#Victoria was asked about the suffrage movement and SPOKE AGAINST IT

[greypetrel]

Watching Poldark with my mother, who is allegedly not into history. We're in 1790s Cornwall.

Elizabeth: "But I just married, whatever should I do in my days?"

Mother: "Those poor women, it must have been so boring, they had nothing to do save bearing children!"

Me: "ACTUALLY-"

*slams Mary Wollstonecraft-Shelley on the table, Anne Radcliffe, Jane Austen, mantua making, Anne Clavering and others and we're talking of just England- Concluding that it was fucking Queen Victoria that ruined it.*

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"PRO-SUFFRAGISTS WIN IN DEBATE," Montreal Gazette. October 15, 1913. Page 5. ---- Marshalling of Facts and Figures Refutes Allegations of Antis ---- WOMEN WERE ELOQUENT ----- Mrs. Seymour Carter and Mrs. Fenwick Williams on Rival Sides, Aided by Two Mere Men ---- Shattering the argument of their opponents with an overwhelming array of facts and figures arranged in logical sequence, and the apparent incontrovertible assumption that what had worked well in other communities of similar traditions and institutions would be successful here, Mrs. Fenwick Williams and Professor J. A. Dale, of McGill University, last night secured a unanimous verdict by three judges that they had made out a case for the granting of the franchise to women.

Their task was, perhaps, the easier, with the sympathies of nine-tenths of the audience with them, but it must be said of the audience, the majority of whom were women, that their attitude was as eminently fair to the debaters on the other side. Mrs. Seymour Carpenter and Mr. Maurice Alexander had undertaken to prove the affirmative in a debate on the principle that "The enfranchisement of women is undesirable," and though they labored under all the disadvantages of building up a constructive thesis, in which the other side had simply to pick a flaw or two to bring about the collapse of the whole fabric, they made some points which the judges and the audience admitted, gave the debaters for the negative some difficulty to explain away.

The debate was staged at Victoria Hall, Westmount, and attracted an audience of between two hundred and three hundred people. Mrs. Seymour Carpenter, leader for the affirmative, assumed as her premises that the greatest requisite of the world today was peace, and that the most disastrous of all forms of strife would be a sex war, which would be an almost certain result if the sexes were to clash in political life. Woman's sphere was in the home, and her greatest task, Imposed by the Inexorable laws of nature, to rear, train and mould the character of her children. The franchise would impose upon women tasks for which they were not only constitutionally unfitted, but which would entail for them an intolerable burden. Woman's natural work must suffer if she were to be called upon to take up new tasks.

It had been stated the other day by Dr, Laberge, the civic health officer, that the high rate of infantile mortality prevailing in Montreal was due to the neglect of their children by parents. Should women then be called upon to further neglect their children? Mrs. Carpenter stated that suffrage was first introduced among the Mormons who gave the vote to their women in order to retain control of the state for the purposes of their religion, as against the influx of newcomers.

In conclusion, the affirmative leader asked why, if suffrage would really mean the emancipation of women, they should not emigrate to those states or countries in which the vote was granted them? Peasants from countries not really free, such as Russia, were constantly seeking new homes, but she had yet to find that there was any concerted movement of women from unenfrachised states to those where women had the vote.

EXPERIENCE OF ANTIPODES. Mrs. Fenwick Williams, replying for the negative, asserted that anti- suffragists always spoke only in the future tense, making with supreme confidence predictions of dire calamities to follow the enfranchisement of women that past history would not justify. Women had not been unsexed in any of the twenty-two states and nations where suffrage now obtained, and in some of these countries women had been voting for the past forty-five years. Not a man in the suffrage states could be found to come forward and advocate the repeal of the law.

Mrs. Williams had a startling array of facts on the subject of infantile mortality. The high death rate among Infants, she declared, was due to the fact that women were forbidden by law in this country to protect their children. In England and Wales, where women could not vote, the infant mortality rate was 109 per thousand. In Canada it was 125 per 1,000. In Australia, where women vote, it was 70 per 1,000, and in New Zealand as law as 60 per 1,000. The low rate in the antipodes could not be attributed to the climate, for the ellmate was the same today as thirty years ago, and the granting of the franchise to women had not changed it. Thirty years ago, before women voted, the infant death rate in New Zealand was the highest in the world, nearly 200 in the thousand. In West Australia fourteen years ago the rate was 184 per thousand, and today this had been reduced to 78. In Canada twenty years ago the death rate was 125 per thousand, and it remained at the same figure today. Mrs. Williams pleaded for the enfranchisement of all women, and the anti-suffragist could not be obliged to exercise the vote if she did not wish to do so.

Mr. Alexander took the view that suffrage would mean a revolution, and an addition to the already heavy burdens of the state. Women were physically, morally and mentally unfitted to cope with the problems of political life. and should not be asked to assume greater burdens than those nature bad already imposed upon them.

NO FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCES Professor Dale, in rebuttal, assumed that both suffragists and anti-suffragists expected too much. He could not be persuaded that there were such fundamental differences between men and women that they could not co- operate in the solution of problems affecting the common life of the country. It was not always war time; by far the greater problems of the state were those of industrial and domestic life, and women could bring as great intelligence and inherent integrity of character to bear on these as men. It was argued that women had not the training to exercise political functions. Neither had men become statesmen except in the exercise of their voting privileges. Great political geniuses today were the descendants of peasants who had fought for and obtained their freedom in the same way that the militants were fighting today, and though they were then looked upon as male-factors they were now regarded as heroes, to whom monuments were erected. Obtaining the vote had not destroyed men's functions as fathers, bread winners, and generally useful citizens, but had on the other hand improved their status and made them a more valuable asset to the state, and it seemed reasonable to assume that the vote might do the same for women.

Professor MacNaughton, Miss Carrie Derrick, and Mr. C. Gordonsmith, who were the judges, announced their verdict in favor of the negative, after which the meeting was thrown open to general, discussion by the chairman, Mr. A. R. McMaster.