The Hawera Star MONDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 1925. WOMEN IN PUBLIC LIFE.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 23 February 1925, Page 4

The Hawera Star

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 1925. WOMEN IN PUBLIC LIFE.

Delivered everj evening- by 5 o’eloek in Hawera. Manaia. Nornianby, Okaiawa, E.lhnm, Mangafoki, Kapnnga, Alton, Mirleyville, Patea, Weverley, Mokoia, ••Yhakaninra, Ohangai, Aleremere, Fraser Unad, and Ararat,,.

The rejection by the House of Commons of the private member’s Bill pro posing to enfranchise all women from the age of twenty-one years, on the same terms as men, need not strike despair into the hearts of ardent feminists. Lady Astor appears to have been a little piqued that thp Government should, as'she expressed it, “butt in’’ on a private member’s Bill to defeat it; but that is a way nil Governments have. The Prime Minister explained that he could not think of accepting a private member’s Bill on a subject on which the Ministry intended to legislate. Lady Astor has been long enough in politics to know that. Mr Baldwin’s observation was merely the official way of saying: “If any further extension the franchise • is to be made, the new electors will have to thank the Government for it, not any private members on the Opposition side.’’ Parliament may be the lawmaking body, but, under our British system of party government, it is wholly dominated by Cabinet. Sir William Joynson-Hicks said quite definitely that the Government intended to carry out its pledge to give equal political rights to men and women, and it is quite possible that a Government Bill identical wth that now thrown out may be introduced later this Parliament. The-man in the street would think it much more sensible, in such a case, were the Government to support the private member ’s proposals; but the man in the street is not well up in the tricks of the political trade. However, the intention of the Government may be to effect some such compromise as that hinted at by Mr Ramsay McDonald —the fixing of the age of enfranchisement at twenty-five years for both sexes. There is something to be said in support of that, but something to be said against it, too, and we do not. propose to discuss the suggestion at this stage. But the debate in the Commons prompts an inquiry into the general question of woman’s progress in the past year or so. “Til a thousand minor ways,’’ says a woman writer in the January number of Current History, “the world seems to be getting used to us.’’ She admits that the representation of the sex in British politics suffered a set-back last election, and that the number of women in the German Reichstag has fallen to less than half what it was in 15)23; but in the increased number of women candidates she reads recovery from “that inferiority complex which has made us too modest to run [stand].” And the election in the United States of two women governors more than balances the loss in European politics. Tn other directions, too, the cause of feminism has been advanced. South Africa and Mysore, India, have granted women the vote, and Spain, besides giving the

municipal franchise to women heads of families over twenty-three years of age, litis elected her first woman Mayor (in England there are four such). A woman sits in the Guernsey Legislature, and Jersey has given its women the right to sit. Turkey, having granted the vote to “every Turk over eighteen,’’ has now to decide whether Turkish women qualify. A third woman has been admitted to the French Academy, and that country is ready to' license women as public auctioneers. Panama refused its women the vote: but universities in France and Japan have appointed women to their staffs, and the first woman Bailie of Edinburgh has taken office. It seems absurd that, if a British youth of twenty-one is a fit and proper person to have the vote, his sister should not be trusted with it until she is thirty; but progress is slow, and the present position is not nearly so absurd as that of ten years ago, when women had no vote at all. The point to note is that the whole line is advancing, and, so long as that can be' shown, Lady Astor and her sisters in the cause should be,satisfied.