WOMEN IN POLITICS

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 226, 21 June 1934, Page 11

WOMEN IN POLITICS

Call For Service

TO SAVE DEMOCRATIC

INSTITUTIONS

In the annual report of the council of the Wellington branch of the National Council of ’Women, there is an urgent call for the service of women in politics. “In view of the extraordinary tangle that the world finds itself in to-day,” says the council, “it is imperative that women should be prepared and equipped for the part they are being compelled to play. Equal political rights mean equal and Increased responsibilities, and these can be shouldered effectively only by keen and persistent study of fundamental questions, and by having as wide a vision and as broad an outlook as poor humans can hope to have.” Referring to 'the election to Parliament of Mrs. Elizabeth McCombs as “an outstanding event of the year,’’ the report stresses the satisfaction felt by the council over "the initial victory of the kind achieved by a woman candidate,” and continues: “This reference to Parliament brings to mind the great conspicuous fact of our present time, to what may be termed the arrest, the pause, in the advance of‘political democracy—to the fact that now and since the Great War, there has been a growing distrust and discontent with the politicians and the political methods evolved by parliamentary democracy.

The Rise of Dictatorships.

“When we see Parliaments like ours kicked into the gutter by dictators, both in kingdoms and republics, it is foolish to wait until the dictatorships die or collapse, and then do nothing but pick the poor old things up and try to scrape the mud off them. The only sane course is to take the step by which the dictatorship could have been anticipated and averted, and construct a political system for rapid positive work, instead of slow nugatory work, made to fit into the twentieth century instead of into the sixteenth.

“Faced with gigantic constructive needs of ever-increasing urgency, so far political democracy has failed. It cannot produce Inventive and original governments; it cannot produce resolute governments; it cannot produce understanding, far-thinking governments. Its utmost act of will is the capricious or peevish dismissal of governments by a general election.

The Roots of the Trouble.

■“The sense of the Inadequacy of modern democratic governments for the task before them grows upon us all. We are familiar nowadays with various projects of electoral reform; but none of these go to the root of the trouble, with modern democracy, which is the indifference, ignorance, and incapacity of the common man and woman toward public affairs. We have to recognise more plainly than is generally admitted to-day, that the ordinary voter does not care a rap for his or her vote. He (or she) does not connect it with the idea of the world at large, nor use it to express any will or purpose whatever about the general conduct of things. “Realising the serious shortcomings Indicated In the foregoing, it devolves on our organisation to do its part in educating the people as to how to produce a system of world controls with as little blind experiment as possible, without the sacrifice of countless millions. of whole generations, in the throes of the inevitable reconstruction that the world has to face.”