The Modern Woman's Rights Movement A Historical Survey

Excerpt

PREFACE

The first edition of this book appeared in 1905. That edition is exhausted,—an evidence of the great present-day interest in the woman’s rights movement. This new edition takes into account the developments since 1905, contains the recent statistical data, and gives an account of the woman’s suffrage movement which has been especially characteristic of these later years. Wherever the statistical data have been left unchanged, either there have been no new censuses or the new results were not available.

The facts contained in this volume do not require of me any prefatory observations on the theoretical justification of the woman’s rights movement.

From the remotest time man has tried to rule her who ought to be comrade and colleague to him. By virtue of the law of might he generally succeeded. Every protest against this law of might was a “woman’s rights movement.”

History contains many such protests. The modern woman’s rights movement is the first organized and international protest of this kind. Therefore it is a movement full of success and promise. Leadership in this movement has fallen to the women of the Caucasian race, among whom the women of the United States have been foremost. At their instigation were formed the World’s Christian Temperance Union, the International Council of Women, and the International Woman’s Suffrage Alliance.

In many lands, even in those inhabited by the white race, there are, however, only very feeble beginnings of the woman’s rights movement. In the Orient, the Far East, and in Africa, woman’s condition of bondage is still almost entirely unbroken. Nevertheless, in these regions of the world, too, woman’s day is dawning in such a way that we look for developments more confidently than ever before.

In all countries the woman’s rights movement originated with the middle classes. This is a purely historical fact which in itself in no way implies any antagonism between the woman’s rights movement and the workingwomen’s movement. There is no such antagonism either in Australia, or in England, or in the United States. On the contrary, the middle class and non-middle class movements are sharply separated in those countries whose social democracy uses class-hatred as propaganda. Whether the woman’s rights movement is also a workingwomen’s movement, or whether the workingwomen’s movement is also a woman’s rights movement or socialism, depends therefore in every particular case on national and historical circumstances.

The international organization of the woman’s rights movement is as follows: the International Council of Women consists of the presiding officers of the various National Councils of Women. Of these latter there are to-day twenty-seven; but the Servian League of Woman’s Clubs has not yet joined. To a National Council may belong all those woman’s clubs of a country which unite in carrying out a certain general programme. The programmes as well as the organizations are national in their nature, but they all agree in their general characteristics, since the woman’s rights movement is indeed an international movement and arose in all countries from the same general conditions....