Is There a Tyranny of Woman?

Thames Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 17763, 10 December 1929, Page 7

Is There a Tyranny of Woman?

"Women, they've made us their -.slaves,'' he said, "their slaves, do you 'hear me ?"

He was a peppery little man, and he shook his newspaper truculently in ■my face. "The law's on their side. Everything's on their side." In days when women haft no political ..rights, and were debarred from most professions, it was right and necessary, "j.e conceded, thai: they should\be projected, lint now, when they shared • -equal political rights with men, when «jost branches of human pursuit were ;pcn to them, when they stood, in many <e»scs, a better chance of earning a livtiig than men did, it was monstrous that the marriage laws should be bashed on the principle, that woman was it weak and defenceless creature. /'The laws are mediaeval," he concluded, "with woman emancipated and divorce freed from its social taint.

What is marriage but a baited trap >nrith alimony at the end of it ?" \ , All in Ten Years. I did not answer. He was in no ■mood for argument. I listened- in •silence, thinking how the wheel had turned, remembering how imy nurse to take me for walks on Hampitead Heath to hear young women acclaiming from pony traps 'on Sunday mornings that taxation without reprcleutation was tyranny; remembering .the heartsearchings in my father's of; -flee in the first year of the war when -.the question* of employing girl clerks ■wad raised, and the directorial fears that work in the counting-house would be permanently suspended. 'And I thought how miraculously the ff ar had telescoped events so that a process that would normally have 'taken ten decades had reached its cli--max in ten years, so that within a few anonths of the suffrage agitation men •were complaining that women were taking the bread put of their mouths, iso that a few weeks hence, in the Vilenna Hofburg, there is actually to.be jield an international congress of the .(oppressed male sex to initiate a world•jvvide movement against the tyranny of *'the unprincipled women" who are -f'exploiting and victimising men." "We have daughters," the appeal ;|*uns, "and do not desire, that men Should be prevented from marriage by existing conditions.?' I thought of that; remembering at' ithe same time how an old man now in ihis grave had said, "Well, even if jbhey do have the vote, I don't know "that it.'il make much difference." For aife docs not work out by formula. '-[Twenty years agQ women were legally Vi?f &wned prop^yQtoy^

A Comment by Alex Wau£h on the Vienna Movement of Protest Against "The Tyranny of The Unprincipled Women who are Exploiting and Vicjmisins Men."

employed labour; they ;»aid taxes, yet they ii.-if no share in their country's government. •

To-day it is the man who is legally ill-used. For though politically woman is man's equal, the law is devised for the safety and protection of woman, making the husband responsible for his wife's behaviour.

Yet the actual state of things remains little altered. Politically, woman may be man's equal. But outside America, and even there to a greater extent than Americans will admit, it is only in the less remunerative walks of life that women meet men upon terms of equality. Important posts do not go to women.

The War Office and Admiralty are closed to them, and though in the law, medicine, in politics, in finance they are faced with an open market, how many women have bothered to stand for Parliament, how many women have seats upon the boards of important companies 1 When a woman applies for a post is she not, simply because she happens to be a woman, invariably offered a smaller salary than a man would be ? How many women do, in actual fact, earn more than ten pounds a

week ? And when we hear that a wife •has been* daserted by her husband, is not our first, question, "What is going to happen to the poor thing now ?"•

The Old Tyranny Let their legal position be what it may, for the average individual man and woman life in its essentials has not appreciably altered. In spite of the anomalies of the law, the modern man is no more., conscious of his shackles than was the woman of hers before the war. And the gentlemen who will attend the Vienna Conference to protest against the "unprincipled woman" and defend the rights of the "exploited man" will be,-.J fancy, the masculine equivalents of the ladies who declaimed in pre-war days against the tyranny' of man. i

No doubt a visitor from another planet would read the property Acts of California with dismay, but in t actual fact I suspect that the tyranny of woman is exercised to-day as it was in the days of Anne Hathaway and Cleopatra, not in public upon the male race at large, but in private upon such Ma;itafaiif as are ready to submit to it.