WOMEN IN GOVERNMENT

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 86, 10 January 1928, Page 9

WOMEN IN GOVERNMENT

WILL DEMAND OVERDUE REFORMS The proposed extension of the Parliamentary franchise in Britain to women on the same terms as men will, it is estimated, give votes to 5,240,000 women, making a total of 14,832,922 women voters as against 12,697,799 men. “Even if a feminine majority were to vote solidly in every constituency against a masculine minority I should not be alarmed,” says'Mr. James Douglas, in the “Sunday Express.” “But everybody knows that a solid sex vote is impossible tn on any issue. Just as the male vote is divided among the three parties, so the female vote will be divided. The age of exclusively male Government is over, and we should rejoice in this blessing, for men have made a dreadful mess of governance in every democracy. The progress of mankind has been disgracefully retarded by the untempered follies of male democracies. If the wisdom of women had ben rllied for a century to the wisdom of men the world to-day would not be the hell it is.

. . . I believe that the surplus of women means the end of war as an instrument of politics and politicians. Every woman is either a wife and mother or a potential wife and mother, and therefore an enemy of war which mutilates, tortures, blinds, dements, and slaughters husbands and sons and brothers. Men in the past have made bad and stupid laws. Women will wake them up and goad them into overdue reforms of nil sorts. Therefore, I exult in surplus of women. Our politicians in future will l>e forced to think and feel and act not as the representatives of men only, but as the representatives of women as well as men.”