The Great Barrier.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVIII, Issue 21, 20 November 1912, Page 33

The Great Barrier.

‘‘An Old-Fashioned Person’’ writes on “The Question of the Vote” in the July number of “The Girl’s Own Paper and Woman’s Magazine.” She says: —“Tn my mind the great barrier to women in politics is the natural physical one. There are so many times when home is the only proper place for a woman. This fact is inexorable. It seems to me that the only proper time for women to mix with num at the polls is after she is fifty years of age. I do not say this flippantly. 1 believe it. I think that sex is the real barrier to women’s rights. “I am convinced that the whole secret of woman’s clamouring for her right” lies in the purse. It is said that the love of money is the root of all evil. Then* is no doubting the fact that woman’s un rest, her discontent, her desire toget into business and polities arise directly from her scum* of injustice over money. Mon

want to give women ‘what money they need’ they propose to be judges of this, and women, year by year, have grown more weary of it. more desirous of having things more equitably arranged. “Now. on this one point I am a suffragist. If by voting we could settle this unlovely dispute, remove from women’s lives this cloud oj unhappiness, I would say let vote. But 1 cannot see how suffrage would make this matter any better. If the law should name a certain percentage of a man's salary as the just portion for a woman’s services as his partner in life, there would still be room for dispute. She might spend it foolishly, and have to fall back on him for a further portion, or she might keep up a continual fussing over the inadequacy of the amount: it would resolve itself after all into a domestic problem to be worked out according to the com-mon-sense of the parties involved. “So long as marriage remain* an institution, so long as men and women come

together with the idea of keeping tc each other for a lifetime, these questions of domestic equity will conn* up. and they will have to be settled by the coupl 1 themselves. No law can intervene here. Sentiment and custom can change, are changing, but the actual condition of woman in the married state, if she is living according to Nature, will remain about the same. There is that in the old. obi story of life and love which cannot be changed, and which, after all. we do not want changed when it comes to the point. Eor this reason. I think most women would vote with their husbands I knowall unmarried women would vote with their sweethearts I never saw a girl who wouldn’t change her politics to -nit her lover. “It is this idea of the actual immuta bility of the history of human life that makes me feel how little change the vot • would actually bring, and also makes me doubt that much goo.l would come of it. I believe there is no more dost roying force than the idea that very soon next year or the year after there is going to bo a change, and that meanwhile what oilers at present isn’t worth doing.”