WOMEN AND CITIZENSHIP

By

META SCHOOLEY LAWS

             In our last article we discussed the subject of citizenship from a general standpoint.

             Shall we this week inquire as to the part of woman’s chief organizations play in furthering our influence in the national sphere which the franchise opens to us?

             We are quite accustomed to divide our lives into two distinct sections-the secular, and the sacred interests.

             Yet, as a Christian nation, we, its citizens, must not stress this division too strongly, because only so far as Christian principle pervades our whole lives, are we true to form.

             We will but mention the church organizations, to whose success women contribute in so large measure.

             We must, however, keep politics out of religion, though perhaps few will question the assertion that a little more religion would not be detrimental to our public life.

             But aside from these various religious organizations, what other organizations have we stressing the fundamental duties of citizenship.

             One of the most far reaching women’s organizations is the National Council.

             With it, nearly every other worthwhile organization is affiliated to some slight degree at least.

             Indeed, the very work which it pursues makes it impossible for any other organization to be complete outside its influence. For the weight of the National Council is brought to bear upon all worth while endeavor or projects of a national scope, which any of us essay.

             Every five years there is an international council meeting held at which women’s civic problems are discussed from the widest possible angle.

             The last meeting of this sort was held in Washington in May 1925. Such questions as Women and World Peace, Personal Naturalization of Woman were fully discussed.

             Educative campaigns were inaugurated. But through the discussion like a thread of gold, the relation which all these questions bear to the greatest institution in any nation, its homes, was ever in evidence.

             Women and home’s home and country. Or may we say women make or mar homes; homes make or mar nations.

             It is significant that at least two of the great women organizations of Ontario centre all their work around this idea. The W. L. whose motto is “For Home and Country,” the U.F.W.O. whose declaration that politics is truly defined as “the science which deals with everything which touches for good or evil, your home and mine.”

             These organizations systemize their work by committees dealing with the various phases of home life. But they keep in mind always this thought, that our communities are just your homes and mine; our country the sum of all the communities. Their work is directed toward helping every home to make the needed contributions to community life; toward translating into action the theory that national ideals, national interests are but the sum total of the ideals, the interests of the people who form the nation. The interest of the individual, must, of course, be subservient to the nation. The interest of the individual, interest of the nation as a whole, yet the whole as Euclid remarked is “the sum of all its parts.” You, I are only one of these parts but we are each of us, one.

             Tennyson said, “The individual weakens, and the whole is more and more”-but that does not mean that the individual may “weaken” in moral or intellectual fibre if “the whole” is to grow “more and more” worthy. Quite the contrary.

             There are other great women’s organizations too, the W.C.T. U.’S the I.O.D.E’s the woman’s section of the labor movement, and others.

             What is their value, any, all of them, to us women as citizens.

             They must, of course, be constructive in their aims. There is an old saying that “any fool can pull down faster than ten wise men can build.”

             Yet there is a constructive destruction, too. We women rip the garment which we propose to remodel. We destroy only the worn-out, useless parts. The rest we use. Men pull down a useless or unsightly building, clear away the debris, salvage all that is of value and on the site of the old, and perhaps incorporating into itself much of the material of the old, the new structure is reared.

             But to destroy as a conflagration destroys, wantonly, ruthlessly, is worse than valueless.

             Organizations if such there be, working on that principle will die of themselves, in any enlightened land.

             Nearly everyone in this county has seen the erstwhile suspension bridges across Niagara river. The supporting cables form a splendid illustration of the value of organization. Each cable is composed of tiny tested wires. Each one separately weak; all placed side by side, no matter how closely inadequate; but woven together, the individuality of each separate wire intact, the cables supported the bridge.

             Women’s work as citizens is the bridge. Each worth while organization a cable.

             Many, ah, so many of our women are the tiny loose wires of splendid material, the same as that of the wires in the cable, but useless because only individual.

             There is another lesson for us in these bridges.

             The first suspension bridge was a wooden structure.

             It became unsafe for the great traffic which crossed it- trams, vehicles, foot passengers. It had to be replaced by an iron structure.

             A master mind directed the workman, and piece by piece the wooden bridge was replaced by one of iron traffic never interrupted. A wonderful triumph of constructive destruction.

             But a much greater task was accomplished when around and beneath the suspension bridge the great steel arch bridge was built, with only a few hours of cessation of traffic at the completion of the work, though a complete change of principle was involved.

             So may any constitutional change which comes to our beloved land be wrought.

             May we women, through our organizations equip ourselves fully for our part in the work of national development.

             But after all no woman’s organization is complete unless another principle which few of them make prominent is kept in view.

             Woman, alone, men alone, are neither of them competent to rightly build homes, communities, nations. It is not a question of superiority. They must work together, each supplementing and complementing the work of the other.

             “As the string unto the bow, is,

             So unto the man is woman

             Useless each without the other.”

The Welland Tribune and Telegraph

2 December 1926