THE SUFFRAGETTES.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 283, 22 April 1913, Page 8

THE SUFFRAGETTES.

The trend of the feminist tide is the subject of an interesting article in the current number of the Nineteenth Cen■titry and After, by Mrs. Archibald Colquhoun, who holds the view that the woman's movement, if it continues on its present lines, must cause the downfall of home life. The author writes:— Round H;he fundamental fact of common parenthood and the dependence of the breeding mother, woman has built up the tissue of customs and conventions called "home," which, expanded in ever-widen-ing circles, becomes society. But wise women know that man can do without this elaborate edifice; he can—and does (even after centuries of civilisation) — dispense with it readily. With the chains, first of his affections, and then of his duty, woman has partially tamed the wild animal. She has made his cage so cosy that he preferred it to the open, and never knew it was a cage. But here come the feminists whose theory is that 1 cages of any kind are immoral and that wc ought all to dwell in the windy open. A few strokes of their hatchets on the already weakened bars and man will be free—and woman will have to begin her work all over again! Woman cannot range freely alongside man in the open. The little liands of children pull her down. Even the sterner feminists concede her necessity for a nest—a Stateprovided nest—a poor substitute for the shelter which through long ages she has been training man to build for her. But } in the feminist movement there is little chance for the mother-woman to be ' heard. In every department it is the child-free woman who is vocal, who fills the public eye with her activity. If the suffrage were granted to women it is this type whose voice would prevail, whose point of view would be insistent. Already she sets the fashion for the young and the pace for the others. Her social activity, her cleverness, her glibne3s, her power of organisation are amazing, and withal she is the interpreter of man to woman and of woman to herself, so that she is fashioning the philosophy of the sexes anew. I have tried to indicate the trend of that philosophy, and I say that it threatens women with a worse enslavement than any she has suffered before when it offers her "equality" with man. Studying the evolution of family life in the hist half-century, and recognising what h»> been done for women, both as to their legal status and emancipation from conventional codes, we are yet faced with the phenomena of the' weakening of social and family ties and obligations, the decline of parental influence, the growth of peripatetic habits, and of flat and hotel life, with the consequent dwindling importance of the housewife and house-mother.