After 100 International Women’s Days, real achievement still trumps leftist ideology
Nothing illustrates better the difference between political idealism and political realism than the campaign to advance women in power, now a century old. The idealists insist on universal principles, based on rights theory, which benefit all women equally. Realists grasp the point that gifted women, in actual office and able to exercise authority, do more to persuade the public of women’s fitness to rule than anything else.
Women’s rights campaigners, suffragettes and feminists have achieved astonishingly little. One reason is that most of them were also radically engaged in advancing left-wing causes across the board as well as the specific demands of women. When faced with the choice of which came first, the left or women, it was usually women who were pushed into second place. It is likely that some women would have got the vote in Britain well before the first world war if feminists had been prepared to accept age and property qualifications as opposed to giving the vote to all women over 21. Violet Bonham Carter, daughter of the Liberal prime minister at the time, explained to me that this was why she opposed the suffragettes: their limited aims would have swelled the Tory vote, on balance. Or so she and others believed.
In the event, votes for women over 30 was won easily, with no fuss at all, in 1918, for one simple reason. During the war millions of women had done men’s jobs, in industry, in public services like buses, even in France behind the lines, with energy and competence, even if need be with courage. Any doubt about their ability had been resolved by real women in actual experience.
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