The article I chose comes from The Freewoman’s Vol. 2, No. 39 issue page 7-9, and is titled “Will Men Govern when Women have the Vote?"
What I found odd about this article is the fact that, despite being published in a radically progressive journal, it is essentially anti-suffragist. Just from the title, I had expected it to be about the need for women representatives within the British government. I was wrong.The author, C. H. Norman, begins the article by proposing that women’s suffrage is attractive to people because of its revolutionary nature, not the practical reasoning behind it.
Norman supports the argument against women’s suffrage by using two societal examples of the unequal treatment of men and women under British systems. First, married men were required, under penalty of law, to financially support their wives. The author believes this to be special treatment of women, and considers it a luxury that men don’t have. To support this point, the author uses an anecdote of a woman whose husband owed her a good sum of money in support payments and was essentially able to keep her him imprisoned indefinitely. I also suspect that this story of female spite was meant to play on the contemporary belief that women were rash and overemotional (another anti-suffrage argument)
The second example of “female favoritism” under the British economic system was the one that I found the strangest. Norman names off a couple of statistics of labor wages, which showed that women were paid 1/3 to 2/3 the amount that men were for the same industrial jobs. This made it much more likely for employers to hire women. Norman states that these women (who were usually single) were displacing men (who had to support families); so women workers were essentially ruining families with their easy employability. The fact that women had no union protections is also mentioned, though the author doesn’t really do anything with that information. Norman basically uses these to argue that women really shouldn’t be in the workforce. Also, the phrase “the evil of married women workers” describes what the author views as one of society’s biggest problems.
Anyway, Norman concludes by saying that since women are so well treated, that no one shouln’t support the “swamping of the male democracy by the sex of privilege”