Explore "A Year of Prophesying" by H.G. Wells on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The British Labour movement is being agitated at present by one of the most important questions in the world, the question whether a woman has a right to clear and complete knowledge about her own body and the fundamental facts of her life. It is a searching and dividing question that may very well split the party into two discordant sections. The old-fashioned politicians who haven't yet observed that women have now got votes, consider the question ought to be left outside politics. It is too real a question for the old parliamentary game. What would the grand Old Man have said about it? The Elder Spinsters of the Labour movement also rally to the protection of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald's gentility, his fine old-fashioned statesmanlike evasiveness. But the Labour Women's Conference carried a resolution against the blushingly tactful Elder Spinsters.
These younger women believe that women really are responsible citizens, that democracy does mean treating adults with respect instead of concealing anything that matters most to them from them; that women ought to know what marriage means for them and how motherhood may be undertaken or declined before diseases and children and such-like intense and overwhelming things blot out their youth and health.