4o8 



The Review of Reviews. 



own hands. So long as the monopolist male evaded 

 discussion with a more or less polite smile the move- 

 ment made no progress, and could make none. Mrs. 

 Pankhurst and her friends have at least succeeded in 

 compelling Mr. Owen and his friends to come out into 

 the open and state with brutal frankness their reason 

 for believing that woman has nothing to teach man 

 in the government of a State which every year inter- 

 feres more and more with the management of the 

 home. Mr. Owen's book is in excellent contrast with 

 M. Finot's. although for a man it is somewhat melan- 

 choly reading. 



III.— A REAL WORKING WOMAN. 



The " Autobiography of a Working Woman : Frau 

 Adelheid Popp " (T. Fisher Unwin. 3s. 6d.), which 

 has been published with an introduction by Mr. 

 Ramsay Macdonald and a preface by Herr Bebel, 

 is, as Mr. Macdonald says, a tragic page torn from 

 the book of life. Madame Popp had a drunken father, 

 and was born in the depths of poverty in Vienna. 

 She was set to work when she was eight or nine, 

 and struggled upwards, despite ill-health and miserable 

 wages. In this Isook she tells the story of the actual life 

 of the working woman and girl in Austrian factories 

 without exaggeration or embellishment. Madame Popp 

 was a woman passionately devoted to reading, and 

 nothing is more interesting in this book than the 

 story of her gradual progress from conventional Roman 

 Catholic loyalty to the position of a free-thinking 

 Socialist. The Socialit evangel dawned upon her 

 with good tidings of great joy, and she threw herself 

 into the work of propaganda with all the enthusiasm 

 of her nature. She began by securing subscribers to 

 Socialist papers, then went to speak at working men's 

 meetings, and afterwards contributed to Socialist news- 

 papers. She is now a widow with two children, whom 

 she supports ; she edits a Socialist organ in Vienna, 

 and pursues the work of Socialist propaganda with 

 iinabated energy and enthusiasm. This plain and 

 simple story of the life of a working woman is 

 useful reading alike to those who, with M. Finot, 

 idealise women and those who regard her with the 

 hardly-veiled contempt expressed by Mr. Owen. 



IV.— INTERMITTENT IDIOTS AND PERIODICAL 

 LUNATICS. 



. In the' last days of last month a Daniel came to 

 judgment in the person of Sir Almroth Wright, who 

 filled three columns of the Times with a demonstration 

 of the utter unfitness of women lo perform any func- 



tions requiring reason, balance, morality, or a sense of 

 proportion. It was the same doctor who, a year or two 

 ago, demonstrated that it was unhealthy to wash, and 

 that dirt was a protective against the bacteria of 

 disease. Dr. Wright began his manifesto by a declara- 

 tion that for man the physiology and psychology of 

 woman is full of difficulties. He draws an eerie and 

 gruesome picture of this creature of mystery, whose 

 mind is " always threatened with danger from the 

 reverberations of her physiological emergencies." But 

 surely Sir Oracle proves too much. If woman be unfit 

 to vote once in five 3'ears because she is periodically 

 liable to regularly recurring fits of insanit)', this inter- 

 mittent lunatic is much less fit to exercise the constant 

 responsibility of motherhood. As a citizen she would 

 have a chance that polling-day might coincide with 

 one of her lucid intervals. But in the governance of 

 the home and in the upbringing of children there is no 

 intermittance of responsibility. No doubt if mother- 

 hood had been a lucrative profession which men could 

 have usurped, this argument would have been pressed 

 for the purpose of showing that women were morally, 

 intellectually, and physically disqualified by Nature 

 from undertaking the serious responsibility of managing 

 the home and superintending the training of children. 

 Beings whose tendency is to " morally warp when 

 nervously ill " should never be entrusted with the 

 onerous task of moulding the moral lite of the next 

 generation. That man does not understand woman 

 may be admitted. But it is a curious non-sequitur to 

 argue that because he does not understand her, there- 

 fore he alone is competent to legislate for her. It is 

 surely the first time that admitted ignorance has been 

 put forward as an adequate title to exclusive control. 

 This is surely a new development of the rights and 

 privileges arising out of the title-deeds of ignorance. 

 The less a man seems to understand a woman the 

 more certain he appears to be of his divine right to 

 govern her. As a mere man myself, painfully conscious 

 that I do not understand the mystery woman any 

 better than Sir Almroth Wright, I draw from that fact 

 exactlv an opposite conclusion to his. I have neither 

 the insolence to assume that I am necessarily superior 

 to the being who brought me forth into this world, 

 nor the imbecility to claim that because I do not under- 

 stand her I am justified in usurping authority over her 

 and of refusing her a voice or vote in the management 

 of her own affairs-^which, after all, are those of 75 per 

 cent, of the human race — 50 per cent, being her own, 

 and 25 per cent, those of the young children whom she 

 is rearing for the State. 



