From the TM Archives - A letter to the Women of England from 1919
Prepared by Nika Gamtsemlidze
Monday, May 6
In the previous issues, we explored numerous articles published in the Georgian Messenger in 1919. Including an article called The Women of Georgia, written by Catharine Shiukashvili. Today we offer an article also written by her about English women. Shiukashvili studied Sociology at the University of Geneva and after coming back to Georgia was actively involved in the social life.
To the Women of England
To you, women of the British Isles. I send my greeting from the heights of the Caucasus, and the odor of tender violets from the laurel-clad shores of the Black Sea. To your heart I turn with my appeal and with my women's griefs.
In our struggle to attain equal rights, have we not been following too blindly the path which has been trodden by heavy masculine feet? Have we not tried to too great an extent to imitate them and to impress their type upon ourselves? Have we not been false to our women's heart, whose simple intuition is often a better guide to happiness than all the complicated theories of superior masculine wisdom? Is not love that golden lever which lightens all the difficulties of life, and brings about complete accord, once the heart and not the head does the thinking.
Then lastly, is not love with sympathy the fountain-head which supplies the world and the basis of all creative work? When the god of war unfolded above the whole world his bloody standard, and gathered in humanity drunk with his devouring flame: when the best social endeavours, backed up by the treaties of the pacifists, were turned into pieces of paper: when civilized Europe surpassed the barbarians in the ferocities of which she was guilty, inventing and putting into use more and more refined and perfected weapons of death and destruction; when she did not wish to destroy all that centuries of human thought had won for humanity, and did not recoil before the world-wide wail of mothers, wives and children; when the little nations perished under the mailed heels of the great ones, it was then that we women showed our “manhood”, and, without listening to the call of our tender women's heart, we thrust our brothers, our husbands and our sons into the jaws of destruction, merely asking them to bring back from the war the helmets of the enemy.
But were we weak in thus exhibiting a man's resolution? Were we not far lower than those simple women of old, who threw themselves between their warring brothers and husbands, and quenched the flame of murderous conflict? Would it not have been more truly womanly and more truly humane for us also to rush between the warring armies and ward off the murderous sword?
It might be that in that case that the wisest strategy of renowned generals and the coolest thinking of the acutest statesmen would seem like a cruel experiment before the simple logic of a woman's loving heart, which would have spared humanity from a legion of murdered. crippled or ruined families, from broken lives and from the hidden rage which fills the heart of the combattants. Is there a brave man, who, in the face of the fearful apotheosis of war, will have the courage to say this to the victors and to the vanquished - but I see no victors, but just tortured, deceived humanity, deafened by the hellish laugh of Satan triumphant.
And now, when the crossed spear is unable to unravel the knot of international complications, when the voices of the weak are again heard over the infernal music of war, would it not be fitting for us at the Peace Conference, by an appeal, whether direct or indirect, in defence of those principles which will in the future put an end to every possibility of war?
Remember that war, as the supreme form of physical force, is the grave of women's rights: we cannot be on an equality with those who have need of war. In the period of great wars, woman has been valued only as the source of new warriors, and Napoleon was correct in his anti-feminine aphorism.
We must demand that the Peace Conference should be a conference where human rights are respected: the mighty in this world should not gather there to dispute the hegemony of two hemispheres with one another, but so as to give the little nations the possibility through their own representatives of restoring the rights which have been trampled upon, and in this way to lay a solid foundation for the true league of peoples, for general disarmament and the introduction of peace throughout the whole world.
Can it be doubted that woman should have a place at the conference, where the rights of the injured and the outraged are being restored, where the foundation of world-wide love is being laid down, and where the oppressive mourning for the victims of the madness of humanity is being removed.
If the male half of humnnity is still hankering after enslavement, and shall close the doors of the worlds tribunal to us, none the less we shall be present in thought, for we shall send our representatives thither not with the parting words: “With thy shield or upon it”, but with the demand for “love and justice”.
