Then will begin the campaign for the right to sit in Parliament, even in the Ministry. From sheer force of prejudice the great majority of the enfranchised women will resist this further claim, and the long story of education and agitation will be repeated. This is the outcome of our habit of persistently compromising with false traditions instead of frankly discarding them. The immortal jokes about women will be retailed in the House of Commons by our legislators; the same dark warnings will come from scientific Cassandras who have felt social influence; the same tragic whispers about "what every woman knows" will be heard in drawing-rooms. Then, about the year 1930, we will discover that woman is really capable of undertaking the not very exacting duties of the average Member of Parliament,--if we have not in the meantime abolished these aimless long debates on subjects which all approach with a fixed conviction,--and that it may not be impossible to find a woman with the capacity of Mr. Reginald M'Kenna or Lord Gladstone or Mr. Walter Long. Our Mrs. Humphry Wards will be the first to compete for the office.
I turn to the more serious question of the economic enfranchisement of women. On this side of the Feminist movement our views are hardly less hazy than in regard to politics. The middle-class, being the brain as well as the backbone of England, is chiefly responsible for the maxim that woman's place is the home; but the middle-class is also the great employer of labour, and it has found that female labour is cheaper than male, and has therefore concluded that woman's proper place is the office or the workshop. More than a fourth of the girls and women of England work outside the home. This material incentive to right views is, however, limited in its action. When the middle-class woman in turn seeks economic independence, she is received with coldness, if not derision. Women may be clerks, teachers, actresses, telegraphists, hosiery-makers, etc., but they ought not to aspire to be doctors, lawyers, or stockbrokers. If they ask the reason, they hear an inconsistent jumble of statements. In the first place, of course, they are not clever enough; in the second place, however, they are likely to be so far successful that they would lessen the available employment of men.