Hundred Years' War

A little over one hundred years ago Harriet Martineau, a deaf but gifted English spinster, toured the U. S. equipped with reforming zeal, a philosophical and inquisitive mind, and a huge, old-fashioned ear trumpet which she aimed like a blunderbuss at the people she questioned. She discovered that only seven occupations were open to U. S. women: domestic service, keeping boarders, teaching young children, needlework, weaving, typesetting and bookbinding.* In 1840 two U. S. ladies, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, attended a World's Anti-Slavery Conference in London, were first barred because of their sex, then permitted to listen to the proceedings from behind a screen. They walked down Great Queen Street that night, boiling mad, resolved to return to the U. S. and launch a holy war for woman's rights.

Last week in Manhattan some 300 delegates assembled in a Woman's Centennial Congress to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the struggle. It was a strange, emotional gathering, in which common-sensical and acute analyses of woman's position in the modern world contrasted with a vague program of action. It began with foreign delegates reporting on the status of women and of the women's movement under totalitarianism. It ended, after about 20 hours of speechmaking and report-reading, with a Declaration of Purpose: ". . . to use our freedom to support, defend and preserve the Constitution, and to work for the progressive securing of freedom, social justice and peace for all people."

What Next? The Congress was not quite in the dilemma of the Prohibition Party after the adoption of the 18th Amendment: What to fight for? But it faced a comparable problem of having achieved its obvious ends and of trying to find out the best uses of its power. In 1848, Elizabeth Stanton called a convention of woman's-rights seekers that adopted a Declaration of Sentiments modeled on the Declaration of Independence: "The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her." It listed 18 specific grievances. Last week's Congress pointed out how few of them still applied:

>"He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise."

>"He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she has no voice."

>"He has made her, if married, in the eyes of the law, civilly dead. . . . He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns."

>"He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration. ..."

>"He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed to her." (Last week it was reported at the Congress that 4,000,000 U. S. girls were in high school, 500,000 in college.)

>"He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself. ... He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life."

These things could no longer be fought for. In 100 years U. S. women had won the vote and had disproved the anti-suffragette scientist who in 1907 warned that women's desire for the vote came from their "katabolic" condition, which, if unchecked, would unsex them and depopulate the cradle. They had won positions in U. S. educational, political and economic life--present were Mrs. Roosevelt, Dean Virginia Gildersleeve, Judge Florence Allen, Minister to Norway Mrs. J. Borden Harriman, many another woman who had made a name in public service. But votes for women had failed to clean up graft, make legislatures more intelligent, or lift democracy to new heights. This last item gave most speakers at last week's Congress an idea.

New Crusade? Most of them felt that the greatest danger to women was totalitarianism because it condemns women to domestic life and destroys their civil rights. That the women's movement was no longer exclusively feminist was implicit via the fact that totalitarianism in destroying civil rights seldom discriminates between men and women. Nor did the Congress face the paradox that in at least one totalitarian country, Russia, women have relatively more freedom than in the U. S., are permitted to marry and divorce without fuss, to work in steel mills, dig canals, manage collective farms, drive tractors, serve in the GPU, make parachute jumps, act as ships' officers, and are frequently elected to Congress.

But beyond the question of whether democracy could be made into a woman's crusade was the still bigger question whether U. S. women of 1940 could be fired by a spirit such as that which fired Elizabeth Stanton and Lucretia Mott. To make a good crusade, the crusaders have to be underdogs, preferably an abused minority. In Washington last week the Census Bureau revealed that the excess of males over females in the U. S. is declining, that by 1945 there should be a female majority in the U. S. for the first time.

Even this did not dismay Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, 81-year-old veteran suffrage leader. "We have got our rights," she said. "Well, what are we going to do with them? We have got to re-establish rights for men."

*They also made umbrellas, shoes, snuff, gloves, caps, hose and lamps; wove hair, washed clothes, packed tobacco, etc.

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