the right rearing of the young, can replace the love and care of the mother, even though that mother, through no fault of her own, may be sunk in the direst poverty. I often wonder whether the Scribes and Pharisees who plan this elaborate and artificial machinery of juvenile courts, benevolent magistrates and Industrial Schools for little boys and girls who have no trace of the criminal about them, do not know in their heart of hearts that the real remedy for all these imaginary crimes is work or maintenance for the parents of the children? None of these things would happen if the fathers of the poor little waifs were in regular work, and the mothers could make the real and comfortable home to which every child is entitled. But cant, makeshift, philanthropy, and bureaucracy still fill the bill; and the governing classes are determined to try everything in the gamut of gush before they consent to give the workers, who make the wealth of the nation, access to the means of life.
Women comrades will have observed that the resolution before the recent Conference at Bristol, embodying the Women’s Educational Committee in the general organisation of the Party was carried by 72 votes to 13. The committee and officers will now be democratically elected, and will carry on under the new mandate more vigorously than ever their work of forming Circles, where women will be taught the principles of Social-Democracy.
The discussion on “Adult Suffrage” was opened by Mrs. Boyce, and the resolution in favour of this item in our programme was carried by 92 to 1. But women comrades will have to see to it that this vote is not a mere expression of opinion, but a serious intention on the part of the S.D.P. branches to forward by every means in their power the agitation for votes for all women and all men. When the Organising Secretary for the Adult Suffrage Society was lately in the North of England; she reported: “I think it is very; evident that we must in the future not expect to get anything like consistent help from the S.D.P., and my friend complains of the same apathy among the S.D.P. people in Scotland. They have given him little or no assistance; but, notwithstanding, he hopes to form a branch there shortly.”
There is no doubt that the writings and action of Belfort Bax have done much to prejudice in our organisation the woman’s part of the principle of Adult Suffrage. In future he will have to confine his activities to what comrade Pay in a speech at the recent Conference described a the “scurrilous language” of his articles, for the Conference passed a resolution: “That the E.C. be definitely instructed to require Belfort Bax to withdraw from membership of the Anti-Suffrage League.”
The “New Age,” of April 15 has an excellent article on the question of the enfranchisement of women, by G.R.S. Taylor. He points out what I have for a long time been urging, that at the present day the Limited Bill lacks democratic support, and he hints that the W.S.P.U. and W.F.L. are putting themselves, by their attitude, out of the running. “I venture to say that the reception of the Howard Adult Suffrage Bill was, to say the least, indiscreet. It is going a little too far to say that the people who wanted to enfranchise ten million women instead of two million, are traitors to the cause. Even the suggestion to amend the Limited Bill, by removing the marriage disqualification, has received a scornful reception. There is no use burking the fact that the Limited Bill will give the ‘fine ladies’ an undesirable start; and it is probable that their class bias will prevent their further help in extending the Bill later on. Whereas, if the leaders insist on a wider Bill, the fine ladies will have to drag their democratic sisters into the political paradise along with them.” Some of the leaders have been for some time demanding a wider Bill; and their reward has been misrepresentation and malignant calumny. But the tide is turning, and the working woman, at least, is beginning to understand that her friends, comrades, and leaders are inside the Adult Suffrage Society, and nowhere else.
A Russian woman comrade, Alexandra Kollontay, is coming over with Clara Zetkin, and will speak at the Holborn Hall, on the 26th April. The Adult Suffrage Society is also glad to announce that Lady Warwick, who has just returned from Italy, will be one of our speakers on that occasion, and is much interested in the subject of the working women being admitted to the franchise. Her name is not on the handbills, as her reply was delayed owing to her absence from England; but the advertisements in the papers all announce her as one of our speakers. The meeting will be of historic interest in the annals of the democratic extension of the franchise, and comrades who desire to be present should take tickets in good time. The Women’s International Socialist Bureau, and the S.D.P. Women’s Educational Committee are joining forces to organise a meeting at Chandos Hall on Wednesday April 28, at which comrades Zetkin and Kollontay will give accounts of the conditions of working women in Germany and Russia respectively. The Executive of the S.D.P. is tendering our Continental comrades a social welcome on the evening of April 25, at Anderton’s Hotel Fleet Street. All Socialists are cordially invited.
DORA B. MONTEFIORE
Source: Justice, May 1, 1909, p.7
Section: “Our Women’s Circle”
Transcription: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
I went the other day to the exhibition of “Fair Women,” at the New Gallery, where are collected the works of French and English artists, who have given us their impressions of women of different classes, different temperaments, different colourings and different psychology. One of the most interesting pictures is a portrait be the late G.F. Watts, of Ellen Terry as an eager, fair-haired girl, rushing impetuously, as it were, across the threshold which divides childhood from youth. Another portrait that attracted me strangely was “Golden Girl,” little Connie Gilchrist, who used to skip in a music hall, and then became, through marriage, a member of the British aristocracy. Whether Whistler paints the portrait of his mother, or of a child in a white frock, or of a girl skipping, he is always “The Master,” and always compels and arrests attention. The thought of his many-sided work, his etchings of London, his nocturnes and symphonies of London’s mystic atmospheric effects, led me the other day towards Chiswick Churchyard, where both The Master and Hogarth lie buried. I passed the massive monument in eighteenth century taste that covers Hogarth’s resting place, glancing as I passed at the pompous panegyric commencing:
“Farewell, great painter of mankind,”
and wended my steps towards the sunlit spot near a warm brick wall, where I remembered three or four years ago looking at the great modern painter’s new-made grave. North of the wall old Jacobean and Georgian houses stand guarding the picturesque past; while south, between the quaint old cemetery and the river runs a ragged fringe of blackened, corrugated iron sheds and buildings—the shipbuilding works of Thornycroft, marking the hideous inroads of modern Industrialism. Only the garden of the dead, starred with spring flowers, divides the sleeping past and the urgent present. The contrast is abrupt and poignant. So also is the contrast between the tomb of Hogarth and the grave of Whistler. I had a difficulty in finding it, for there was not even a headstone recording the painter’s name. A low wooden railing made in simplest fashion and painted the blue of a blackbird’s egg, surrounds the spot where he lies, and the little mound of earth is bright with crocuses. It was good to find no crushing stonework, no hollow phrases, no cast-iron and monumental masonry. Colour, sunlight and spring life; those seemed to be the symbols and the emblem of the Master, whose work being done, whose life message being given, now sleeps beneath the sod. We Socialists have not only to beautify and simplify our lives, we have also to break down the monumental hideousness that surrounds everything connected with death; and the teaching at the simple graveside of the great artist, who knew so well how to paint life is an excellent hint of the beautifying protest of his message from the beyond.
During this week there will be women from many lands in London, working and speaking for the political emancipation of women; but those who will be working definitely on the basis of a class war, as opposed to a sex war, will be grouped on the platform of the Adult Suffrage Society, the Holborn Hall. On that platform comrades from Germany, Russia, and Finland will have given their message to the workers of England; while fraternal messages from Holland, Switzerland, Austria, and Denmark, all couched in the same spirit will have been given to the international audience assembled at Holborn. Internationalism is the supreme strength of our Socialist movement, and is the touchstone on which all national propaganda must be based. It was the failure to ring true in this international chord that caused the recent split at the I.L.P. Conference at Edinburgh. “The chimera of Socialism” was the jarring note; and the jangling discord that phrase has made will ring through the air until we obtain once more the full, clear, resounding chord of revolutionary Socialism here and now.
The Women’s International Socialist Bureau (British) has taken up the subject of “Women and War,” and five of its members have promised to write short articles on the subject from different points of view, and send them to the American paper the “Progressive Woman,” so as to let international comrades know what English Socialist women are thinking on the subject. The Fabians, Clarion Scouts, S.D.P. Women’s Educational Committee, and other Socialist bodies will be represented in this symposium; and if “Gleichheit” is interested in publishing the result, the German women, and, through them, women in many other European countries, will be also put in touch, and the feeling of solidarity among Socialist women will be strengthened.
DORA B. MONTEFIORE.
Source: Justice, May 8, 1909, p. 7
Section: “Our Women’s Circle”
Transcription: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
[See the translation of report of the conference below in “Die Gleichheit” of 7th June, 1909 in Justice 3rd July 1909, p. 7—Note by transcriber ERC].
If anything were needed to prove that the struggle between those who are working for a limited measure of Women’s Suffrage and those who are working for the enfranchisement of all women is a real class struggle, the recent sittings of the congress of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance would be a conclusive form of evidence. England, being the stronghold of privilege and of property, the English ladies who organise the Congress were able to wire-pull and arrange resolutions in agreement with their particular line of policy; and it was as a protest against the preponderating influence of property and privilege that the four members of the Adult Suffrage Society left the Congress on the fourth day of its sitting, Thursday, April 29. The question arose as to what new National Societies should be admitted in future into the Alliance, and under the heading of “What the objects of the new society should be,” a discussion took place as to whether these societies could stand for the franchise of both men and women. It was admitted that a Russian society was organised on those lines, and Dr. Augsburg, one of the vice-presidents of the alliance, pointed out that their German National Society stood for the suffrage for all adult men and women; we of the Adult Suffrage Society then asked what our position would be, as we were the only National Society in Great Britain organised to agitate for votes for all women and all men. The astute ladies who were managing the Congress at once saw that there might be a chance in the future of the English Adult Suffragists getting into the Alliance and changing its policy to a real democratic one; therefore, to the resolution stating that the sole object of the new national societies seeking for admission was to be woman suffrage, an amendment was carried that the “sole object” should not apply to societies already in the Alliance. Several reactionary speeches were at this point made on the subject, “The result of men and women being organised together for obtaining political rights.” It was stated by several delegates that when men gained them they left the women in the lurch. It was also attempted to restrict the words to “gaining suffrage for women”; but I pointed out that if these words remained in the resolution they did not include eligibility to Parliament, and narrowed down our demand. Mrs. Chapman Catt, always an enlightened and impartial chairman, saw the point at once, and the wording of the resolution was altered to “political enfranchisement.” I then asked for a right to reply to the misleading speeches that had been made by various delegates, but the wire-pullers were ready; they did not intend, to have our position for adult suffrage as the only reasonable position both in England and on the Continent, put before the Congress, and the closure was moved by an American delegate, and was carried in face of a protest from Germany and several other countries. I then explained to the president that, as the right to reply was refused us and as it was evidently the intention of a majority of the Congress to exclude any new adult suffrage society from the Alliance, the Adult Suffrage Society of England withdrew its members from the Congress as a protest against the action of the ladies present. Working women will see in this action that it is the intention, at least of the English ladies, to shut them out from political privileges.
Adult Suffragists are in a curious position, they have one day in the week to fight reactionary women and another day to make a stand against apathetic and hostile Socialist men. In response to an invitation from the May-Day Demonstration Committee we sent a delegate to its deliberations and paid our affiliation fee, only to discover some few weeks ago that we were refused, as a society, the separate platform that we were granted in 1908; not understanding the reasons of the refusal (as we knew that other organisations were to have their own separate stands, where their banners and devises could advertise their organisation); we protested again and again through our delegate against the treatment we were receiving, and when no satisfaction could be obtained, we arranged to have our own separate platform. As a result the May-Day Demonstration Committee took no notice of our presence, either in its programme of the proceedings, or in its report of our part of the demonstration. This certainly confirms the members of the Adult Suffrage Society in their impressions that where there is not apathy on the part of the rank and file of the S.D.P. there is too often hostility to the agitation for adult suffrage as a political reform here and now. As further evidence of this apathy I feel bound to state that our organising secretary, Miss Hope, wrote me yesterday that as a result of her recent visit to Manchester, “The Manchester people are forming their branch of the Adult Suffrage Society on Friday next without the support of the S.D.P.” Adult Suffragists all over England will be glad to hear that, in spite of our discouragement on May-Day, we held a most successful meeting in Hyde Park, Miss Vance taking the chair. The speakers were Comrades Zetkin from Germany, Kollonty from Russia, Malmberg from Finland, and Boyce, Kough, Montefiore, Macpherson, Shaw, and Murray for England. The usual Adult Suffrage resolution was put to a huge crowd from the platform of the second Clarion van, and enthusiastically carried.
DORA B. MONTEFIORE.
Source: Justice, May 15, 1909, p. 7
Section: “Our Women’s Circle”
Transcription: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
THE PROTECTION OF MOTHERHOOD,—I received from Germany this month two highly interesting papers, both containing the demands of the German women comrades for the protection of mothers employed in industry. The gist of their demands is an immediate eight hours day for women over 18, and six hours for girls between 14 and 18; the exclusion of women from employments which destroy their health or absorb their whole strength to such an extent that they suffer as child-bearers, and their babies are born unhealthy and weak (these employments include industries in which lead, quicksilver, phosphorus, and other poisonous chemicals are used, and trades that necessitate the lifting and carrying of heavy loads); the forbidding of women to use machines driven by foot power, as the long-continued use of treadle machines has a most injurious effect on the female organism. They further demand that pregnant women shall be forbidden to work within eight weeks of their confinement, and, if the child lives, within eight weeks afterwards. (As industrial insurance against sickness covers the child-bearing period, the woman worker in Germany, who is forbidden by law to work at such periods, gets her insurance money during these weeks.) The women comrades further demand free medical attendance in child-bed, and they ask the municipality to provide good and pure milk for children who have to be brought up by hand. They further wish the State to give special scientific teaching to women on the duties of motherhood and on the care and suckling of their children; and they end their list of demands with the reminder: “Women comrades, when the May Day celebration comes round, think of these demands!”
The second gives statistics of the results of State insurance against sickness. Taking the various industrial occupations all round, we find that 35 per cent. of the men insured come on the insurance funds, and 32.1 of the women (this in spite of the fact that, with the women, the insurance includes childbearing periods); but in special trades, such as the building trade, where women lift and carry heavy loads, the invalidity among women is 47.3 per cent. Under the heading of the number of days absent from work in consequence of invalidity, the statistics show that, on an average, men are absent 18.5 days in the year, and women 23.4 during the same period. But the writer of the report points out that in the case of most of the women they have a double burden to bear in their work for their capitalist masters, and in the minding of the home and of the children. The strain on them is, therefore, greater, and it is not surprising that their absences from work are greater than those of the men. The last group of figures deal with 100 individuals, whose absences from work were specially noted. I reproduce the figures below; and it, will be observed that from the ages of 15 to 54 the absences of the women are more frequent than those of the men; but once the age of 54 is passed, the men’s working abilities seem to deteriorate rapidly, while those of the women show much less deterioration, and women over 75 still go on working fairly steadily.
|
Ages |
Men |
Women |
|---|---|---|
|
Under 15 years |
595.0 |
533.5 |
|
15 to 19 |
617.4 |
753.6 |
|
20 to 24 |
657.1 |
955.0 |
|
25 to 29 |
707.5 |
1,205.4 |
|
30 to 34 |
813.6 |
1,395.1 |
|
35 to 39 |
940.9 |
1,465.3 |
|
40 to 44 |
1,088.0 |
1,453.3 |
|
45 to 49 |
1,243.4 |
1,495.9 |
|
50 to 54 |
1,456.2 |
1,489.8 |
|
55 to 59 |
1,704.7 |
1,485.0 |
|
60 to 64 |
2,068.9 |
1631.7 |
|
65 to 69 |
2,710.3 |
2,376.0 |
|
70 to 74 |
2,456.3 |
2,530.5 |
|
75 and over |
4,042.9 |
2,5124 |
I am informed by Madame Almo Malmberg, who is staying in my house, that she was requested by the Women’s Freedom League to write a pamphlet on the subject of “How the Finnish Women Gained Universal Adult Suffrage.” She complied with the request, and sent the manuscript of the pamphlet to the secretary of the League. No proof was sent to her for correction, but after, a certain lapse of time a copy of the pamphlet was sent her, when she found to her dismay that every historical allusion she had made in the pamphlet to the action of the Finnish Social-Democrats in their successful agitation for obtaining votes for all women and all men had been deleted. She is extremely troubled about the matter, as it places her in a very awkward position. The history of gaining Universal Adult Suffrage in Finland cannot be faithfully written without referring to the fact that the agitation of the Socialists was one of the factors in obtaining this political reform. The publication of this mangled pamphlet is, therefore, an impeachment of her intellectual integrity and of her historical accuracy. I can hardly believe that this unscrupulous “Bowdlerising” has been carried out with the consent of Mrs. Despard, the Chairman of the League, and of Mrs. Billington-Greig, its Organising Secretary, both members of Socialist organisations, and I challenge them to explain the action of someone in connection with their League who is evidently an anti-Socialist.
Hilja Parsinen, whom some of the comrades will remember to have met at Stuttgart, writes me from Helsingfors to confirm the telegram of congratulation sent by the working women of Finland to the Adult Suffrage demonstration on April 26; and she adds the information that the class struggle between the Social-Democratic women and the reactionary women is being carried on as fiercely in the Finnish Diet as it is in the political organisations. The middle-class women are struggling to make religious instruction obligatory in elementary schools, and the clerical party are urging on the middle-class women to oppose the disestablishment of Church and State, and also the new legislation for protecting women in industry. One point in her letter seems almost incredible, that women who already possess full political rights should be working for restricted municipal rights for women; but Parsinen assures me in her letter that an attempt is being made to grant municipal rights to women on a property basis only. I think it only right to call the special attention of Socialists to these points, because in the “Labour Leader” of April 30 there is a short paragraph headed “Female Suffrage in Finland,” in which paragraph it is stated that “in the last Diet there were twenty-five lady members, but it is expected that this year the record will be easily beaten.” The point for us Socialists to record is surely not how many “Lady members” there were or are in a National Parliament but how many Socialist women members have been elected, and to point out that the fight between the class interests of women Socialists and of all middle-class women is as keen inside Parliament as outside.
It has been a great help and refreshment to me to have our German comrade, Clara Zetkin, staying with me for a week. When not occupied preparing her speeches for the evening, she was writing and sending off matter for the pages of “Gleichheit,” of which she is the able Editor. That paper, which is the organ of the class-conscious Socialist women of Germany, and which is read in Austria, Scandinavia, Russia, Switzerland, Holland, and England, is an abiding monument of the energy and intelligence of the remarkable woman who guides its destinies. For some years it struggled along with a restricted number of readers; now it has such a circulation that it pays its Editor a salary, it pays several of its contributors from other lands, and it hands over every year a very handsome profit to the funds of the party Although pressed by leading commercial firms to accept advertisements of articles dear to the heart of women, it steadily refuses to take commercial advertisements; and in spite of this Spartan decision, it still continues to enlarge its circulation, to increase its appeal to Socialist women and to make a substantial profit.
DORA B. MONTEFIORE
Source: Justice, May 15, 1909, p. 7
Section: “Our Women’s Circle”
Transcription: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
The Socialist Women’s International Bureau held their monthly meeting at Chandos Hall on Wednesday evening, May 5. Reports were given by Mrs. Murray concerning the action of delegates from the Bureau at the Women’s International Alliance Congress; Mrs. Montefiore, of work going on among Social-Democratic women on the Continent; and by Mrs. Hendin and Miss Kough, of the joint meeting organised by the Bureau and the Women’s Educational Committee as a welcome to our comrades Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontay. The financial report showed a small balance in hand. Mrs. Townsend (Fabian Society) read a most instructive paper on State Nursery Schools, describing how Robert Owen, in 1816, in his evidence before the House of Commons on “the education of the lower orders,” foreshadowed the necessity for such schools, and experimented in them later on, both in New Lanark and in London. They were started in France in 1826, and are now a well-known institution in that country, known as “Ecoles Maternelles.” Belgium, Hungary, and some parts of Germany have followed this wise example, and it remains for England to make practical what its own idealist, Robert Owen, dreamt of and experimented in. Good and hygienic habits for life are inculcated in these nursery schools, and, as meals are provided and resting at mid-day is encouraged, the children of the workers get some of the training and advantages that are provided in the nurseries of the well-to-do. No reading or writing is taught, but games are played, interesting stories are told, and drawing at blackboards is encouraged. In France every child is expected to have a clean change of linen twice a week, and to come provided with a pocket handkerchief, the use of which is taught to the nurselings. Next month Miss Hicks will read a paper on the State’s responsibilities towards school children.
D.B.M.
Source: Justice, May 22, 1909, p. 2
Section: “Special Articles Page”
Transcription: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Source: Justice, May 29, 1909, p. 7
Section: “Our Women’s Circle”
Transcription: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
In the May number of “La Tribune Russe,” there is an article by our Russian comrade, Vera Figner, on the position of women in Russia, parts of which I propose to translate this week for our Women’s Circle, as it throws a flood of light on the struggle for liberty going on in Russia at the present day, in which struggle women are taking an equal share of the risks and of the suffering with the men. Vera Figner is one of those who have undergone a long and painful imprisonment in the fortress of Schlusselburg, and as she is on a visit to England, this article from her pen should be of special interest to English comrades.
“Among the many questions brought to the front of late years by social life in Russia, is that of Political Rights for women. During the period preceding the movement for liberty in 1905 and 1906, absolutism stifled all manifestations of thought, and every aspiration, both of the people and of Russian society. This explains why, at that moment, neither the question of political rights for women, nor many other urgent questions could be considered; as some writer has well said, ‘The woman, in her absolute lack of every right, was the equal of the man.’ But the peculiar characteristics of Russian life exercised their influence on the lot of women, and during the last forty years created for her a special situation quite different from that occupied by women in other countries. If, on one side, this situation is more difficult than that of her sisters in Western Europe, and the burdens of responsibility are heavier, on the other hand, the Russian woman finds lying open before her wide and luminous horizons. The abolition of serfdom in 1861 not only emancipated the Russian peasant, but also caused a great upheaval in the whole spirit, and in the moral conceptions of the privileged classes. This reform was reflected in the family, which, till then, had had for basis on one side the despotism of husband and father, and on the other side the unlimited submission of the wife and mother. The severe military discipline which prevailed during the reign of Nicholas I. reflected itself in the family, and penetrated into the relations of father and children, of husband and wife. But once the serf was freed and the dignity of the human being was recognised, it was necessary to recognise also the human dignity of the oppressed members of the family. They had suffered so long that they hastened to seize the propitious moment, and planted the standard of revolt on the domestic hearth. The youth of both sexes protested in the name of human dignity, in the name of independence, and in the name of personal rights; and women, who until then had been dumb, openly defied the authority of father, husband and society, and braving traditional conventions, demanded the right to be independent. Inside the family, woman desired to be the equal of the husband and the father; as a member of society she demanded the right to higher education, the right to work, and to make for herself a position of economic independence.
“During the stormy period of economic and moral transformation of the nation, without troubling herself about the jesting and the calumnies falling like hail upon her from every side, the Russian woman won the first outposts of that frank comradeship, which have governed, since then, the moral relations of the sexes in Russian intellectual circles. Between the years 1860 and 1870 the political preoccupations of the educated classes were still feeble; the struggle against prejudices of the family, of society, and of religion, and later on the realisation of the reforms of the reign of Alexander II. (the abolition of serfdom, judicial reforms, Zemstvo, etc.) sufficed to absorb their activity: This period was followed by thirty years of reaction, during which time social energy not finding any legitimate expression, the whole of the activities of Russian youth were centred in the revolutionary movement. The Russian woman, who had only just escaped from slavery, took part in this movement with the same mandate and the same rights as did the man, her comrade in the struggle.
Vera Figner then shows in some detail the part that women played in the sixties in the Russian struggle for liberty; she tells of the long years of imprisonment, suffered by both men and women, when so many fell victims to disease, suicide and madness, the survivors only escaping with ruined health.
“Women played a preponderating role many cases; everyone who saw those young women and these young girls, well educated, rich, belonging to the privileged classes, but who voluntarily became industrial workers, submitting themselves in factory life to the hardest conditions, were struck with admiration for the purity and the grandeur of their aspirations. The speech of one of them, Sophie Bardina by name (a former student of Zurich), is a model of delicacy and of eloquence, and occupies an important place in the annals of those days.
“During the period between 1876 and 1885, the Socialist movement, which till then had been peaceful, gradually changed into an active revolutionary struggle directed against the political organisation of Russia. A series of attacks on Ministers, on the police, on the Emperor himself, kept, during ten years, the whole country in a state of unrest. In all these conspiracies the part played by the women was as active and energetic as that of the men. No danger, no peril stopped them …. In 1877 the Petersburg Prefect of Police, Trepoff, having ordered a political prisoner to be flogged, Vera Zassoulitch took upon herself to avenge this outrage in the blood of the executioner; she fired on Trepoff. To the great joy of all Russian thinkers she was acquitted, and the name of Vera Zassoulitch is honoured as the symbol of revolt against outraged human dignity. In 1881, for the first time in Russian contemporary history, a woman was executed. She was the daughter of the ex-governor of the province of Pskow, Sophie Perovskaia; she met her death with the same serenity and the same courage as did her companions. Before and after this execution other women had been condemned to death, but their sentence has been commuted to hard labour, and they have been imprisoned in the fortress of Schlusselberg, the Bastille of Russia …. During the last ten years of the preceding century there has been, throughout Russia, a prodigious agitation among students and workmen. The political struggle, having to a certain extent ceased, it was followed by a strenuous propaganda of Social-Democratic teaching, specially among the workers in the towns. Women participated actively in this propaganda, and took part in all revolutionary organisations and in all the committees for propaganda. Since 1902, two parties have been working in the field,: the Social-Democrats and the Revolutionary Socialists; in both parties women work with energy and devotion, and have accomplished an enormous share of work. It is not disputed that the propaganda carried on in the Army is in great part due to them. They mixed among the sailors of Kronstadt and of Sebastopol; they carried their propaganda among the soldiers both in the capital and in provincial towns, and succeeded in interesting those who till then seemed absolutely impervious to the light of Socialist doctrine, and totally unconscious of existing conditions …. They took part in the military risings of Sveaborg, of Kronstadt, of Sebastopol, and of Vladivostock; they fought on the barricades of Moscow.”
The writer then retells the heroic stories of Spiridonova, of Bitsenko, of Schkolnik, of Konopliannikova, of Ragozinnikova, all of whom confronted alone, and in many cases succeeded in executing tyrants who had tortured peasants, burned villages and made the streets of Moscow run with blood. These women have suffered every degradation and torture which defenceless women in the hands of brutal gaolers and soldiers can suffer. In one case Mlle. Ismailovitch was shot immediately, and without trial, after her attempt to execute Admiral Tchoukhine; others were strangled by the executioner for having taken part in the conspiracies and