Votes for Women

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 204, 21 May 1943, Page 3

Votes for Women

HASTY reading of the expressed on Pages 4 and 5 might suggest that the women of New Zealand do not value their political privileges, and would not be greatly disturbed if they lost them. The truth is almost the exact opposite of this: the vote is so much a part of their lives that they don’t remember when it came to them, and when they are asked to think what life would be like without it they can’t find their way through such an unreal world. There are of course women still living who remember those days of darkness, who took part in the battle for liberation, and who can still recall the thrill of the first universal vote. One of them has some interesting things to say in this issue. But they are not numerous and they are not. typical. To women in general in New Zealand the right to vote is as natural, as necessary, but as unexciting as the right to read the newspapers and send their children free to school. It is not possible to think of even curtailing the right--by raising the voting age, for example — and if a proposal were made to take it away altogether no one would get agitated because no one would believe that such madness could be advocated seriously. And it makes no difference at all that so few women take an active part in politics. Not many women take an active part in religion or education or law or medicine. Until 1939 hardly any had taken an active part in war. But the bearing of all those things on their lives is as well understood by the calmest woman as by the most excited man, and it would be getting the whole picture out of focus to assume that when they don’t speak they don’t care. There is in fact no one in Zealand, male or female, who would say in 1943 that democracy could be maintained on the votes of men alone. It would be as sensible to say that a bird could fly with one wing or a tree grow straight if the wind blew one way only.