Women are half the world

It is wise as it is generous for women celebrating suffrage tonight in the south to invite men to their Ascot dinner. For the granting of franchise, the right to vote, is the right step always.

In New Zealand, the first country to grant women a vote, the wider enfranchisement of the population came in gradually, landowners first, then leaseholders, then Pa¯ keha¯ working men, Ma¯ ori men and then in 1893 women, all women.

That made New Zealand a world leader, and the influence of women exercising their right to vote helps keep us up fairly high in the stakes when health, education and welfare are the issues.

Women voters have never formed the great ‘‘wowser’’ block predicted by men who at the time could not see past the Women’s Christian Temperance Union involvement.

But semantics aside, men did not grant or give women the vote.

Women won or earned the vote by their determination, their refusal to be thin-skinned or offended by put-downs, their sheer dogged persistence in producing a nationwide petition carrying 37,000 signatures.

Neither did women have to fight to get the vote.

We did not have women chaining themselves to railings, being arrested as obstructions.

Our men may have been reluctant to share the power, anxious that family life could be disrupted, nervous at the thought of equality on the home front, disturbing the order of the kitchen, the peace of the marriage bed.

It is likely that many men accepted their wives could think and vote as wisely as they themselves.

One fear oft-expressed seems very odd: that voting would change women and they would no longer be wives and mothers.

How? God knows, and she is not telling, because it is just not so.

We hold no brief with the idea that we should be equal. We aspire higher than that.

But we should all remember how closely involved our lives, our genders, are.

If every woman in the world, every girl child, were all gathered up in some Rapture and died tonight – guys, the world would be over.

But if instead, God forbid – and she would – every boy child and man were to be taken from us tonight, the world would go on still.

How?

Because in thousands of women, millions worldwide, in their yet-to-be-born babies, creation continues, life is growing, the world goes on.

We are not more precious, more important.

But we are more than half the world and we have been around a long time.

‘‘Women won or earned the vote by their determination, their refusal to be thin-skinned or offended by put-downs, their sheer dogged persistence in producing a nationwide petition ...’’