NOT SO ADVANCED.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20254, 14 May 1929, Page 5

NOT SO ADVANCED.

WOMEN SHOULD REMEMBER.

"It is important," once wrote that great historian, the late Lord Acton, "that people should believe that events occurred as they did occur, and not as they did not." J

It is timely then, for women to realise that they are not sweeping forward as a triumphant sex in the sense that every apparently new privilege is an innovation. Only too often, the most that is being achieved is a recovery of something that women in the Stuart or Hanoverian epochs stupidly let slip, writes Helena Normanton in an English magazine. To come down to cases. What a paean went up when some five years ago a distinguished lady was made Sheriff of Canterbury! The first woman sheriff in English history. Another glorious advance—and so on and so forth. The Record Office list of sheriffs tells a different tale from that. Both in 1216 and 1217, Nicolaa de la Haye was sheriff in Lincolnshire. In 1236 and 1237 Ela Countess of Salisbury was sheriff of Wiltshire. From 1301-3 Margaret, widow -of the Earl of Cornwall, was sheriff of Rutland.

Again, in 1449, Cicely Duchess of Warwick was sheriff for Worcestershire, and at late as 1650 Anne Clifford Countess of Dorset held that office in Westmorland. \

Similar reflections apply to other political "advances" ot women. Proud as we are of our women members of Parliament, it is very chastening to reflect that women sat ia the Witanagemot, the Saxon Parliament, and that Matthew Paris informs us that King John summoned to the Temple Church in London not only his nobles and abbots, but the great abbesses to one of those national taxing assemblies which were the embryo germ of Parliament long before the two Houses were ao.parar.od. In 1277 the Abbesses of Wilton, Barking, St. Mary's, Winchester and Shaftesbury were summoned to a great council to "treat upon monetary matters. Women peers in their own right are rigorously excluded from the present House of Lords, but in the 35th year of Edward 111. no less than nino peeresses who held land in Ireland were called up to a Parliament wh f oh was to treat, principally, Irish affairs. In 1306 the great abbesses were again summoned to a Parliament..

A long and interesting history narrates the varying fortunes of' women as voters at Parliamentary and local elections. It has often been remarked that the indentures for the election of knights of the shire sometimes bore female names upon t heir seals—as, for example, those of Lucia Countess of Kent (1412) and Margaret Vavasour (1415). In 1644 Coko m his "Ihstitutes" casually classes women among those having no votes, and this unfortunate dictum was followed for centuries, although with a good many protests, a case being actually fought, and lost, by women in 1863. Something parallel to this was going on in' France. Throughout the Middle Ages women of noble and of burgess birth there enjoyed the same privileges as men. The women of Beaumont had the express written privilege given to them to vote in all elections as far back as 1185. Aud yet Frenchwomen to-day have no vote!

In France women lost voting power in 1789; m England it was not finally settled that women could not vote until 1868. Present political rights are a revival—not an innovation. Queen Mary's Privy Oouneillorship merely accentuates the fart that the Privy Council has always been open to women. Professional sex straggles are no new tiling either. Five great, women lawyers lectured in medieval Bologna, the mother of all universities. Salerno in eaifo' oajs trained many women doctors. . . As early as 1421 the men physicians of England wore petitioning Par,ia "'f''" that " no unlearned man nor any woman should practise -physic." One wonders how many more centuries it will be before men get ovei being scared of women About five, I fancy—but thon I was ever an optimist. At all events, women should take thenown progress very calmly, and not grow conceited about the commonplaces of the Middle Ages.