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Title: The Women's Victory—and After: Personal Reminiscences, 1911-1918

Author: Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett

Release date: April 30, 2015 [eBook #48833]

Language: English

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THE WOMEN'S VICTORY—AND
AFTER




 "When there is a fervent aspiration after better things, springing
 from a strong feeling of human brotherhood and a firm belief in the
 goodness and righteousness of God, such aspiration carries with it
 an invincible confidence that somehow, somewhere, somewhen, it must
 receive its complete fulfilment; for it is prompted by the Spirit
 which fills and orders the Universe throughout its whole development."

  J. B. MAYOR: _Virgil's Messianic Eclogue_.

[Illustration: "AT LAST!"

(Reproduced by special permission of the Proprietors of _Punch_.)

_Punch_, January 23, 1918.]

      [_Frontispiece._
]




 The Women's Victory—and
 After: Personal
 Reminiscences, 1911-1918

 By Millicent Garrett Fawcett,
 LL.D., once President, N.U.W.S.S.


 London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd.




_First published in 1920_




DEDICATORY PREFACE

TO THOSE WHO MADE THE DREAM COME TRUE


I wish to dedicate this little book to the thousands of faithful
friends and gallant comrades whose brave unwearied work, steadfastly
maintained through many years, made Women's Suffrage in Great Britain
no longer a dream but a reality. Many of them have passed away, but
their work, its results, and our gratitude remain. Whether in the flesh
or out of the flesh, I have been accustomed to think of them as the
Goodly Fellowship of the Prophets; for they foresaw what was coming,
proclaimed it, and devoted themselves in making it come in the right
way. All my gratitude goes out to them, especially to—

  E.G.A. : C.C.O. : E.F.R. : I.O.F. :
    A.G. : R.G. : E.P. : E.A. :
       R.S. : E.G. : H.A. :
         S.G. : I.H.W. :
              E.I.

Through the kindness of the Proprietors of _Punch_, I am allowed to
use as illustrations some of their excellent pictures demonstrating
the growth of the suffrage movement. For this permission, and also
for their valued support and sympathy, continued over many years, my
heartfelt thanks are hereby tendered.

      MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT.

  London,
  _January, 1920_.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER      PAGE

I.  THE TWO DEPUTATIONS      1

II.  THE DEFEAT OF THE CONCILIATION BILL      20

III.  THE ELECTION FIGHTING FUND      30

IV.  THE FIASCO OF THE GOVERNMENT REFORM BILL      39

V.  THE PILGRIMAGE AND THE DERBY DAY, 1913      54

VI.  THE TURN OF THE TIDE      68

VII.  THE WORLD WAR AND WOMEN'S WAR WORK      86

VIII.  WOMEN'S WAR WORK AS IT AFFECTED PUBLIC OPINION      106

IX.  THE LAST PHASE      121

X.  THE DIFFERENCE THE VOTE HAS MADE      156

APPENDIX      169

INDEX      173




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

(_Reproduced by special permission of the Proprietors of "Punch."_)


      TO FACE PAGE

"AT LAST"      _frontispiece_

THE CATCH OF THE SEASON      16

A PLEASURE DEFERRED      52

PRO PATRIA      113

THE MAN OF THE WORLD      117




THE WOMEN'S VICTORY—AND AFTER




CHAPTER I

THE TWO DEPUTATIONS

 "I have a passionate love for common justice and common sense."—SYDNEY
 SMITH.


In 1911 I wrote a little book called "Women's Suffrage: a Short History
of a Great Movement." My intention in the following pages is to bring
my story up to February 6th, 1918, when the Royal Assent was given to
the Representation of the People Act, which for the first time placed
women on the register of parliamentary voters.

In 1911 I ended my book on a note of confidence. I felt quite sure
that we were going to win soon, but I did not the least foresee the
wonderful series of events which actually led to so complete and great
a victory.

Not that all the signs were favourable in 1911—very far from it. There
were many ominous clouds on the horizon, and one of the chief of them
was the known hostility of Mr. Asquith, then Prime Minister, and at
the zenith of his power. His acuteness and dexterity in offence and
defence were unrivalled, and most suffragists believed that he intended
to wreck our cause on the rocks of Adult Suffrage, for which there had
been no demand in the country.

In 1908, almost immediately after he became Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith
had announced his intention before the expiration of that Parliament to
bring in an Electoral Reform Bill; this Bill, he had declared, would
not include women; but he pledged his Government not officially to
oppose a woman suffrage amendment "if drafted on democratic lines."
The Parliament elected in 1906 with an overwhelming Liberal majority
was dissolved in 1909 without the fulfilment of this intention. There
were two General Elections in 1910 without the introduction of a Reform
Bill. But the suffrage societies continued without intermission to
keep up a tremendously active agitation for the enfranchisement of
women. The various methods employed have been sufficiently described
in my earlier book. It is enough here to state that a large majority
of Members of the House of Commons, belonging to all parties, were
pledged to support women's suffrage; that various private Members'
Bills for extending the franchise to women had passed their second
reading in the Commons every year since Mr. Asquith became Prime
Minister; that the strength of our support in the rank and file of
the Liberal—and also in the Conservative—Party was constantly growing,
and that the Labour Party had definitely placed the enfranchisement
of women upon its official programme. In January, 1913, immediately
after what will be hereafter described as the Franchise Bill fiasco of
Mr. Asquith's Government, the Labour Party, at its annual conference,
passed by an enormous majority a resolution reaffirming its support of
women's suffrage, and calling "upon the party in Parliament to oppose
any Franchise Bill in which women are not included." This was the
most signal service to our cause which had then been rendered by any
political party.

It was followed at the next meeting of the Trades Union Congress by the
adoption of the following resolution:

 "That this meeting expresses its deep dissatisfaction with the
 Government's treatment of the franchise question ... and protests
 against the Prime Minister's failure to redeem his repeated pledges
 to women, and calls upon the Parliamentary Committee to press for the
 immediate enactment of a Government Reform Bill, which must include
 the enfranchisement of women."

Over forty trade unions, including the most important, such as
the N.U.R. and the A.S.E., adopted resolutions supporting the
enfranchisement of women.

The formation of the Conciliation Committee in the House of Commons
in 1910 has been sufficiently described in my earlier book (p. 73).
Its object was to unite all suffragists in the House, and secure their
support for a suffrage Bill which was believed to represent their
greatest common measure. They decided that this would be found in a
Bill to enfranchise women householders—those women, in fact, who had
for about forty years been admitted to the local franchises. The Bill
was called the Conciliation Bill because it had reconciled differences
existing between various types of suffragists inside the House of
Commons.

In July, 1910, two days of the Government's time had been given for
a full-dress debate upon the Conciliation Bill. Hostile speeches
from Mr. Asquith and Mr. Austen Chamberlain, on the ground of their
complete opposition to all kinds of women's suffrage, were followed by
equally vehement and hostile speeches from Mr. Lloyd George and Mr.
Winston Churchill, on the ground that this particular Bill did not
go far enough, and was so drafted as not to admit of amendment. In
anticipation of, and during, the Parliamentary debate, _The Times_ came
out with a hostile article every day for nearly a fortnight, and its
columns contained numerous letters prophesying all kinds of horrors and
disasters which were to be expected if women were allowed to vote; many
were of the type satirized in "Rejected Addresses," "What fills the
Butchers' Shops with Large Blue Flies?" Notwithstanding all this, the
division on the Second Reading resulted in a majority of 110 for the
Bill, a far larger figure than the Government had been able to command
for any of its party measures.

On November 12th, in anticipation of the second General Election in
1910, Mr. Asquith gave a pledge in the House of Commons that his
Government would, if still in power, give facilities in the next
Parliament for "_proceeding effectively_" with a Bill to enfranchise
women if so framed as to permit of free amendment. The second General
Election of 1910 took place immediately after this, in December, and
again resulted in a majority for Mr. Asquith and the Liberal Party.

On the reassembling of the new House the Conciliation Bill Committee
was reformed, Lord Lytton and Mr. Brailsford again acting respectively
as chairman and hon. secretary. The Bill was redrafted on the same
lines as regards its provisions, but in a form which admitted of free
amendment. Our friends were lucky in the ballot, and the debate and
division taking place on May 5th, 1911, it was found that the majority
of 110 in 1910 had grown to a majority of 167 in 1911—only 88 Members
voting against it.

Militantism, or, as it would now be called, "direct action," had been
suspended from the beginning of 1911 in view of Mr. Asquith's promise
to grant time for "proceeding effectively" with all the stages of a
Suffrage Bill during that Session. It should be noted that these two
suffrage victories in the House of Commons in July, 1910, and May,
1911, had taken place, in each case, when Members were fresh from
contact with their constituencies after the General Elections of
January and December, 1910. The contrary was often most ignorantly, if
not maliciously, asserted by antisuffragists. After the big majority
for the Conciliation Bill in May, 1911, Mr. Lloyd George promised
that in the next Session a week of Government time should be given
for the Second Reading and further stages of the Bill, assuming, of
course, its having received a Second Reading. Sir Edward Grey further
explained the value of this offer, and said (June 1st, 1911) that
a definite opportunity had been promised to the House of Commons,
and that it was important that people should understand that it was
a "real opportunity," and "not a bogus offer." In a letter to Lord
Lytton, dated June 15th, Mr. Asquith endorsed what Sir Edward Grey (now
Viscount Grey of Fallodon) had said; and writing again on August 23rd,
he made it clear that his promise applied to the Conciliation Bill,
and not to any other women's suffrage measure. Therefore it was not
astonishing that suffragists of all shades of opinion had high hopes of
a real victory in the Session of 1912.

Then came, quite suddenly, a characteristic blow from Mr. Asquith. On
November 7th, 1911, in answer to a deputation of the People's Suffrage
Federation, introduced by Mr. Arthur Henderson, M.P., Mr. Asquith
stated that he intended to introduce an Electoral Reform Bill during
the coming Session of 1912. This Bill was to be on very wide lines; all
existing franchises were to be swept away, plural voting abolished,
and the period of residence materially reduced. The vote in this Bill
was, Mr. Asquith said, to be based on male citizenship. His exact words
were: "We believe a man's right to vote depends on his being a citizen,
and _primâ facie_ a man who is a citizen _of full age and competent
understanding_ ought to be entitled to a vote." When pressed by Mr.
Henderson to say what he intended to do about women, he dismissed the
inquiry with the curt remark that his opinions on the subject were well
known, and had suffered no modification or change during the last few
years.

The announcement made a tremendous stir, and not in suffrage circles
only. The women's point of view was strongly urged in many quarters,
and to an unprecedented extent by a large proportion of the general
Press throughout the country.

Our own paper, _The Common Cause_, pointed out the bad statesmanship
which acknowledged "the intolerable slur of disfranchisement" where men
were concerned, and professed a desire to extend the franchise to all
citizens of full age and competent understanding, and yet did nothing
to remove this intolerable slur from the women of the country, and thus
by implication accepted the theory that women should be held in the
bondage of perpetual nonage, and could never be rightly described as of
competent understanding.

If this attitude on Mr. Asquith's part was intended to provoke a
renewed outburst of militantism, it certainly had the desired effect.
Even the mildest and most pacific of suffragists felt that she had
received from the Prime Minister a personal insult. One of them, by
no means identified up to that time with militant tactics, wrote to
the Press that Mr. Asquith's words "had filled her with an impulse of
blind rage." Those who represented the constitutional suffrage movement
constantly felt themselves in face of a double danger—the discredit to
their movement of the window smashing and other unjustifiable methods
of violence, and the continued and often very subtle opposition of the
head of the party most identified with the advocacy of parliamentary
reform.

The joint deputation of all the suffrage societies to Mr. Asquith on
November 18th, 1911, has been sufficiently described in what I call my
first volume. I may, however, here be allowed to repeat that, on behalf
of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, four categorical
questions were then put to Mr. Asquith:

1. Was it the intention of the Government that the Reform Bill should
be passed through all its stages in the Session of 1912?

2. Will the Bill be drafted in such a manner as to admit of amendments
introducing women on other terms than men?

3. Will the Government undertake not to oppose such amendments?

4. Will the Government regard any amendment enfranchising women which
is carried in the House of Commons as an integral part of the Bill, to
be defended by the Government in all its later stages?

To each of these questions Mr. Asquith gave the answer, absolutely
unqualified and unconditioned, "Certainly."

His whole attitude and manner were far more conciliatory than they
had ever been before, and, whether designedly or not, certainly had
the effect of strengthening our hopes of a speedy victory. Referring
to his own position, he said: "It is perfectly consistent with the
self-respect and the best traditions of our public life that in
relation to a question which divides parties, not only the head of the
Government, but the Government itself, should say that if the House
of Commons on its responsibility is prepared to transform or extend
a measure which we are agreed in thinking necessary—a measure for
the franchise as regards men—and to confer the franchise on women, we
shall not only acquiesce in that proposal, but we shall treat it as the
considered judgment of Parliament, and shall make ourselves responsible
for carrying it out."

What a contrast these suave words presented to Mr. Asquith's method of
receiving earlier suffrage deputations only those who had taken part in
both could fully appreciate.

Mr. Lloyd George was present, and was pressed by the deputation to
speak. He did so very briefly, and said: "I shall take the first
opportunity of setting forth my views in reference to this matter....
The only thing I would say now is this, and I say it after twenty-one
years' experience of Parliament: Do not commit yourselves too readily
to the statement that this is a trick upon women's suffrage. If you
find next year as a result of this 'trick' that several millions of
women have been added in a Bill to the franchise, that this Bill
has been sent to the House of Lords by the Government, and that the
Government stand by that Bill, whatever the Lords do,[1] then those who
have committed themselves to that ill-conditioned suggestion will look
very foolish."

That closed the deputation; but Mr. Lloyd George sent the following
message to the National Union almost immediately afterwards: "The
Prime Minister's pronouncement as to the attitude to be adopted by the
Government towards the question seems to me to make the carrying of a
women's suffrage amendment on broad democratic lines to next year's
Franchise Bill a certainty. I am willing to do all in my power to help
those who are labouring to reach a successful issue in the coming
Session. Next year provides the supreme opportunity, and nothing but
unwise handling of that chance can compass failure."

No doubt Mr. Lloyd George's reference to the risk of unwise handling
was directed to the suffragists themselves. But it was soon to be
proved that "unwise handling" was quite as likely to proceed from
the head of the Government. Mr. Asquith had received the suffragists
on November 18th. Twenty-six days after this, on December 14th, he
received an antisuffrage deputation. It was introduced by Lord Curzon,
and among those who spoke were Mrs. Humphry Ward, Miss Violet Markham,
and Sir C. Henry. Mr. MacCallum Scott, Member for Bridgeton, Glasgow,
was also present. In the course of his reply, Mr. Asquith made it quite
clear that his sympathies were entirely with the deputation; and he
encouraged them to put more vigour into their methods of opposing the
extension of the franchise to women, advising them "to take off their
coats," or whatever was "the equivalent raiment to which he should
allude when addressing ladies."

He also chaffed them genially about the Referendum, a subject on
which the deputation had not been able to agree among themselves. All
this was quite good sword-play, and no reasonable suffragists could
fairly object to it. But there was one passage in his reply to which
they did most vehemently object, as they felt that it went far to
render perfectly worthless the reassuring words he had addressed to
themselves about three weeks earlier. The words to which we objected
were these: "As an individual I am in entire agreement with you that
the grant of the parliamentary suffrage to women in this country
_would be a political mistake of a very disastrous kind_." How could a
Prime Minister reconcile it with his responsibility to his country to
acquiesce in and help to carry through all its stages in both Houses of
Parliament a constitutional change which he himself believed to be "a
political mistake of a very disastrous kind"?

One member of the antisuffrage deputation, Mr. MacCallum Scott, M.P.,
interpreted this expression of his political chief as an S.O.S. call
to his party, and in a letter addressed to the _Standard_ early in the
following Session he called upon his brother Liberal M.P.'s, whether
they were pledged to suffrage or not, to rally to the support of the
Prime Minister and to deliver him from "the humiliation" of having to
fulfil the promises he had made to the suffragists recounted in the
earlier pages of this chapter.

From this time every possible intrigue and trick and misrepresentation
were resorted to in order to defeat the suffragists when they next
submitted their question to the vote of the House of Commons.
Nevertheless, our strongest friends inside the Government continued to
be very confident. In December, Sir Edward Grey, Mr. Asquith's Foreign
Secretary, and a very leading member of the Government, and Mr. Lloyd
George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, addressed a large meeting of
the Women's Liberal Federation in the Horticultural Hall, Westminster.
Sir Edward Grey spoke strongly and very reassuringly about the
practical certainty of the addition of women's suffrage to the coming
Government Reform Bill, and Mr. Lloyd George made an eloquent speech in
the same sense. The event proved them to have been entirely mistaken,
not through our blundering, but in consequence of serious mistakes made
by the Government itself.

Looking back over the last years of our struggle, we could not but see
that our chief antagonist was Mr. Asquith. Opposition from a Liberal,
with all the Liberal traditions of devotion to the principles of
representative government and a wide suffrage, was far more damaging
to our cause than opposition from Conservatives. It was Mr. Asquith,
more than any other one person, who prevented the Liberal Party
becoming a Reform Party, and including women in their general scheme
of enfranchisement. In 1906, very shortly after the unprecedented
Liberal triumph of that year, the Liberals returned were by an immense
majority supporters of the enfranchisement of women. Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman, the Prime Minister, was one of these, and received
a large representative suffrage deputation in May of that year. He
told them that they had made out a "conclusive and irrefutable case,"
but promised them no practical action whatever from the Government of
which he was the head; the only advice which he gave the deputation
was that they should go on "pestering." He evidently thought that
the best course for suffragists to pursue was to make themselves as
great a nuisance as possible until their claim was granted. There
must have been obstacles in his own Government which prevented his
giving us any more favourable answer, and there can be little doubt
that these obstacles were not so much to be found among the Harcourts
and the Hobhouses, but in the more formidable personality of his Home
Secretary, Mr. Asquith, who was destined, as events proved, within
less than two years to be his successor as Prime Minister. Mr. Asquith
had no grasp whatever of the significance of our movement. When what
was called "militancy" came upon the scene, very much encouraged, of
course, by Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman's speech, he did not attribute it,
as he should have done, to the consequences of justice long delayed;
he saw nothing in it but a means of defeating the whole movement,
opportunities for covering its supporters with ridicule and himself
with additional prestige. Thus he would in a public speech compare
himself with Orpheus, and the whole suffrage party—for he then made no
distinction between militants and non-militants—with the wild women
of Thrace. We were "the rout that made the hideous war," and he, with
mock humility, our victim. He never really understood the social and
educational changes in the position of women which had been going on
for the last two generations, and made a corresponding change in their
political status an urgent necessity. One of his chief weapons against
us was this assumed inability to distinguish between the militants and
non-militants, and this was quite as much marked in the early stages
of the militant movement, when nothing more tragic had been done than
asking inconvenient questions at meetings, waving flags, and making
speeches in the lobby of the House, and so forth, as it was later, when
the militant movement became month by month increasingly aggressive
and dangerous. A statesman, whether in England, India, Ireland, or
Egypt, face to face with grave and persistent disorder, while taking
immediate steps to restore order, does not content himself with the
mere employment of physical force; he enquires into the moral causes of
the disorder, and seeks by wise legislation to remove them. This Mr.
Asquith never did in regard to women; for his eleventh hour conversion
to women's suffrage, although welcome, was more then for his own good
than ours. _Punch's_ picture of the "Conductorette" helping Mr. Asquith
into the suffrage bus, with the exclamation, "Come along, sir; better
late than never," exactly described his position in 1917.

[Illustration: THE CATCH OF THE SEASON.

_Conductorette_ (to Mr. Asquith): "Come along, sir; better late than
never."

(Reproduced by special permission of the Proprietors of _Punch_.)

_Punch_, April 4, 1917.]

      [Facing page 16.
]

I well remember the long series of suffrage deputations which it
fell to my lot to introduce to Mr. Asquith, and his gradual change
of manner in receiving us. Some of the incidents of these interviews
were extremely amusing, and we laughed over them as soon as we were
by ourselves. The first was when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer
in Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's Government. We had with us Miss
Emily Davies, the founder of Girton College; Lady Strachey, wife of
the well-known Indian administrator; Miss Frances Sterling; Miss I. O.
Ford; and other well-known suffrage leaders from our various societies.
While we were still in the waiting-room, I was sent for by myself
for a preliminary interview with Mr. Asquith's private secretary.
I found him a rather agitated-looking young man, who said: "I want
you, Mrs. Fawcett, to give me your personal word of honour that no
member of your deputation will employ physical violence." "Indeed,"
I replied, "you astonish me. I had no idea you were so frightened."
He instantly repudiated being frightened, and I rejoined: "Someone
must be frightened, or such a request would never have been made of
me; but as it is made, without hesitation I give you my most solemn
word of honour that no member of my deputation will either employ
or threaten violence." The idea of it, considering who they were,
entertained me, and I took no pains to conceal my amusement. I rejoined
my deputation, and almost instantly the gentleman I had just left
reappeared to conduct us to the reception room, I walking first, side
by side with the secretary. As we entered the room, where Mr. Asquith
was sitting with his back to the light on our right, I observed in
the opposite corner on our extreme left a lady I did not know. So I
said to the secretary in a clear voice, "I give no guarantee for that
lady; I do not know her." "Oh, that," he rejoined, and again showed
some agitation—"that lady is Miss Asquith." Members of the deputation
told me afterwards that they had also seen Mrs. Asquith sitting behind
her husband's chair, but I did not see her myself.[2] I remember the
extremely forbidding expression of Mr. Asquith's face, and how, after
a little, when I was speaking to him, I ceased to look at him on this
account, and looked at the space just above his head. Of course he gave
us no encouragement. One of his expressions was that he "had yet to
learn that there was any widely spread desire among women themselves
for their enfranchisement." A member of the deputation, Miss I. O.
Ford, of Leeds, who all her life had been very much in sympathy and in
constant communication with industrial women in the North of England,
replied to this, that if Mr. Asquith would come with her to meetings
of working-women in Yorkshire, she could show him that there were
thousands of women who keenly desired the vote. He replied, in his most
forbidding air: "The prospect does not greatly attract me."

This interview was a specimen of Mr. Asquith in his most hostile mood.
It was our lot to taste the insolence of office and the proud man's
contumely. It was part of our job. We rather resented being made a show
of for the benefit of his family; but this, after all, was a small
matter. His manner, possibly adopted to impress his wife and daughter,
was indicative of his deeply seated opposition to our aims, and it was
extremely interesting to watch how, by slow degrees, it was modified
until it became, even while he was still in opposition to us, cordial
and pleasant. Once, I remember, I could not resist saying to him that I
had never seen a man so much improved. But this was very near the time
when our victory was a certainty.




CHAPTER II

THE DEFEAT OF THE CONCILIATION BILL

    "Keep on ploughing when you've missed crops,
    Keep on dancing when the fiddle stops,
    Keep on faithful till the curtain drops,
    And you'll get there in the morning."

    (_With acknowledgments to the Trent Otter._)


Suffragists had entered upon the Session of 1912 with two strings to
their bow. The first was a definite promise from the Prime Minister
of a week, or more if necessary, of parliamentary time for the Second
Reading and all the necessary subsequent stages of the Conciliation
Bill.

The second string was embodied in the series of promises given by Mr.
Asquith to the suffrage deputation described in the last chapter.
These promises we had been assured by Mr. Lloyd George were of the
very utmost value; to cast doubt upon them was "an imputation of deep
dishonour" which he vehemently repudiated. Sir Edward Grey shared
Mr. Lloyd George's opinion, and assured us that we now had "a real
opportunity" of victory.

Our first struggle was over the Second Reading of the Conciliation
Bill, and it was not long before we discovered that the dice were being
loaded against us. We had, however, in our favour the big majorities
for the Bill in 1910 and 1911, the promises and past support of M.P.'s
of all the parties, numbering more than half the House of Commons. This
position seemed too strong to be abandoned, and we therefore encouraged
our friends in the House to ballot for a day for the Second Reading.
The 28th of March was secured. The text and title of the Bill were
exactly the same as had been read a second time the previous year by a
majority of 167.

As the day for the Second Reading approached we became aware that
all kinds of new influences hostile to us were in operation. These
were for the most part in the nature of Lobby gossip, and, not being
publicly made, could not be publicly refuted. One, however, had been
made public—viz., Mr. MacCallum Scott's appeal to Liberals, published
in the _Standard_, as mentioned in the last chapter, not to allow their
leader, Mr. Asquith, to be subjected to "the humiliation" of having
to fulfil the promises he had given to suffragists in the previous
November. This method of detaching Liberal M.P.'s from the support
of the Bill was very freely used. It was said that if this Bill were
carried it would break up the Ministry, and in particular it was widely
rumoured that the Prime Minister and other antisuffrage members of
the Government would resign. These rumours were never contradicted.
Mr. Lloyd George's name was also freely used in this connection.
Had he not openly expressed his dislike of the Bill? He had spoken
against it in 1910; and in his speech at Bath in November, 1911, he
had boasted that it had been "torpedoed" by the promise of a wider
measure. The Irish Nationalists were peculiarly susceptible to the line
of argument that the success of women's suffrage would mean the break
up of the Government. The Home Rule Bill had been passed in all its
stages twice by the House of Commons in two successive Sessions, but it
required, under the Parliament Act, to be passed three times in three
successive Sessions before it could be placed on the Statute Book,
notwithstanding its rejection by the House of Lords. The continued
violence of the militants—smashing windows, slashing the canvas of
valuable pictures, burning the contents of letter-boxes, letting off
explosives in empty churches, etc.—caused intense irritation and
resentment among the general public, and afforded an excuse to those
M.P.'s who had promised their support to our movement to break their
word. On March 28th thirteen members of the Labour Party were absent
in their constituencies in consequence of the labour unrest connected
with the coal strike. The result of this combination of unfavourable
conditions resulted in the defeat of the Bill by a majority of 14.
Our Labour supporters could have saved the Bill had they been present
in their full strength. It was a heavy disappointment, and the utmost
was of course made of it by the antisuffragists, including, first and
foremost, Mr. Asquith.

Analyzing the causes of our defeat, we found that, whereas in 1911
thirty-one followers of Mr. John Redmond had supported the Bill,
including Mr. William Redmond, Professor Kettle, Mr. Stephen Gwynn,
and other men in a leading position in their party, in 1912 not a
single one voted for it. The only Irish Nationalists who continued
their support to the Bill were three O'Brienites, Mr. William O'Brien
himself, Mr. Timothy Healy, and Mr. Gilhooley. Twenty-two Liberals,
twelve Nationalists, and eight Conservatives, who had hitherto
supported the Bill, now voted against it. A far larger number withdrew
their support, but did not give a hostile vote.

What perturbed us more than anything else was the knowledge that
the same underhand and unscrupulous methods which had been used to
defeat the Conciliation Bill would also in all probability be used
to defeat the women's suffrage amendments to the Government Reform
Bill. We appealed, quite unsuccessfully, to our leading friends in the
Government to check these hostile influences.

One outstanding instance of the methods employed against us must here
be described. Some years before, Dr. Louisa Martindale, a lady of the
highest character and professional standing, belonging to a family
universally respected in their place of residence in the South of
England, had written a book called "Beneath the Surface." It was, in
a far briefer form, on the lines of Mr. A. Flexner's well-known book
on the History of Prostitution in Europe. It was in part historical
and in part a warning to men and women of the physical risks connected
with promiscuous sexual intercourse, and its dangers to the race as
well as to the individual. The literature department of the N.U.W.S.S.
stocked this volume, and placed its title in the list of books and
pamphlets they were prepared to supply. Then suddenly there appeared
in the list of questions to be addressed by M.P.'s to members of the
Government one by the Marquis of Tullibardine (now the Duke of Atholl),
to ask the Home Secretary if he intended to prosecute the N.U.W.S.S.
for circulating an "obscene book," meaning the one by Dr. Martindale.
The Home Secretary, Mr. R. McKenna, could give no positive answer; he
must take time to make enquiries; the question must be repeated. A few
days later it was repeated; again the Home Secretary delayed his reply;
he found it necessary to consult the Law Officers. The Under Secretary
for the Home Department answered these questions more than once, but
at last owned that the Law Officers advised that a prosecution would
not be successful. As no one in his senses could possibly think that
this little book was obscene, it would have been simpler to reply
that the prosecution would be unsuccessful on this account; but this
straightforward course was avoided. It became evident to us that the
object of the whole business was to bring up the question in the
House of Commons as often as possible with a view of prejudicing the
public against the suffrage and the suffragists, and to produce the
impression that we were people who delighted in the circulation of
vile literature. This went on for about a fortnight, when I happened
to have the opportunity of a conversation, on an entirely different
subject, with a highly placed officer of the Government, a member of
the House of Lords. While I was talking to him on the subject on which
I had come to see him, it occurred to me to speak to him also about
the little plot to discredit the suffrage movement in which the Home
Secretary was playing the leading rôle. "Is it with your knowledge
and consent, Lord ——," I asked, "that your colleague, Mr. McKenna, is
keeping before the public as long as he possibly can the interesting
fact that he is unable to make up his mind whether or not to prosecute
me and the N.U.W.S.S., of which I am President, for circulating obscene
literature? Three questions have already been asked on this subject in
the House of Commons within the last eleven days, and it is impossible
to say how many more times the point will be discussed in the House
and reported in every paper in Great Britain."[3] I also told him
something of Dr. Louisa Martindale, her high character and first-rate
professional position, and also (rather maliciously on my part) that
her family were very active and highly esteemed Liberals in Sussex, and
that gratuitous insults to them would be keenly resented, and might
possibly even have a political reaction. He appeared startled, and, as
far as I could gather, had had no previous knowledge of what had been
going on. He said very little, and promised me nothing. But from that
date the attack upon Dr. Martindale, her book, and the N.U.W.S.S.,
entirely ceased. The incident did not increase our esteem for the
antisuffrage party in the House of Commons. A few months later I had
proof, if proof were needed, that the Government did not seriously
believe me to be a person capable of circulating obscene literature,
for I was invited by the Government to become a member of the Royal
Commission on Venereal Disease, a position which could certainly not
have been offered if the Government had shared Mr. McKenna's doubts as
to my character. I was not able to accept the invitation because my
suffrage work entirely absorbed me, and I saw no prospect of its claims
becoming less urgent in the near future.

The Session of 1912 dragged its interminable length along. It lasted
for thirteen months, from January, 1912, to January, 1913, both
inclusive. The Government were slow in producing their Reform Bill.
In May, however, it was brought forward, and it did not come up for
Second Reading until July 12th, 1912. In the Second Reading debate Mr.
Asquith, Prime Minister and Leader of the House, expressed himself as
follows:

 "This Bill does not propose to confer the franchise on women; whatever
 extensions of the franchise it makes are to male persons only.
 Speaking for myself, I cannot help remembering that the House at
 an earlier stage of the Session rejected with, I think, sufficient
 emphasis the proposal to confer the franchise on women; and, so far as
 I am concerned, I dismiss at this moment as altogether improbable the
 hypothesis that the House of Commons is likely to stultify itself by
 reversing in the same Session the considered judgment at which it has
 arrived."

That is to say, the rejection of the Conciliation Bill by a majority of
14 in the previous March was to be taken as "the considered judgment of
the House of Commons," whereas its passage in May, 1911, by a majority
of 167 counted for nothing at all. What the passage just quoted did
stand for was the continued and bitter hostility of the Prime Minister
to women's suffrage in any form, and as a renewal of his S.O.S. call
to his followers to come to his deliverance. The fortunes of all the
little politicians "in the make" are absolutely in the hands of the
Prime Minister—more so at that moment than perhaps at any other period
of our history. To please the Prime Minister and serve his purposes
indicated the road which led to success and preferment, and he made it
absolutely plain what was the best possible way to please him in this
matter of women's enfranchisement.

This was truly a time when we had "to go on dancing when the fiddle
stopped," and we did not decline the task. We held two immense meetings
in the Albert Hall, the combined collections at which totalled nearly
£13,000, and also organized an even more than usually vigorous
campaign throughout the country in support of the inclusion of women
in the Government Reform Bill; there were twenty-one by-elections
during the year, in all of which the N.U.W.S.S. took an active part,
making suffrage a very live issue in the country, and we also lost no
opportunity of raising the question in the House on other Bills which
came before it.

But the change from a majority of 167 in 1911 to a minority of 14
in 1912 gave a fatal shock to what had hitherto been our election
policy—namely, the support at all contested elections of the candidate
(irrespective of party) whom we deemed from his answers to our
questions, his personal record, and other indications, to be "the
best friend of women's suffrage." When the Conciliation Bill was
defeated in March, 1912, 42 of these "best friends" had voted against
the Bill, and 91 had abstained from supporting it. To lean on such
"friends" as these was to lean on a broken reed. We did not abandon
the essential principle of our election policy, but we gave a new and
improved interpretation of the meaning to be attributed to the words
"best friend"; and as a result of a special council held for the
purpose in May, 1912, it was decided that a friend of suffrage who had
the support of his party upon our question was a better friend than
one who belonged to a party which was either hostile or neutral. The
immense powers of party in our politics made it practically certain
that this was the only safe line to take. There were, it is true, a
handful of men, in both the Liberal and Conservative ranks, who had
shown themselves such strong and convinced suffragists as to be capable
of disregarding the party whip when it was used against us. These we
defined as "tried friends"—tried not only on the platform, but in the
fiery ordeal of the House of Commons, and these we excepted from the
new definition we had agreed to make of the words "the best friend of
women's suffrage."




CHAPTER III

THE ELECTION FIGHTING FUND

 "My centre is giving way, my right wing is falling back. The situation
 is excellent. I am attacking."—MARSHAL FOCH TO G.H.Q.


The change of policy indicated at the end of the last chapter was
adopted after full deliberation and discussion at a council meeting at
which our 411 societies were represented, and at which, as was to be
expected, there was an important minority who objected to it. For at
this council we resolved on a change of rules. The general objects of
the N.U.W.S.S. in by-elections were defined as follows:

 1. To shorten the term of office of the Cabinet as at present
 constituted, especially by opposing antisuffrage Ministers.

 2. To strengthen any party in the House of Commons which adopts
 women's suffrage as part of its official programme.

At by-elections we decided that the N.U. should support those
candidates whose return would best promote the foregoing objects,
provided that:

 (_a_) No Government candidate should be supported.

 (_b_) No candidate shall be supported who does not answer all the
 National Union questions in the affirmative.

Another clause provided for the exemption of "tried friends" from
these regulations. It would, of course, have been an absurdity for
suffragists to oppose such men as the late Mr. Walter McLaren or Lord
Robert Cecil, who had shown through the stress and strain of many years
of parliamentary life that they were prepared to act independently of
party in cases where electoral justice to women was involved.

But our change of policy was in effect a declaration of war against the
official Liberal Party and of support of the Labour Party, which was
the only party which had made women's suffrage part of its programme.

This not unnaturally laid us open to the charge of having abandoned our
non-party attitude; but I thought at the time, and I think still, that
it was the only possible attitude for a truly non-party association
such as ours to adopt. We were making no break with our non-party
professions so long as we were prepared to give our whole-hearted
support to any party which made the enfranchisement of women part of
its programme. We found analogies in the attitude of other non-party
organizations, and also in what was happening in the suffrage work in
Sweden. In our own country we were so far fortunate that none of the
political parties had officially identified itself with opposition
to suffrage. Men of unrivalled distinction in the Conservative Party
for many years past had supported women's suffrage; the names of Lord
Beaconsfield, Lord Salisbury (the great Prime Minister), Mr. Arthur
Balfour, Lord John Manners, Lord Robert Cecil, need only be mentioned
to show that it was an absolute impossibility for the Conservative
Party, as a party, to oppose women's suffrage. The same could be said
for the Liberals, past and present: The Hon. Charles Villiers, Mr. J.
S. Mill, Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Edward Grey, Mr. Lloyd George,
Mr. Acland, and Sir John Simon, held the antisuffragists in their own
party in check; moreover, the rank and file of Liberals were largely in
our favour, and all the Liberal catchwords could be cited _ad nauseam_
in our support. There could therefore be absolutely no question of
opposition to women's franchise becoming an item in the Liberal
programme.

In Sweden, however, the Conservative Party had definitely identified
itself with antisuffragism; and the Swedish Suffrage Society, non-party
like our own, had been obliged by force of circumstances to put itself
into opposition to the party in their own country which definitely
opposed the one object for which their society existed.

We no doubt occupied an analogous position with regard to our own
political situation; but we had a very important advantage in the
existence of one party, the Labour Party, which had officially accepted
women's suffrage, and had shown the sincerity of its support by being
willing to record its votes in the House in favour of a limited form
of enfranchisement for women, although its own inclinations, and
probably also its party interests, were in favour of a much more
extended measure. The Swedish suffragists opposed the one party which
had made hostility to their enfranchisement part of its programme; the
N.U.W.S.S. supported the one party which had taken the opposite course
by definitely adopting women's suffrage as part of its programme. I
maintain that by so doing neither the Swedish nor the British suffrage
societies forfeited their claim to describe themselves as "non-party."
We welcomed members of all parties into our ranks, and were prepared to
give impartial support to any party which made our object its own.

It is interesting now to look back at the N.U.W.S.S. report in the
year 1912, and to see the care with which we defined our position.
No Government candidate was to be supported, because the Government,
under Mr. Asquith, had shown the most determined opposition to our
enfranchisement. When a Conservative candidate was supported, it
was because we deemed this the best way of securing the defeat of
a Government candidate; when the Labour candidate was supported, it
was made clear that this was done because the Labour Party was the
only party which had made women's suffrage part of its programme, and
had, moreover, rendered us the signal service of calling upon its
parliamentary representatives to oppose any Franchise Bill which did
not include women.

A society which disregarded such signal services as these could only
be described as abandoning its non-party attitude and identifying
itself with opposition to those who had shown themselves the strongest
supporters of our movement.

It was not enough for us to put on record our intention of doing our
best to strengthen the position of the Labour Party at by-elections;
we also made plans to help Labour members to defend their seats at the
time of a general election. A special committee was formed to organize
the support of Labour candidates, and to raise a sum of money for this
purpose. It was thus that the Election Fighting Fund was inaugurated
in May, 1912. Two thousand pounds was at once subscribed in the room,
before any special appeal had been made; and during the short time
between the starting of the fund and the outbreak of the European War
it was sufficiently replenished by constant gifts from our own members
to enable us to keep up the work with vigour and efficiency. The fund
had not been a month in existence before it was used in support of the
Labour candidate at the Holmfirth by-election; and there were shortly
afterwards three other by-elections—at Hanley, Crewe, and Midlothian—at
which the Election Fighting Fund and its band of organizers and
speakers were used in support of Labour candidates. We were
authoritatively assured that the Liberals knew that they would have
held the seats at Crewe and Midlothian had the attitude of their party
been satisfactory on women's suffrage. In 1913 the E.F.F. work was put
into operation at Houghton-le-Spring, Keighley, and Lanark; and in 1914
in North-West Durham, Leith Burghs, and North-East Derbyshire. There
were therefore ten elections in all during the almost exactly two years
in which the E.F.F. policy was vigorously worked by the N.U.W.S.S.,
and during which six seats, counting for twelve votes in a division,
were transferred from the Liberal to the Conservative side of the
House. We were very well satisfied by these results, although of course
disappointed that no Labour candidate had won a seat: in every case,
however, the number of votes recorded for Labour had greatly increased.
We had a splendid band of first-class speakers and organizers to
work in each constituency; and at each successive election the whole
place rang with women's suffrage and our meetings were crowded and
enthusiastic—very often much more crowded and enthusiastic than
those of the candidates. In the first election the Liberal against
whom we had worked got in, but his majority was reduced to less than
half what it had been at the last contest. The next election was less
satisfactory; but at the third, a seat formerly held by a Liberal
by a majority of 1,704 was gained by a Conservative supporter of
suffrage, and it was generally acknowledged in the district that the
vigorous help of the N.U.W.S.S. was the deciding factor in defeating
the Liberal candidate. The Labour candidate polled nearly double the
number of votes which his party had secured at the last three-cornered
contest, and consequently was the means of securing the defeat of the
Government candidate. Our success at Crewe was followed by a still more
notable victory in Midlothian, the famous seat won by Mr. Gladstone in
1879, and from that date looked upon as an impregnable stronghold of
Liberalism. In September, 1912, the former Liberal majority of 3,157
was converted into a Conservative majority of 32, the Labour candidate,
who stood for the first time, polling 2,413 votes.

It is unnecessary to go in detail through the rest of the elections in
which the N.U. in 1913, and up to June, 1914, worked the E.F.F. policy
for all they were worth; the specimens of which I have given details
are indicative of the remainder. When we were originally discussing
our change of election policy, Mr. H. N. Brailsford, who had warmly
pressed it upon us, said to us, "The moment that you are able by your
election work to transfer seats from one side of the House of Commons
to the other, the Whips and the wire-pullers will begin to treat you
with respect"; and we certainly found that this was the case. In every
election in which the E.F.F. committee took part, women's suffrage was
the main topic of the contest, and in every case, although we did not
succeed in winning the seats for Labour candidates, the value of our
work in their behalf was most warmly recognized. We never in any case
subsidized the Labour candidates. Their independence was jealously
preserved by their own party, and correspondingly respected by us;
any attempt to infringe it would have been deeply resented. Our work
in the constituency was strictly our own; we held meetings, organized
processions and other demonstrations, and paid our own way with the
funds our own members had subscribed for the purpose. We had nothing to
conceal, nor had the Labour men for whom we worked.

The N.U.W.S.S. had always interpreted "non-party" to mean that the
N.U. included members of all parties within its ranks. We therefore
naturally chose as our speakers and organizers to carry out our E.F.F.
work from among those of our members whose personal sympathies were
with the Labour Party.

The whole movement had been a source of strength to our Union, and
we were looking forward to further developments when all schemes for
this object were cut short by the outbreak of war on August 4th, 1914.
A special meeting of the E.F.F. committee was held immediately, and
decided at once that during the war the Election Fighting Fund should
be used to employ the E.F.F. staff for the time being on relief work
only. This will be further described in a future chapter, which will
deal with the general activities of the N.U.W.S.S. during the war.




CHAPTER IV

THE FIASCO OF THE GOVERNMENT REFORM BILL

 "If we can't win as fast as we could wish, we know that in the long
 run our opponents cannot win at all."—JOHN BRIGHT.


We were at this time receiving a great deal of good advice from
suffrage members of the Cabinet. One of them, who ought to have known
better, advised us to rouse public opinion in our support. "Why," he
said, "do you not hold a few meetings, and get good speakers, like
Miss Royden, to address them?" We replied that we had held 4,000
public meetings in the last four months, filling the largest halls
again and again, and that Miss Royden, never very robust, had nearly
killed herself by fulfilling the constant demands that were made upon
her for speeches at our innumerable demonstrations. She had spoken
267 times in the last twelve months. We reminded him that there had
been no agitation at all by men for a wider franchise for themselves;
there had been a persistent and strenuous demand by women for their own
enfranchisement; and the only official reply of the Government was to
promise a Bill for more suffrage to men, and no suffrage at all for
women. All this was, of course, so much more grist to the mill at which
we had to grind out perpetual speeches. This, as we did not fail to
point out, illustrated the value of a vote: voters could get what they
wanted without even asking for it; whereas the voteless had to devote
years and generations, and to spend thousands of pounds, in order to
voice persistent demands on the part of women for representation,
demands which were as persistently and determinedly passed by
unnoticed, and we were asked why we did not hold a few meetings! The
House of Commons seems scarcely capable of giving intelligent attention
to any subject unless it is forced to undertake the excruciating pain
of thought by the demands made by voters in the constituencies. The
most remarkable social revolution had been taking place for the last
fifty years in the educational and professional and industrial status
of women; all we asked was that a corresponding change should be made
in their political status; but up to the present the only reply we
could get from the Government had been rightly described by one of its
members as "shuffling and delay."

At this time we derived a sort of sorry consolation by the articles
which appeared in the Press on the expiration of the twenty years
during which the development of motor travelling in this country had
been held back by ignorant legislation. The public were reminded that
the first Act passed by Parliament in regard to automobile traffic
enjoined that motors must not exceed the pace of four miles an hour,
and must be preceded by a man on foot waving a red flag! The moral
for us was that if our legislators could so little read the signs
of the times in regard to a comparatively simple matter like the
development of motor transport, it was not astonishing that they were
at least as incapable of reading the signs of the times in regard to
a great human movement which was gradually, in almost every part of
the world, raising the position of women from absolute subjection to
free citizenship. Our spirits were raised, too, by the fact that,
though we were not winning in our own Parliament, we were winning in
other Parliaments and everywhere else. A Czech woman had been returned
to the Diet in Bohemia; and three new States were won for suffrage
in the U.S.A. Barriers in other directions were everywhere breaking
down. The very same papers which reported Mr. Asquith's reception
of the antisuffrage deputation in December, 1911, when he confessed
his unaltered and unalterable opposition to women's suffrage, also
contained the announcement of the election of the first woman to the
fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons. The more intelligent
of the antisuffragists, such as Mrs. Humphry Ward, were constantly
proclaiming their sympathy with every step in the development of
women's freedom which had already been won, such as their share in, and
responsibility for, local government. In her society she was at the
labouring oar, and must have been conscious that no popular movement
could exist whose programme offered nothing but negatives. She felt
the need of a positive programme, and even announced her intention
of using the machinery of the Society for Opposing the Extension of
the Parliamentary Suffrage to Women for promoting their activity in
Local Government and the election of women to Local Government bodies.
But she was sharply pulled up for this by Lord Curzon, who said at a
meeting of the society, as reported in the _Antisuffrage Review_: "The
funds we collect are given primarily, _and I think exclusively_, for
resistance to the parliamentary vote for women. It is for that purpose,
and _that purpose alone_, that our organization exists.... I hope you
will be quite clear about that." Of course Mrs. Humphry Ward had to
give way. Had she not just said at this same meeting "how necessary was
the maintenance of the male hand upon the helm of English Government"?
But the male hand of the politician is capable of adaptability to
changed circumstances. Lord Curzon, twenty years earlier, had succeeded
in reversing the decision of the Royal Geographical Society to elect
women as Fellows—an innovation which he then considered "most
injurious to men and disastrous to women." Further experience must
have convinced him that this injury to men and disaster to women would
be a source of strength to the society; for when he found himself in
the position of President of the R.G.S., and responsible with others
for the increased cost of far larger and more commodious premises,
he himself promoted and, I believe, proposed the election of women
to the society. Council's opinion was taken, and was to the effect
that "on the true construction of the charter and by-laws women were
admissible." The noble President therefore had the solace of finding
that the law was on his side when he said, "Ay."

The difference between Mrs. Humphry Ward and her chief in 1912 may
have been the prototype of the greater difference which divided them
in 1918. But at the earlier date it was Mrs. Ward who wished to go
forward, and Lord Curzon who resolutely refused to follow; in 1918 the
rôles were reversed. It was Lord Curzon who bowed to the inevitable and
Mrs. Ward who vehemently protested that the "male hand" had betrayed
her.[4]

We now resume the thread of our story in 1912 after the defeat of the
Conciliation Bill by 14 votes on March 28th. One of its results was the
change in the election policy of the N.U.W.S.S. described in the last
chapter. Outside of this, our work was concentrated on securing all
possible support for the women's suffrage amendments to the Government
Franchise Bill. One important advantage was gained when Mr. Redmond
gave a definite promise that his party would be left free to vote on
women's suffrage according to their personal convictions. The Irish
Nationalists, who had in a body deserted the Conciliation Bill, had
been very severely criticized for this by their own supporters, both in
this country and in Ireland.

The women's suffrage amendments to be moved to the Government Bill
were four in number. The first stood in the name of the Foreign
Secretary, Sir Edward Grey. It was to delete the word "male" from the
first clause. It will be remembered that Mr. Asquith, in the previous
July, had said in reference to the Bill, "Whatever extensions of the
franchise it makes are to male persons only," and the Bill, therefore,
had been drafted in this sense. The deletion of the word "male" from
the first clause would not in itself have enfranchised a single woman,
but, if accepted by the House, it would have rendered the inclusion of
women by amendment a possibility. Three amendments to include women
were therefore drafted, representing three degrees of comparison,
corresponding, roughly, to the degrees of enthusiasm of different
sections of the House for the free citizenship of women.

The first amendment represented the views of the Labour Party, and
also corresponded with the aims of practically every suffrage society:
it demanded the vote for women on the same terms as men. Under the
new franchises contemplated in the Bill this would have enfranchised
about ten and a half millions of women. We had little hope that this
amendment would be carried, as our belief was that Parliament would
not consent to the creation of an electorate in which women decidedly
outnumbered men. Mr. Arthur Henderson, Chairman of the Parliamentary
Labour Party, undertook to move this amendment. He was a very stanch
friend of our movement, and could be relied on to support the other
amendments if his own were lost.

The second amendment was to create what was virtually household
suffrage for women, and proposed to give the franchise to all women
over twenty-five years of age who were householders or wives of
householders. It was believed that this amendment would enfranchise
about six and a half millions of women. It was to be moved by Mr. (now
Sir) W. H. Dickinson, also a very stalwart friend, whose tenacity had
been tested on many occasions.

The third amendment, to be moved by the Hon. Alfred Lyttelton if the
first and second were lost, was on the lines of the Conciliation Bill,
and would have enfranchised women householders only, of whom it was
known there were about one and a half millions in England and Wales.
Committees on party lines were organized in the House of Commons in
support of these amendments, Mr. Henderson, Mr. Stephen Walsh, and Mr.
Snowden, being especially active on behalf of the Labour Party; Mr.
Acland, Sir Alfred Mond, the Hon. H. D. McLaren, and Mr. Dickinson,
on behalf of the Liberals; Lord Robert Cecil, Mr. Goulding, Lord
Wolmer, and Sir W. Bull, on behalf of the Conservatives. Members of the
Government could not join these committees; but some, such as Sir John
Simon, gave very valuable help and advice. The great point to aim at
was to maintain the unity of the suffragists in all the parties, and
thus to secure a united vote in support of any suffrage amendment which
recommended itself to the House as a whole. We therefore endeavoured
to obtain promises, in the event of one amendment being defeated, that
those Members who had preferred it should transfer their support to the
next. The Labour Party, inside and outside the House, was particularly
firm and outspoken in support of this policy. "We intend to stand by
the women through thick and thin," said one of their leaders. "I will
fight for them, amendment by amendment, with all the strength that is
in me." The annual congress of the Labour Party backed us up by the
resolution recorded on p. 3. The Trade Union Congress also adopted a
very strong suffrage resolution.

But we soon found the parliamentary air thick with the intrigue and
gossip which had succeeded in defeating the Conciliation Bill. Rumours
and threats of resignation if any form of women's suffrage were carried
were rife. One "Right Honourable gentleman" would take an Irish
Nationalist on one side and remark casually that it was lamentable
to think, after the long struggle for Home Rule, that it would be
destroyed after all by the break up of the Government over women's
suffrage. Sir Edward Grey, intending to counteract these rumours,
rather intensified them by writing to a suffrage meeting in Glasgow
in December indicating that resignation was a game which two could
play at, and if antisuffrage Ministers resigned as a result of the
success of one or other of the suffrage amendments, then non-success
must equally be followed by the resignation of Ministers like himself
pledged to its support.

It has already been noted that the Session of 1912 had begun in
January; the Second Reading of the Government Reform Bill had been
taken in July; on the reassembling of Parliament for the autumn Session
October and November went by with no signs of any further progress with
the Bill. It was the constant subject of conversation and discussion
in the Lobbies, in the Press, and in general society, and many public
meetings were held, but no parliamentary progress was made; and when
this state of things continued over the Christmas recess, and the
lengthy Session of 1912 was prolonged into 1913, the more experienced
of suffragists were asking each other how it could be a physical
possibility to pass a controversial measure like a Reform Bill through
all its stages in both Houses of Parliament at the tail end of a
Session which had already lasted nearly thirteen months.

An influential meeting in support of the more democratic of the
suffrage amendments to the Reform Bill had been held in the Opera
House in Kingsway on December 4th. Important speeches were made by
Mr. F. D. Acland, Sir John Simon, leading Liberal women, and others;
but the difficulties and confusion inside the House caused by the
Prime Minister's statement in the Second Reading debate, that he
"could not suppose that the House would so far stultify itself as to
reverse the considered judgment it had already arrived at," continued
to darken the outlook, particularly by encouraging the rumours of the
resignation of antisuffrage Ministers and the consequent break up of
the Administration. It is to be noted that no official contradiction
was given to these very prevalent rumours of resignation _until the day
before the House expected to go into Committee on the Bill_, January
22nd, 1913. But the _coup de grâce_ for the Reform Bill and those who
were responsible for it came from an altogether unexpected quarter.
Three days, January 24th, 27th, and 28th, had been allotted to the
women's suffrage amendments under a special "guillotine" time-table.
This stage, however, was never reached, for on January 23rd Mr. Bonar
Law asked the Speaker to give a ruling on the point whether the
Government's own amendments to the Bill, regarding the occupation
franchise for men, would not so far alter the Bill from that which had
received a Second Reading in July as to necessitate its withdrawal
and reintroduction in an altered form. The implied argument was, "the
Bill which the House read a second time in July is not the same Bill
which it is now asked to consider in committee." The Speaker replied
that though he could not at that stage give a definite ruling, it
was, in point of fact, his opinion that the Bill was not the Bill to
which the House had assented in July, and he added that there were
"other amendments regarding female suffrage which, of course, would
make a huge difference in the Bill if they were inserted." The blow
to the whole Bill thus foreshadowed fell like a thunder-bolt on the
House, and on no portion of it more severely than on the Government,
especially on the Prime Minister. Ever since May, 1908, when first Mr.
Asquith had become Prime Minister, he had given various forecasts and
promises about this Bill, and especially on his attitude and that of
his Government to women suffrage amendments. Now all these promises
and forecasts were proved to be absolutely worthless, mere scraps of
paper; and this owing to the conduct of the Bill by the Government
itself. Whether the Speaker's ruling, which was given definitely a day
or two later, was based on the incorrect naming of the Bill,[5] or on
the fact that in the Second Reading debate Mr. Asquith had told the
House definitely, "This Bill does not propose to confer the suffrage
on women, and whatever extensions of the franchise it makes are to
male persons only," was never, according to my knowledge, made public.
What everybody knew was that the Government had blundered badly, that
its chief had given promises which by his own action he was powerless
to fulfil, and that the proposed Reform Bill promised by him in 1908,
1910, and 1911 was a complete fiasco. The new situation proved to every
suffragist that our measure could never be carried through all its
parliamentary stages unless it was brought forward by a united Cabinet
as a Government measure. The day for such success as could be attained
by a private Member's Bill was long passed.

A very considerable number of the general public were under the
impression that we had been "had"; and there were many among
suffragists who thought that a deliberate fraud or trick had been
practised upon us. I never shared this view. The blow was much more a
blow to the Government than to the suffrage movement. It did not harm
our movement in public opinion. On the contrary, public opinion was
with us; the prestige and authority of the Government were lowered;
and they did nothing to retrieve their position so far as we were
concerned. If the Prime Minister had sent for the representatives of
the suffrage societies, the Women's Liberal Federation, and other
bodies standing for suffrage which had formed the deputation in
November, 1911, and had said, "I have given you promises which it is
unfortunately out of my power to fulfil; will you suggest any course
which would be a reasonable substitute in fulfilment of my pledges?"
he would have put the onus of the acceptance or rejection of such an
offer upon us; but he did nothing of the sort. We asked him to receive
us, but he refused to meet us or to hold any communication with us on
the subject. His position, therefore, was that his promises remained
unredeemed, and he made no effort to redeem them. It is true that he
offered parliamentary time for the discussion of a Second Reading of a
private Member's Bill. But it needed not to be a Daniel or a Solomon
to see that a private Member's Bill, of which seven had passed Second
Reading in the last four years, and four of them in 1908, 1909, 1910,
and 1911, was no substitute for a place in a Government Bill, which,
if adopted by the House, would be regarded by the Government as an
integral part of the measure, and defended in all its stages in both
Houses of Parliament. We were furiously indignant. If a man who had
owed £1,000 suddenly became bankrupt, and declined any meeting with his
creditors, but offered them 1,000 gilded cardboard discs, he could not
expect this conduct to assuage their indignation or soften their anger
against him, for he would first have robbed them and then treated them
as if they were children. One of the papers which usually supported
the Government put the case thus: "If A and B arrange a deal, and A is
unavoidably prevented from delivering the goods for which B bargained,
it is not open to A to offer a different class of goods till he has had
B's consent to the substitution." We remembered how, when the militant
suffragists had said that Mr. Asquith's promises were worthless, Mr.
Lloyd George had indignantly and forcibly retaliated that such a doubt
was "an imputation of deep dishonour" which he absolutely repudiated.
We took pleasure in recalling Dr. Johnson's description of the Duke
of Devonshire of his time, and contrasting it with Mr. Asquith, to
the latter's disadvantage. "If," said the Doctor of the third Duke,
"he had promised you an acorn and none had grown in his woods that
year, he would not have contented himself with that excuse; he would
have sent to Denmark for it. So unconditional was he in keeping his
word, so high his point of honour." If that was the sort of man the
Duke of Devonshire was, it was the sort of man Mr. Asquith was not.
The N.U.W.S.S. decided at its council meeting in February, 1913, to
take no part in supporting by work in the constituencies or inside
the House this private Member's Bill. Our reasons were that we were
now convinced that nothing but a Government Bill, backed by a united
Cabinet, would be of any practical service to our cause. Of course the
N.U.W.S.S. could never, under any circumstances, oppose any Bill which
enfranchised any women, few or many; but we took no part whatever in
its support. It came on for Second Reading in May, 1913, and met with
the defeat to which from the beginning it had been foredoomed.

[Illustration: A PLEASURE DEFERRED.

_Suffragist_: "You've cut my dance!"

_Mr. Asquith_: "Yes, I know. The fact is the M.C. objected to the
pattern of my waistcoat, and I had to go home and change it. But
I'll tell you what! Let me put you down for an extra at our private
subscription dance next season!"

(Reproduced by special permission of the Proprietors of _Punch_.)

_Punch_, February 5, 1913.]

      [Facing page 52.
]

The last four years had witnessed the steady advance of the suffrage
cause. It was now in the forefront of practical politics, and was a
question which had led to more than one serious Cabinet crisis, and was
capable of making or unmaking Governments. We held steadfastly to our
resolution to work for nothing in Parliament but a Government measure
backed by a united Cabinet. Our chief practical consideration was how
to do this on constitutional lines and by non-party means. Our friend
and colleague, Mrs. Harley, suggested what we afterwards called "The
Pilgrimage," and her idea was taken up and carried out with enthusiasm
by the whole National Union. An account of the Pilgrimage will form the
subject of the next chapter.




CHAPTER V

THE PILGRIMAGE AND THE DERBY DAY, 1913

 "Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants
 thereof."—LEV. xxv. 10.


The Pilgrimage was a piece of work which could only have been
undertaken successfully by a powerful organization, and such the
N.U.W.S.S. certainly was. We had divided the whole area of Great
Britain into nineteen federations; in each federation there was
a working committee meeting regularly, whose aim was to form a
non-militant, non-party women's suffrage society in every parliamentary
borough in its area. Each federation and each society aimed at being
self-supporting; but the large sums, amounting to many thousands of
pounds, collected at our big Albert Hall demonstrations in London
enabled the executive committee of the whole N.U.W.S.S. to make
grants for special work to specified societies or federations. Our
organization was thoroughly democratic, the executive committee and
all the officers being subject to election at our annual council
meetings, where each society could claim representation in proportion
to its numbers. No new departure in policy could be undertaken without
the authority of the council. In 1913 we had over 400 societies, and
they were constantly increasing; in 1914, just before the war, there
were over 600. We calculated that, adding together the central funds,
the Election Fighting Fund, and the funds raised and expended by our
societies locally, the National Union at this time was using over
£45,000 a year for the furtherance of the enfranchisement of women.

We were giving full time employment to scores of organizers, mostly
highly intelligent young women of University education, who not
only did admirable propaganda work throughout the country, but kept
headquarters informed of all important local developments and incidents
bearing on our movement.

The Pilgrimage was a march of bands of our societies, all non-militant
suffragists, from every part of Great Britain, converging on London,
and so arranged as to reach their goal on the same day. Eight
routes were selected: the great North Road, the Fen Country, the
East Coast, Watling Street, the West Country Road, the Portsmouth
Road, the Brighton Road, and the Kentish Pilgrims' Way. In each case
the Pilgrimage procession started at the point most distant from
London, carrying banners, and accompanied, where possible, by music.
The pilgrims were prepared to stop and hold meetings, distribute
literature, and collect funds in towns and villages _en route_. As
they proceeded their numbers rolled up; friends lent motor-cars for
conveying luggage, and the most wonderfully generous hospitality was
extended to them all along the route, especially in the towns where we
had powerful societies. This we might have been said to expect; but
what surprised us was the extraordinarily warm welcome we received from
the villages we passed through. Once their inhabitants understood that
we were non-militant, and had no desire to injure anybody or anything,
they gave us the most cordial reception; indeed, we were often stopped
as we were passing through villages which we had deemed hardly large
enough for a meeting with the remonstrance, "You are surely never going
to pass us by without saying a word!"

The meetings in the towns were not so uniformly friendly. Hooligans
sometimes declined to believe that we were non-militant, and
demonstrated their enthusiasm for law and order by throwing dead
rats, potatoes, rotten eggs, and other garbage, at our speakers. No
real harm was done to any of us, but occasionally the services of
the police were needed to protect our speakers. This, however, was
exceptional, and had reactions in our favour. For instance, one lady,
well on her way towards old age, who had started on our Pilgrimage at
Land's End, originally intended to break off her march at Plymouth,
but, being roughly treated by a band of disorderly youths at Camborne,
resolved that she would accompany the pilgrims all the way to London,
which she did. The start was made in each case from the points most
distant from London on June 18th, and the Pilgrimage in all its eight
branches arrived in London on July 25th, the final demonstration being
held in Hyde Park on July 26th. Here there were nineteen platforms,
representing the nineteen federations of the N.U.W.S.S. There was
a huge and an entirely sympathetic crowd in the Park. When a bugle
sounding from the central platform announced the putting of the
resolution, there was hardly a hand held up against it.

On the next day—Sunday, July 27th—many hundreds of the pilgrims,
wearing their badges and colours, assembled in Trafalgar Square and
walked in procession, but without banners, to St. Paul's to attend
the afternoon service. A large number of seats had been courteously
reserved for them under the dome, and a sermon appropriate to the
occasion was preached by Canon Simpson. We thought it just like
our good luck that the first Psalm for the evening service on the
twenty-seventh day of the month was the absolutely appropriate one:
"When the Lord turned again the captivity of Sion, then were we like
unto them that dream.... They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He
that goeth on his way weeping, and bearing forth good seed, shall
doubtless come again with joy, and bring his sheaves with him." A deep
sense of peace and of absolute confidence in our ultimate triumph came
upon us. We were as certain of it as if it had already been in our
grasp.

It may not be inappropriate here to add a few words about Mrs. Harley,
who originated the Pilgrimage. She was a woman of great originality
and imagination. The widow of a soldier, and sister of General French,
she had lived most of her life among military people and in a military
atmosphere. She was the life and soul of the suffrage movement in
Shrewsbury and the neighbourhood, where her fine character has left a
lasting impression. In December, 1914, she joined the first unit of the
Scottish Women's Hospitals for foreign service under Dr. Elsie Inglis,
and acted as administrator of the great hospital, afterwards so famous,
which was opened in the Abbaye de Royaumont. Mrs. Harley took her young
daughter with her as one of her orderlies. On one occasion, when this
gently nurtured girl was scrubbing a ward, a sick French soldier asked
her if it were true that she was the niece of Lord French. When she
replied in the affirmative, the poilu rejoined: "I don't think General
Joffre's niece would scrub our ward." These little things made a deep
impression, and, I am told, puzzled our French friends not a little.
When the French Government asked the S.W.H. for a second hospital, one
was opened at Troyes, and Mrs. Harley accompanied it, again acting as
administrator. It was the first open-air hospital ever seen in France.
The soldiers nursed in it were enthusiastic in their praise. When the
French Expeditionary Force was sent to Salonica the French Government
asked the Scottish Women's Hospitals Committee to allow this unit to go
with it, a request which was, of course, willingly granted. While at
Salonica Mrs. Harley received from the French military authorities the
Croix de Guerre avec Palme, a decoration which she brought to show us
at our suffrage office in the summer of 1916, when she was in London
for a short time arranging for the transport to Serbia of a couple of
motor ambulances. This was the last time we saw her, for she was killed
by Bulgarian shell-fire at Monastir on March 7th, 1917. Her works do
follow her. A very fine tribute to her memory was paid by the Serbian
authorities on the occasion of the unveiling of a memorial to her. "To
die for one's country," said one of the Serbs, "that is fine, but that
we understand; but to die for another country, that is superb—that is
something beyond us."

Returning to the Pilgrimage and its results. Petitions to Parliament
in favour of women's suffrage had been sent up from the very
numerous meetings which the pilgrims had held while on their march
towards London. These were presented by our friends in the House in
batches, with short speeches, not just dropped silently into the bag
behind the Speaker's chair, as in the old days. A number of M.P.'s
received deputations from their constituents who had taken part in
the Pilgrimage. At the end of July the Home Secretary, Mr. McKenna,
received a deputation from some of the pilgrims, who wished to bring
to his notice the inadequacy of police protection given at some of
the meetings they had addressed. One of the speakers said there was
an impression abroad that women's suffrage meetings were fair game,
and that disorder and hooliganism could take place at these without
disagreeable consequences to those who indulged in them. In his reply
there was a notable change for the better in Mr. McKenna's attitude
towards the N.U.W.S.S. He asked for a list of the meetings of which
complaint was made, and promised enquiry, adding that he would do his
utmost to give suffragists protection as complete as that extended to
other citizens holding peaceful political meetings. He even added: "I
sincerely admire the courage with which you have carried on your work
... and I honestly believe that your method of action has assisted your
cause." This was a great improvement compared with the time, not many
months earlier, when he was so long in making up his mind whether or
not to prosecute us for promoting the sale of an "obscene" book.

The Pilgrimage also led to a deputation from the N.U.W.S.S. being
received by Mr. Asquith. We noted, too, in his attitude and language
a notable improvement; we felt that his education in the principles
of representative government was progressing. Mrs. Harley, Miss
Margaret Robertson, Mrs. Rackham, and Miss Royden spoke chiefly of
the widespread interest in and sympathy with our movement which had
been demonstrated during the Pilgrimage. It fell to me, as leader of
the deputation, to try to wring from him some acknowledgment that he
had not fulfilled the pledges he had given the suffrage deputation
in November, 1911. I reminded him of these pledges, and maintained
that they had not been fulfilled, and reviewed the series of events
which had led suffragists to the unanimous conclusion that the only
way in which their fulfilment was now possible was by means of a
Government Bill. I reminded Mr. Asquith that several of his colleagues
had repeatedly assured us that the opportunity offered them by him
in November, 1911, was far better than any chances afforded by a
private Member's Bill. Mr. Asquith at this point interjected, "So they
were. It was the truth." This enabled me again to emphasize our main
point—namely, that the offer of time for a private Member's Bill was a
totally inadequate substitute for what we had lost by the Government's
mishandling of their own measure. Proceeding, I recalled two
comparatively modern instances in which Liberal Governments had been
divided on the question of franchise reform. Lord Palmerston, leader
of the Liberals in the early sixties, opposed the extension of the
franchise to working men just as Mr. Asquith now opposed its extension
to women. The result was that it was left to a Conservative Government
to carry the needed reform. Lord Goschen, in 1880, had stood aside
from active participation in party politics because of his opposition
to the enfranchisement of the agricultural labourer. I pressed Mr.
Asquith to follow the example of Lord Goschen rather than that of Lord
Palmerston, and not to allow his own views to stand in the way of what
he himself had acknowledged to be the desire of the majority of his
colleagues in the Government and the House of Commons. Finally, I urged
him not to shut his eyes to the fact that the women's demand to share
in self-government was a vital and living movement, a development of
the basic principle of democracy, and was founded on the growth of
education and the wider industrial and professional opportunities which
women had won for themselves during the last two generations. "We have
ceased to have the serf's mind and the serf's economic helplessness,
and it follows that the serf's political status no longer contents us.
The Government is now meeting the demand of women for free institutions
with coercion, and nothing but coercion. It is not thus that the
victories of Liberalism have been won. I readily admit that the
maintenance of order is one of the first duties of every Government.
But another is to redress the grievances from which disorder has
sprung."

In reply, Mr. Asquith confessed himself to have been greatly impressed
by the Pilgrimage and its reception in the country; but though he
admitted that we were in a position of great hardship, and virtually
acknowledged that what he had offered us in January, 1913, was no
equivalent for what he had promised us in November, 1911, he declined
to say what steps his Government were prepared to take in the future
on the suffrage question. But he said: "Proceed as you have been
proceeding. Continue to the end;" and that it would be quite impossible
for a minority in the Liberal Party to obstruct or prevent the
realization of our hopes. Parliament would yield, as it had always
hitherto done, and as it was bound to do, to the opinion of the country
... it was a matter which in the final resort must be decided by the
people themselves. Asked how he expected the judgment of the people to
express itself, Mr. Asquith replied: "I think, in the long run, there
is only one way of finding out what people think, and that is by an
election." But under present conditions, as we did not fail to remind
him, those most concerned in the present matter would not possess
one single vote. Members of the Government favourable to women's
suffrage also received a deputation from the N.U.W.S.S. on the same
day. The interview was private, but when members of both deputations
compared notes, we agreed that the antisuffrage Prime Minister was less
discouraging than his prosuffrage colleagues. They plentifully douched
us with cold water. Only one of them, Sir John Simon, made any helpful
suggestion.

One part of the remarks made by me to the Prime Minister seems to call
for some further explanation: it is that in which I had referred to the
existence of disorder, and that the Government's one and only remedy
for disorder was coercion, and again coercion, ever more and more
harshly and relentlessly applied, unaccompanied by any statesmanlike
effort to redress the grievances from which disorder had sprung. This,
of course, had reference to militantism, which was at its height in
1913. Liberals all over the country were quite willing to endorse John
Bright's wise saying, "Force is no remedy"; but they seemed absolutely
incapable of finding the real remedy—the extension to women of free
institutions. Mr. Asquith had proclaimed that the object of his
Government was "to set upon an unshakable foundation the principles
of Representative Government," while maintaining that its application
to women would be a political mistake of a disastrous nature. Quite
recently, at a Lord Mayor's banquet, he had referred with well-founded
complacency to the rapid reconciliation of the Boer population of South
Africa, and had exclaimed, "Great is the magic of free institutions!"
What we demanded was not the repetition of these mouth-filling phrases,
but their application in our own case. The N.U.W.S.S. had consistently
and persistently opposed militantism from the moment when the so-called
militants attempted to promote their political aims by the use of
personal violence. At the outset they had suffered violence, but used
none; but this policy had, from 1908 onwards, been abandoned, and
they openly took up the weapon of physical force, and in retaliation
physical force was used against them brutally and unscrupulously.
Forcible feeding, the Cat and Mouse Act, were the weapons of the
Government. "Frightfulness" in the German sense had been used on
both sides, and the frightfulness of the Government was as sincerely
deprecated by all of us as the frightfulness of the militants. Again
and again, on all possible occasions, we urged that the redress of
grievances was the true remedy for disorder. We recognized, along with
very large numbers of people hitherto uninterested in our movement, the
courage and power of self-sacrifice of the militants, but we felt that
the use of the weapon of physical force was the negation of the very
principle for which we struggled; it was denying our faith to make our
faith prevail.

In the early summer of 1913 an incident occurred which deeply touched
the popular imagination, and placed the principle of self-sacrifice as
illustrated by the militants on a hill-top from which it was seen not
only all over our own country, but throughout the world. Courage calls
to courage everywhere, and its voice cannot be denied.

The race for the Derby was held on the last Wednesday of May. The
King's horse was the favourite. Crowds even more enormous than
usual gathered to witness it; among them a young woman, a militant
suffragist, Emily Davidson, of Morpeth, in Northumberland, had managed
to place herself close to the winning-post against the rope barrier
which kept the crowd off the actual track. As the King's horse swept
by at a tremendous speed, Emily Davidson threw herself in front of
it. Down came the horse with fearful violence; the jockey was, of
course, thrown, and seriously injured; and there lay Emily Davidson,
mortally injured. She had deliberately sacrificed her life in order,
in this sensational way, to draw the attention of the whole world to
the determination of women to share in the heritage of freedom which
was the boast of every man in the country. The King enquired for the
jockey; the Queen enquired for the injured woman. In a day or two it
was announced that she was dead. She never recovered consciousness.
She had died for her cause. After one of the military disasters which
accompanied the early development of the Risorgimento in Italy, the
historian writes that young Italy had, at least, shown that it knew
how to die. Emily Davidson had shown that she, too, knew how to die. I
happened to be in Vienna at the time, and I shall not easily forget the
awed solemnity with which a Viennese with whom I had had some halting
conversation in German on the suffrage question came to me and said,
"Miss Davidson ist todt."

It is said that the urgency of the suffrage problem in Great Britain
was one reason which induced the ex-Kaiser and his advisers to consider
England a decadent power; if this is true, it is only an example
of the way in which he misread every sign of the times and totally
misunderstood this country. That a woman was capable of throwing away
her life on the chance that it might serve the cause of freedom might
have taught him to expect what happened about fourteen months later,
when over 5,000,000 young Englishmen voluntarily joined the army
in order to preserve the principles of liberty and self-government
throughout the world.




CHAPTER VI

THE TURN OF THE TIDE

                          "Yet die not: do thou
    Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow.
    Live and take comfort.... Thou hast great allies."


After the Pilgrimage, but whether because of it or not we could
not judge, we began to receive much more general support from the
public and from the Press than ever before. This process was probably
accelerated by the character of some of the legislation which had
recently passed through Parliament. The National Insurance Act,
for instance, in 1912, caused a great stir, some of it extremely
nonsensical, such as a huge meeting got up mainly by antisuffrage women
to protest that they would perish rather than stick the insurance
stamps on their servants' policies. The Society for Opposing the
Extension of the Parliamentary Suffrage to Women, however, presented
to Mr. Lloyd George a really excellent memorial on the subject of the
Insurance Bill as it affected women, in the course of which they asked
whether it would not be better if the Bill provided for women the kind
of insurance they wanted rather than the kind which they did not want.
We suffragists, of course, did not fail to point the moral that the
way to get the legislation women wanted was to let women have votes.
Mr. Lloyd George, who had charge of the Bill throughout, was, however,
very accessible to suggestions about it, and received deputations in
which women of all kinds took part, mistresses and maids, as well as
women in industrial occupations. He said he had learnt much from them,
and that their point of view had not occurred to him before he had had
the opportunity of meeting them. The suffragists again were not slow to
point the moral: If women had been voters, their point of view would
have been ascertained and considered from the outset.

One almost ludicrous feature of the Insurance Bill as it first passed
through Parliament was the payment of the maternity benefit granted
under it to the father and not to the mother. One of our Conservative
supporters, Mr. R. Prothero (now Lord Ernle), said, in reference to
this: "It is a small detail. But it is impossible to imagine that a
Parliament elected by women would have allowed the maternity benefit to
be paid to the husband, and would have given the woman the remedy of
prosecuting the man, with whom she must continue to live, if he does
not spend it properly." The improper use of the maternity benefit by
the husband probably was quite exceptional; but there were cases known
in which the husband had spent it in the public-house or to buy himself
a gramophone; and in such cases it was poor comfort to the wife to tell
her that she could protect herself by prosecuting her husband, and get
him fined or sent to prison.

As far as argument was concerned our battle was won. The
antisuffragists, when they pulled themselves together sufficiently
to have a great meeting, continually fell back, even in the case of
their more distinguished speakers, on the undeniable statement that
men were men, and women were women. Another speaker at the Albert Hall
antisuffrage meeting gravely reproached the suffragists for wilfully
misleading industrial women by persuading them that women's wages
would be favourably affected by the possession of political power. His
words were: "It is a heartless and cruel deception to tell poor women
that the possession of a vote would enable them to raise their wages.
Parliament has never attempted such a thing for men." This was on
February 28th, 1912. Within less than a month the Government, of which
he remained a member, did regulate the minimum rate of wages for men
and boys in coal-mines. We believed that the triumph of the miners was
in part due to their electoral power.

The antisuffragists were greatly elated by the success of their Albert
Hall meeting, and their monthly organ, _The Antisuffrage Review_, for
March triumphantly exclaimed: "The great demonstration has been held,
and the woman's suffrage bubble has been pricked." Mrs. Humphry Ward,
however, took a different and a more subdued line. Speaking at Oxford
a little later, she said that "the real fight was only beginning,
and would probably last a long time." As pricked bubbles are not of
a very durable character, she thus virtually disowned the exuberant
metaphor of her paper. But the small fry in the antisuffrage movement
were about this time more than usually offensive and inept. One of
them, a woman writer with a tolerably well-known name, published the
following: "For social purposes, now and always, man is superior to
woman. Organized society rests on him. It would go on quite comfortably
if every woman retired to her own particular wigwam and did nothing
but breed." Another writer, probably male, not to be left behind
in offensive rubbish, wrote in the _Liverpool Courier_: "Votes for
women! Why, the matter is in a nutshell. If married, she exercises the
franchise through her husband. If a widow, she is a past-partner in a
joint concern, and should rest content with the achievement of other
days. If single, she is, or ought to be, too busily engaged in trying
to capture 'John Henry Charles' to think about votes." Degrading and
vulgar nonsense of this kind was nauseating to every decent-minded
man or woman, whether for or against suffrage; but it made many who
had previously been indifferent turn with sympathy to those who were
claiming political freedom for women and trying to preach and live the
gospel of a nobler and truer relationship between the sexes.

    "Self-reverent each and reverencing each,
    Distinct in individualities,
    But like each other ev'n as those who love."

These coarse and foolish attacks upon our whole movement did it not one
ounce of harm.

It was in the spring of 1914 that Lord Selborne raised the question
of women's suffrage in the House of Lords. It was the first time that
suffrage ground had been broken in any serious sense in the Upper
Chamber. A Bill was introduced on the lines of the Conciliation Bill,
and came on for Second Reading on May 5th. Eleven peers spoke in its
favour, and seven in opposition. Among the speeches on our side Lord
Lytton's rose to the level of the very highest excellence. The House,
so proverbially difficult to move in any emotional sense, was obviously
and deeply moved by his earnestness, transparent sincerity, and closely
reasoned argument. Gossip said that as he concluded Lord Curzon threw
himself back in his seat and exclaimed, _sotto voce_, to his next
neighbour: "What a tragedy that such talent should be wasted upon
women!" Another peer who took the antisuffrage side, and used language
comparable to the specimens quoted on the previous page, caused an
old-fashioned country gentleman type of antisuffrage peer sitting on
the Conservative side to exclaim: "I shall go. If I listen to this
fellow any longer I should be driven to vote for the Bill." Lord Curzon
moved its rejection, and it was defeated by 104 votes to 60. The
suffragists were more than gratified by this result, and by the debate
and the general reception given to the subject.

A number of other things were happening month by month which indicated
the growing strength of our movement. The Labour Party, preparing
its programme for the next General Election, placed in the forefront
of its demands "a Government Reform Bill, which must include the
enfranchisement of women." Within the Women's Liberal Federation a
Liberal Women's Suffrage Union was formed, pledging its members to
undertake no work in support of antisuffrage Liberal candidates. A
Liberal Men's Association for Women's Suffrage was also formed, under
the chairmanship of Mr. W. Barton, M.P. for Oldham. Mr. Barton had
recently claimed the right of Liberal women in his constituency to
attend a party meeting to be addressed by Mr. Asquith, and this not
as guests accompanying the speakers, but as political workers in the
constituency. The extraordinary attitude adopted by many Liberal
Associations towards women at this time may be gauged by the fact that
Mr. Barton had to threaten to resign his seat before he could induce
the Oldham Liberal Association to admit women Liberals to their meeting.

Contemporaneously with this, women's suffrage was making way within
the Conservative Party. At the annual conference of the National
Conservative and Unionist Associations at Norwich, Lord Robert Cecil
moved "that it is expedient to extend the franchise to all citizens,
regardless of sex, who have the qualifications at present required
of men for the exercise of the suffrage." The opponents did not
venture on a direct negative, but moved "that it is not expedient
to grant the parliamentary franchise to women on any terms until
this great constitutional change has received the express sanction
of the electors." This amendment was carried by a large majority;
but Lord Robert Cecil had made a deep impression on the association
in connection with this and other subjects debated by them, and his
present very leading position in politics was from this date distinctly
indicated.

Support for suffrage came at this time from another and a much less
expected quarter. The Ulster Unionist Council in September, 1913,
approved the draft articles of the Ulster Provincial Government which
it was intended to set up in the event of the Home Rule Act coming
into operation, and these articles embodied the enfranchisement of
women on the basis of the Local Government register. Indeed, the
Ulster Unionist Council went further than this. For, writing to the
Ulster Women's Unionist Association, the secretary of the U.U. Council
asked for "names of women willing to act upon the various committees
which will on that date (the date of the creation of a Nationalist
Parliament) be established. This ensures that those who have so
heartily supported us in the past will immediately be co-opted with
a view to taking their proper share in the management of the affairs
of Ulster whilst we are holding the province on trust for the British
nation, in which matter we fully realize that their interests are as
much at stake as those of the men."

This attitude on the part of the Ulster Unionist Council was all the
more satisfactory to us because up to that time we had reason to
believe Sir Edward Carson to be among our most determined opponents.

About the same time the Church Congress, meeting in Southampton under
the presidency of the Bishop of Winchester, arranged a debate on the
Ideals of Manhood and Womanhood. The Bishop ruled that the political
aspects of the subject would not be out of order. Miss Royden spoke,
and made so deep an impression that her speech was referred to a
year later by the Bishop of Lichfield, preaching in Hull, "as the
epoch-making address of Miss Maude Royden." The Bishop of Winchester
wrote to the Press, replying to attacks made upon him in defence of
his attitude on women's suffrage at the Church Congress. He pleaded
for truce and amnesty between the Government and the suffrage party,
and urged as a necessary preliminary to this the definite prospect
of the introduction by the Government of a Women's Suffrage Bill as
a first-class measure. From that meeting of the Church Congress at
Southampton dates, I believe, the very strong and undivided support
given to our movement by the Bishops in the House of Lords.

We also had evidence at this time of the support of another religious
body, the Society of Friends, who this year, in their _Annual Epistle_,
issued from the London yearly meeting, made a very sympathetic
reference to the women's movement. We valued this all the more because
of their fine record in the matter of sex equality in religious matters
from the foundation of their society. They had from the first practised
as well as preached the doctrine of equality as between men and women,
and had again and again been pioneers in matters of education and
social reform, besides giving us many of our most valued colleagues and
leaders.

In 1913 also the National Union of Women Workers (now the National
Council of Women) had the last of a series of tussles with Mrs. Humphry
Ward. The point at issue between the suffragists and antisuffragists
in the N.U.W.W. was the necessary majority required on any particular
subject before the executive committee was justified in taking action
upon it. A committee for revising the constitution had been at work,
and had presented a report recommending, among other things, that no
action should be taken on any controversial point unless such action
were supported by a three-fourths majority; this was by way of an
olive-branch, as the necessary majority under the old constitution had
been one of two-thirds. To this proposed compromise the antisuffragists
presented a solid opposition. Some desired that the council should be
deprived of the power of passing resolutions at all. Mrs. Ward proposed
that no resolution should be binding unless passed unanimously—a
reminiscence, apparently, of the _liberum veto_ which contributed so
much to the ruin of the old Polish Constitution. Driven from this
position, she then proposed to give to any five branches and five
affiliated societies an absolute veto upon the proceedings of the
council. In each of these efforts Mrs. Ward was unsuccessful, and in a
gathering of over 400 she could not rally sufficient votes to carry any
of her points. The Antisuffrage Society in consequence withdrew from
the N.U.W.W., and figuratively shook its dust from their feet.

At the opening of this chapter I referred to the more favourable
tone in the Press upon women's suffrage and allied questions. For
quite a number of years we had had true and faithful friends in the
_Manchester Guardian_, the _Aberdeen Free Press_, and in _Punch_, and
other papers. The latter gave us a series of first-rate pictures and
cartoons, which I hope one day may be reproduced as _Punch's_ "History
of Women's Suffrage." Its occasional verses were also very crisp and
to the point. A couple of specimens are here reproduced. The first
was apropos of Mr. Asquith's frequent statement in the course of his
struggle with the House of Lords that "the will of the people must
prevail."

    "You speak, Mr. Asquith, the suffragist said,
      Of the Will of the People wholesale;
    But has the idea never entered your head
      That the People are not wholly male?"

Another, which was headed "Any Premier to any Suffragist," ran thus:

    "So, lady, it is plain,
    While at your claim one man shies,
    Until you have the vote 'tis vain
    To ask us for the franchise."

About this time the editor of the _Daily Telegraph_ allotted space in
his paper once a week, under the heading of "Women in Public Life,"
for the discussion of all kinds of women's activities, including
suffrage. It also gave good telegraphic summaries of events bearing on
the women's cause in foreign countries, and sometimes even printed the
speeches of suffrage leaders verbatim. As our struggle for suffrage
became more and more a struggle with Mr. Asquith it not unnaturally
followed that those papers were naturally estranged from us which
lived, and moved, and had their being in believing that he was the
first of men, and that everything he said and did was perfect. They
did not go back definitely, and in so many words, upon their former
record in support of free representative institutions, but they gave
us many a back-hander, published everything conspicuously which they
thought likely to be damaging to us, and suppressed such events as
told in our favour. I give an instance. In a copy of an evening
paper in 1913 I saw in one column, apropos of some House of Commons
incident, that "Mrs. Fawcett was in despair"; in another that "Mr.
Birrell had finished with women's suffrage for ever"; and that "Mr.
Wilfred Ashley had felt compelled to vote against it." As I knew I
was not in despair, and had never given any justification for the
assertion that I was, I contemplated with some calm the assertions
about Mr. Birrell and Mr. Ashley. We did not complain of this sort
of treatment. The tactics it revealed were too transparent to do our
movement any real harm. The papers which we familiarly referred to as
"the three _Posts_"—the _Morning Post_, the _Birmingham Post_, and the
_Yorkshire Post_—remained out-and-out antisuffrage all through down to
the very end of our struggle. But the _Standard_, which at one time
had refused even to insert colourless paragraphs of suffrage news,
passed to new editorship, and became much more favourable. It referred
sympathetically to our by-election campaigns in 1912 and 1913, saying
that suffragists "were displaying energy of the first order"; and
after the procession in the Coronation year, which had attracted much
favourable notice, it arranged for the daily appearance of a special
page, entitled "Woman's Platform," in which facts and arguments for
and against suffrage were inserted. This was of great use to us, and
we welcomed the publication of the antisuffrage copy, because this
gave the paper an entry into the strongholds of our opponents, and
also enabled us to judge of their policy and tactics. For instance,
it was in the "Woman's Platform" of the _Standard_, in 1913, that Mr.
MacCallum Scott called upon his Liberal friends in the House of Commons
to break their suffrage pledges in order to save Mr. Asquith from the
humiliation of keeping the promises he had made to us.

In 1913 the Conservative and Unionist Women's Franchise Association,
of which the Countess of Selborne had become President, had the happy
thought of instituting through the medium of a joint committee of
suffragists and antisuffragists a systematic and careful enquiry into
the results of women's suffrage in those States of the U.S.A. where it
had been put into operation. A _questionnaire_ was drawn up and sent to
men and women occupying positions of authority and influence in these
States. Of the sixty-three replies received, forty-six were wholly
favourable, eight neutral, five vaguely unfavourable, and only four
wholly adverse.

The late Hon. Robert Palmer, Lady Selborne's son, tabulated the
replies, and published an explanatory comment on them from the suffrage
point of view, while the same task on behalf of the antisuffragists was
performed by Mr. MacCallum Scott, M.P.

Both reports appeared in the form of articles in the _Nineteenth
Century and After_ of February, 1914. Mr. Palmer's article was later
published as a small volume, and formed a valuable handbook for
suffrage speakers. The supporters of suffrage in the U.S.A. frequently
expressed themselves as convinced by experience that the women voters
strengthened the forces which made for good government, using such
expressions as this: "I do not think we could have cleaned up the
city without the women's vote"; or, "At that time I was opposed to
woman suffrage ... but since I have had experience of it I have become
favourable." Mr. MacCallum Scott did not, of course, deny that by an
immense majority the replies had supported the women's vote, or that
it had been followed, in California, for example, by the immediate
passing of much long-sought-for social legislation; but he concluded
his article with the words: "I have tried to sum up the evidence as
impartially as possible, but I have not tried to conceal my own views,
and I have found nothing in the evidence to modify them."

Another very significant breach in the antisuffragist Press stronghold
was revealed when on the last day of 1913 _The Times_ published one of
its American Supplements "On the Pacific Coast," and, to the amazement
and joy of suffragists, wrote most warmly in praise of the complete
success of women's suffrage on the whole Pacific seaboard. Suffragists
had won the State of Washington in 1910, California in 1911, Oregon and
Arizona in 1912. We had expected nothing from _The Times_ but flouts,
and gibes, and sneers, and lo! it blessed us altogether. The concluding
paragraph sufficiently indicates the general character of the article.
It ran thus:

 "One-fifth of the United States Senate, one-seventh of the House of
 Representatives, and one-sixth of the Presidential electoral vote
 of the United States comes now from States where women exercise
 suffrage just as men do. Homes have not been disrupted, marriages
 have not lessened, children have not failed because of the political
 enfranchisement of women. Instead, there has come a more solemn
 feeling of obligation, a greater feeling of responsibility on the
 part of men and women, a higher moral tone in candidates and in
 measures, and an effort to make the city streets and the country at
 large a safer place for children when they leave the precincts where
 maternal love reigns supreme. The women of the suffrage States care
 not only for their own children, but for the children of women not so
 fortunately placed."

What a change this represented from the time, three years earlier, when
every day for nearly a fortnight _The Times_ in its leading articles
and correspondence columns fulminated on the unmeasured national
misfortunes which must necessarily result from the enfranchisement of
women.

Immediately all our group wrote for as many copies of this blessed
supplement as our newsagents could supply. The stock from this source
was quickly exhausted; then I wrote officially to _The Times_ office,
asking for more, only to receive the reply that no more copies could
be obtained. Then we applied for leave to reprint, but the request was
declined on the ground that it was the intention of the management to
publish the whole supplement in book form. On enquiring the probable
date and price, the first question was unanswered, and the reply to the
second mentioned what we considered a prohibitive sum.

But we never saw that book. Of course, I carefully preserved my own
copy, and quoted it continually when I was speaking. The evidence it
gave coincided entirely with what we had learned from our American
friends at the Congress of the International Women's Suffrage Alliance
held the previous June at Buda Pest, when ladies from the newly
enfranchised State of California had told us that, after winning the
vote, they had gained in six months legislative reforms for which
(without the vote) they had been labouring in vain for twenty years.
Twenty months of suffrage, our American friends told us, were worth
more than twenty years of "influence."

Another of the signs of the great progress of our cause was the
continual increase of the support given to it in modern drama. At this
time nearly all the really telling plays by up-to-date writers were
practically suffrage plays. Some—like _How the Vote was Won_, by Miss
Cecily Hamilton; _Votes for Women_, by Miss Elizabeth Robins; and
_Press Cuttings_, by Mr. Bernard Shaw—were propaganda plays pure and
simple, and very good propaganda, too, extremely witty and amusing.
Others, even more telling because a good deal more subtle in method,
were by Sir James Barrie, Mr. Arnold Bennett, and many by Mr. Bernard
Shaw. These were of very great service to our cause, as well as a sign
of its progress; while the plays on the moral aspects of our movement,
such as _Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont_ and _Les Avariés_, by M.
Brieux, brought our message to thousands whom we could not have reached
unaided.

No wonder that, with all the influences enumerated in this chapter
working in our favour, we felt we were on the eve of victory. We
quoted, with an application to ourselves, Cavour's prophetic saying,
"La cosa va." Seldom has a political movement had such a various army
of allies: the Trades Union Congress, the Labour Party, the Church
Congress, the annual meeting of the Society of Friends, the Ulster
Unionist Council, the Press, the Pulpit, and the Theatre. But a great
catastrophe was at hand, which for four and a half years concentrated
all thoughts on national safety, and, above all, on the preservation of
the principles of free representative government, not merely in our own
country, but throughout the world.




CHAPTER VII

THE WORLD WAR AND WOMEN'S WAR WORK

    "What have I done for you,
      England, my England?
    What is there I would not do,
      England, my own?
    With your glorious eyes austere,
    As if the Lord were walking near,
    Whispering terrible things and dear
    As the song on your bugles blown,
      England—
    Round the world on your bugles blown."

    W. E. HENLEY.


In the midst of all the plans of organized work detailed in previous
chapters, which were certain, as we thought, to lead to speedy
victory for the suffrage cause, we were suddenly startled by the
trumpet call of war, the world war, the greatest which ever had been
waged, and our own country was to be a protagonist in it. The wanton
violation of Belgium neutrality by the Germans made this a certainty.
Very soon, too, we realized how right the socialists of the allied
countries—England, France, Belgium, and Russia—were when they agreed
that "a victory for German Imperialism would be the defeat and
destruction of democracy and liberty in Europe," and we recognized that
our cause, the political freedom of women, was but a special case of
the still greater cause for which the Allies were fighting. Clearly
as we began to perceive this, it will easily be recognized that the
time of the outbreak of war was a time of no little perplexity and
anguish of mind to nearly all of us. But from the first our duty was
quite clear—namely, to help our country and her allies to the utmost of
our ability; many of us, however, myself included, believed that the
great catastrophe of the world war would greatly hamper and retard the
movement to which we had dedicated our lives. It only very gradually
dawned upon us that one of the first results of the war would be the
emancipation of women in our own and many other countries.

It will be remembered that England entered the war against Germany at
midnight on Tuesday, August 4th, 1914. All that day and the previous
day the Executive Committee of the N.U.W.S.S. had sat in anxious
consultation. We were a tolerably large band of organized women—over
50,000 members, and about 500 societies—scattered all over the country,
accustomed to work together in a disciplined, orderly fashion for a
common end; we felt, therefore, that we had a special gift, such as
it was, to offer for our country's service—namely, our organizing and
money-raising power.

In my first message to our societies, published in the _Common Cause_
on August 7th, 1914, I had said:

 "In the midst of this time of terrible anxiety and grief, it is some
 little comfort to think that our large organization, which has been
 carefully built up during past years to promote women's suffrage, can
 be used now to help our country through this period of strain and
 sorrow. 'He that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth
 his life for My sake shall find it.' Let us show ourselves worthy of
 citizenship, whether our claim to it be recognized or not."

In the ordinary course of things we could not by the rules of our
union have made any change in our methods of work, and still less have
applied our organization to any other object than the gaining of the
parliamentary franchise for women, without calling our council together
and receiving its express authorization. The circumstances of the hour
rendered this impossible, and we took the only available alternative:
we consulted our societies by post. Even this was not quite simple,
as a large number of the officers of our societies were scattered, at
the beginning of August, in various holiday resorts. However, it was
the best we could do, and the Executive Committee intimated to all the
societies its opinion that the ordinary political work of the union
and all propaganda must be suspended; and that the best way of using
our staff and organizing capacity would be in initiating forms of work
designed to mitigate the suffering which the war would bring.

The alleviation of distress among women caused by the dislocation of
employment due to the war was our first object. When events rendered
efforts in this direction no longer necessary, we enlarged the scope
of our activities so as to include everything that was calculated
to "sustain the vital energies of the nation." But the preliminary
necessity in that first week of the war was to know that we had the
backing of our societies throughout the country. We had consulted them
by post on August 3rd, and we met again on August 6th to consider the
replies received. Ninety-nine per cent. of these acquiesced in our
suggestion. Two of them contained sketch plans of methods of work on
the new lines. We concentrated at first on using our whole organization
for the relief of distress caused by the war. We suggested to each
of our societies that it should formally offer the services of its
officers and members to the Lord Mayor, Mayor, or Chairman of the
Council in its own district, and should volunteer to take part in
the local relief committees which were being formed in every local
government area under directions issued by the Local Government Board.
Like almost everyone else in those troubled, anxious times, we expected
that there would be a great deal of distress owing to unemployment;
and there was temporarily great dislocation of industry and lack of
work, especially among women. On August 27th, 1914, we unanimously
adopted a resolution, moved and seconded by our hon. secretary and hon.
parliamentary secretary, urging the Government, long before anything
of the kind had been done, to adopt the principle in the Government
offices, and in all suitable occupations, of the substitution of
women's labour for men's. We pressed this on the Government with the
double motive—to increase the demand for women's labour, and to set
free a large number of men of military age who were keenly anxious to
join the newly forming armies. Our suggestion met with no response. But
I cannot but look back with gratification that we made it at that early
date.

While out-of-work distress lasted among women, we opened, in various
parts of the country, forty workshops, and gave employment to over
2,000 women. I well remember the resentment and melancholy of some
able young women in our employment when they saw the advertisements
everywhere displayed calling upon young men to join the colours,
announcing in huge letters YOUR COUNTRY WANTS YOU, and reflected that
their country did not want them. We endeavoured, so far as lay in our
power, to check this feeling of discontent by not diminishing our own
demand for the services of women. We did not add to the volume of
unemployment by dismissing on account of the war any of our staff or
organizers. We paid the salaries and lent the services of nearly 150
trained workers all over the country to local relief committees and
other bodies responsible for carrying out new work connected with the
war.

The officers of our societies in many parts of the country showed great
initiative in finding out what the soldiers wanted, and doing it for
them. As an example, I may mention the case of the hon. secretary of
one of our Kentish societies. It was in the neighbourhood of a large
training camp where 12,000 men were congregated. The existing local
arrangements for their laundry were quite inadequate, and this lady,
of University education, ran a laundry for them most successfully and
efficiently. She appealed not only to the well-to-do, but also to
domestic servants and other working women in the neighbourhood, to give
time regularly in their afternoons to do the necessary mending. She
herself devoted her whole time to the work of the laundry, which was a
great success from the first.

The London society of the N.U.W.S.S. devoted its great powers and
wide experience of London conditions to sorting out efficient women
workers to positions where such services, paid or unpaid, were
urgently required. This work, under the name of Women's Service, it
has continued, with success and efficiency, to the present time. Its
energies have been remarkably varied. For instance, it provided the
London General Omnibus Company with a hundred women conductors when
first the need for them was felt; it was constantly applied to by the
War Office and other public departments for women fitted to carry out
all kinds of novel employments, such as the judging of the quality
and the forwarding of hay for the army. It registered the first great
rush of the Belgian refugees, and organized this so efficiently that,
when the numbers to be dealt with became so great that the work had
to be handed over to Government officials, no change in the system of
registration had to be introduced. The London society has from the
beginning of the war greatly extended the area of women's employment.
It opened a small workshop and taught women acetylene welding for
aeroplane work until this establishment was taken over by the
Government. H.M. the Queen honoured this workshop by a surprise visit
in the summer of 1916, and pleased the workers very much by taking a
workshop cup of tea seated on an overturned packing-case.

I believe all our societies, from Cornwall to Stornoway, except those
in the prohibited areas, did their part in providing hospitality for
the Belgian refugees. The London society opened nine hostels for them
in its area, and forwarded to the Government several hundred offers of
private hospitality.

Over sixty of our societies, immediately after the declaration of war,
devoted themselves to life-saving activities by the formation of
maternity centres, baby clinics, schools for mothers, and other similar
associations.

Forty-five of our societies became Red Cross centres. One of our
societies, within a very few weeks of the outbreak of war, offered to
staff and equip a hospital at a naval base in the North of Scotland,
but the chief medical officer and the C.O. rejected the offer, with the
remark that they did not wish to be troubled by "hysterical women."
The officers and members of our societies were extremely active in
establishing and providing the necessary funds and labour for keeping
up canteens for soldiers on railway-stations, also in starting clubs,
guest-rooms, and houses of rest for soldiers. At many of these
educational facilities were given, French classes being particularly
called for. We also did everything in our power to call attention to
and to check the terrible waste which at the outset was taking place in
the training camps for soldiers; and our organization was first in the
field, afterwards so well tilled by the war savings committees, to call
attention to the great national importance of personal and household
economy. Many of our most active societies initiated war savings
exhibitions and demonstrations in their own area, and by precept and
practice showed the great national importance of personal thrift. In
London, Liverpool, Cardiff, Brighton, and many other places, we held
these "patriotic housekeeping" exhibitions, where short addresses were
given, war economy recipes distributed, etc. To women of all classes
who constantly passed through them we did not fail to bring home the
importance of small daily savings, showing that if every one of us in
our domestic expenditure could save on an average twopence a head per
day, Sundays excepted, this would be a shilling a week, and a shilling
a week for 45,000,000 people, fifty-two weeks in the year, meant an
annual saving of £117,000,000. In this way we countered the so-called
"argument" so frequently heard: "What is the good of my saving my
poor little pence when the Government is throwing away millions in
absolute waste, for which no one is a farthing the better?" Women,
we reminded our audiences, everywhere and in all classes, were the
domestic Chancellors of the Exchequer: domestic expenditure was almost
wholly in their hands. Women had often been told in contempt that their
business was to "mind the kitchen"; and now they joyfully and proudly
determined they would mind the kitchen, and do their part in the
service of their country by saving hundreds of millions per year; and
they also determined to do this while seeing that by skilful management
the physical health of those under their charge was in no way impaired.
Their job was to see that every ounce of raw material passing through
their hands yielded its full food value.

I have already touched in an earlier chapter on the most important
of all the war activities of the N.U.W.S.S.—the Scottish Women's
Hospitals for Foreign Service, initiated and carried through by the
genius and devotion of the hon. secretary of our Scottish Federation,
Dr. Elsie Inglis. Her name and her great work are now known and
honoured throughout the world, and it is unnecessary here to dwell
upon them at any length. In the old days before the war Dr. Inglis
used to say she had two passions, "suffrage and surgery." Before the
end of her honoured life came she added to these two S's yet another,
"Serbia." How this came about is worth recalling, and can be studied in
detail in the "Life of Dr. Elsie Inglis," by Lady Frances Balfour. It
affords an example of "the soul of goodness in things evil would men
observingly distil it out." Her first wish in September, 1914, was to
place her services, her knowledge and skill in her profession, at the
service of her country. In an interview with a high official of the
R.A.M.C. at the War Office in that month, when she asked his advice
as to what course she should take, his reply was: "Dear lady, go home
and keep quiet"—in other words, her help was refused. The British Red
Cross adopted the same attitude. She was therefore compelled to place
her organization under the French Red Cross. The great hospital at
Royaumont was the first to be established. The N.U.W.S.S. Scottish
Women's Hospitals were complete hospital units, officered entirely
by women. The physicians and surgeons, nurses, dressers, orderlies,
motor drivers, and domestic staff were all women. The whole scheme was
initiated by Dr. Elsie Inglis, and was enthusiastically taken up by the
whole N.U.W.S.S. The work quickly grew to large proportions. I have
a letter from Dr. Inglis, dated October 13th, 1914, on the financial
aspect of her scheme. At that date she only had £213 in hand. At the
date of writing this, August 18th, 1919, the total collected for the
S.W.H. amounted to £428,905 1s. 3d. The total number of beds in France
and Serbia for which the organization was responsible exceeded 1,800.
Powerful committees were formed in Scotland, South Wales, and in London
to support the hospitals, and their membership was not confined to
the N.U.W.S.S.—indeed, especially in Scotland, several influential
non-suffragists joined in promoting the great work. It must not for a
moment be supposed that only suffragists were active and devoted. It
was recognized by the instinctive common sense of the great majority
of women throughout the whole country, suffragist and non-suffragist,
militant and non-militant, that their first duty was by every practical
means in their power to strengthen the resources of their country so
as to aid it to issue successfully from the great struggle. Those who
took a contrary view did exist, but their numbers were very small.
But it is a source of pride and thankfulness that the womanhood of
the whole country, quite irrespective of political party or creed,
were eager to do everything in their power to help their country. The
"militants" immediately abandoned militant tactics. Many of them took
part in what was known as the Women's Emergency Corps, which readily
undertook a large variety of patriotic activities. Several well-known
antisuffragists, among them Mrs. Humphry Ward and Miss Gladys Pott, did
patriotic work of a first-class kind. Among the former "militants,"
two, Dr. Flora Murray and Dr. Louisa Garrett Anderson, were, I believe,
the very first women doctors to take out a well-equipped hospital
unit, officered entirely by women, to France. The necessary funds were
privately subscribed. It was of these ladies that Surgeon-General Sir
Alfred Keogh, head of the R.A.M.C., afterwards said that they "were
worth their weight, not in gold, but in diamonds." He had by this time
had practical experience of their professional and personal work,
both in Paris and, later, in another hospital at Wimereux. Sir Alfred
Keogh's words were no empty compliment, for he very shortly afterwards
placed Dr. F. Murray and Dr. L. G. Anderson at the head of a large
military hospital of 520 beds in London, posts which carried the rank
of Major in the army.

Their first hospital was established in a spacious hotel in the Champs
Elysées, and was described as the best equipped in Paris. It became
quite a show place, and those who visited it were full of admiration
for the devotion, care, and skill with which the patients were tended.
The men were most grateful and appreciative of the skill of the women
surgeons, dressers, and nurses. "There was a wonderful atmosphere of
sympathy and home about the wards, and the men were not slow to respond
to it," wrote a visitor. Another visitor asked one of the wounded men:
"Is it possible there are no men surgeons in this place?" The man, a
Highlander, replied by another question: "And what would we be wanting
men for?" Other hospitals officered by women were taken out to Belgium
and the North of France quite independently of the N.U.W.S.S.; but the
Scottish Women's Hospitals were the only ones which were originated
and run, as one of their main pieces of war work, by a suffrage
organization.

Our first unit arrived at the Abbaye de Royaumont in December, 1914.
The building had then been uninhabited for about ten years, and was
a bare shell, without water, light, or heating; magnificent indeed
architecturally, but almost incredibly forbidding, icy cold, dark, and
comfortless.

The forerunners will not easily forget the first few weeks in the
Abbaye, when they had to cope with the difficulties of converting this
dark ice-house into warm and comfortable wards for sick and wounded
soldiers. But it was done cheerfully, and even gaily. Outside labour
was practically impossible to get, and the whole staff turned to and
did the work themselves: charing and scrubbing went on; electric light
and electric stoves were procured; the equipment arrived; the pioneers
after a time had the pleasure of sleeping in beds instead of on the
floors, and by the middle of January, 1915, the huge vaulted halls were
all white and spotless, and were transformed into comfortable wards,
with rows of cosy beds covered with cheery red blankets. There were 100
beds to begin with, but this number quickly grew to 200; then to 400;
and eventually, in the very last months of the war, to 600.

The Medical Department of the French Army, probably a little sceptical
at first, visited the hospital, examined it thoroughly, and expressed
their warm approval, especially of the X-ray apparatus which was the
only one for many miles round, and of the very practical character of
the whole equipment.

Gradually the most difficult and serious cases among French soldiers
gravitated to this hospital. General Joffre showed a very kindly
interest in it, and on one occasion sent an aide-de-camp with a gift
of money for distribution among the patients as they left. The medical
and surgical work done has been of the very highest excellence, and was
warmly appreciated by the patients. The women surgeons made a great
study of conservative surgery, and many a wounded man left Royaumont
with limbs intact, saved by the skill and patience of the Scottish
Women's unit.

The second hospital to be opened in France was at Troyes. It was
financed by the students of Newnham and Girton, a fact which is said
to have made a deep impression on the French soldiers. This hospital
was directly under the French military authorities, and when the
complications in the Balkans became acute it was ordered to Salonica.
An enlargement of this hospital, financed by our Manchester society,
was under the medical direction of Dr. Mary Blair. When Serbia was
overrun by the Austrians her unit was transferred to Corsica, where she
had control of a hospital for Serbian refugees at Ajaccio.

The N.U.W.S.S. eventually had five units in Serbia. One of the most
magnificent pieces of work they did was the successful grappling,
under Dr. Inglis's guidance, with the typhus epidemic in 1915, which
threatened the very existence of the Serbian Army. It may be said
that twice Dr. Inglis saved the Serbian nation from despair—once when
she stamped out the typhus epidemic, and once when the country was
overrun by the then victorious Germans and Austrians. This compelled
the withdrawal of most of our units. The papers told of their wonderful
tramp of 300 miles across ice-bound mountains. Dr. Elsie Inglis and
Dr. Alice Hutchinson, with their respective staffs, did not leave
Serbia when the other units left. They stayed on and continued their
work until they were taken prisoners by the Austrians. They were
prisoners for three months. Dr. Alice Hutchinson told how she and her
unit kept Christmas, 1915:

 "In the evening we sang carols and drank toasts. We even ventured
 to sing 'God save the King' under our breath.... It cheered us
 wonderfully. We had our British flag with us, too. I wound it round
 my body under my clothes when we evacuated our hospital, so that it
 should not be trampled on and insulted." (_The Common Cause_, February
 18th, 1916).

She refused to give up her hospital equipment without a receipt, and
on being ordered to send her unit to a cholera hospital, she refused,
except on condition that her nurses were first inoculated, and also
paid for their work, and their proper rank accorded to the doctors.
"At this," she said, "there was a terrible scene. I was sworn at and
cursed, and told I was a coward; but I would not give in." She was
willing to work herself for cholera patients, but would not allow her
nurses to do so without inoculation.

Dr. Elsie Inglis also showed the same fine spirit. They both said that
the Germans, officers and men alike, behaved like brutes, the latter
using disgusting and insulting language. The Austrians, officers and
men, were kind and polite. But the hardships of the imprisonment were
shortage of food and gross overcrowding. Our doctors were enthusiastic
in all they said of the courage and devotion of the Serbians. They
reached home safe and sound, and made an appeal for additional
subscriptions to continue their splendid work.

The scientific work done by the women doctors at Royaumont received an
unsolicited testimonial in 1916 from a leading French man of science,
Dr. Weinberg, who held the office of Chef de Laboratoire at the Pasteur
Institute, Paris.

Lecturing to members of the medical profession in Glasgow on gas
gangrene, he paid a splendid tribute to the work of the Scottish
Women's Hospital at Royaumont. He had, he said, seen hundreds and
hundreds of military hospitals, but none the organization and
direction of which won his admiration so completely. Every duty in
the hospital, from those of the chief surgeon to the chauffeur of
the motor ambulance, was performed by women. He was impelled to
express his admiration of the manner in which cases were treated. The
military authorities had such confidence in the hospital that they
were ready to trust to its care the most severe class of cases. Of the
bacteriological department of the hospital, which was arranged by Dr.
Elizabeth Butler, Dr. Weinberg was equally enthusiastic. He was struck
with the most perfect order which prevailed, notwithstanding the
apparent entire absence of anything in the form of rigid disciplinary
measures. He attributed this order to the fact that the patients
recognized how devoted were the staff to their care and interests.
It was the soldier's natural recognition of the excellent services
and attention given by all the staff, and particularly by the chief
surgeon, Miss Ivens, who was ably assisted by numerous colleagues all
inspired by the same devotion. Incidentally, Dr. Weinberg expressed the
opinion that he could not imagine any activity on the part of women
that would more effectively further the cause of the women's movement
than the institutions carried on by the Scottish Women's Hospitals.

The work of the hospital at Royaumont was particularly heavy in the
spring of 1918. The place was frequently exposed to bombardment. The
three operating theatres were kept busy night and day, the surgeons
having frequently to work by candle-light and under shell-fire. In July
the hospital was taken over by the French military authorities, when
the number of beds was brought up to 600. Down to the very end of the
war the work of the Scottish Women's Hospitals was continued in France
and Serbia undiminished in vigour and extent. In October and November,
1918, the organization was maintaining 1,885 beds. Many of the doctors
and nurses have received decorations and other honours from the French
and Serbian nations; but, so far as I know, no national honour has been
conferred on them by the country of their birth. In recognition of her
splendid work, the chief medical officer at Royaumont, Dr. Frances
Ivens, received the Croix de Guerre avec Palme, and twenty-three of
her staff the Croix de Guerre avec Étoiles from the French Army. In
February, 1919, the hospital was closed; but the organization of the
Scottish Women's Hospitals still exists. The committee at headquarters
in Edinburgh are raising a fund to establish a training school for
Serbian nurses in Belgrade as a memorial to Dr. Elsie Inglis; while
the London committee, with the same object in view, are in process of
endowing a chair of medicine in the University of Belgrade. The name of
Elsie Inglis will live for ever in Serbian history. Her works do follow
her, and her memory will be cherished by the gallant nation to which
she devoted her great powers.

Late in the autumn of 1915 the N.U.W.S.S. resolved to send some units
of women doctors and nurses to Russia to aid the civil population, more
especially women and children, who had become refugees in consequence
of the German advance over the western provinces of Russia. The
accounts which reached us of the sufferings of these refugees were
terrible. The roads by which they had travelled were marked by the
graves of those who had fallen by the wayside. A maternity hospital
was opened in Petrograd as well as "barak" hospitals for all kinds of
infectious diseases. Our units were warmly welcomed by the suffering
population and by the Zemstvos. They co-operated with the Britain to
Poland Fund Committee, and also with the Moscow Union of Zemstvos.
Eight hospitals were equipped and opened. Our doctors and their staffs
on their arrival immediately began a fierce fight with diphtheria,
scarlet fever, smallpox, typhus, and scabies; and skilled treatment
saved many hundreds of lives. Over £11,000 was raised, and we were
served by most able and devoted staffs, several of whom laid down their
lives in the work in which they had engaged. The work was brought
to a premature end by the chaos which quickly supervened upon the
Russian Revolution of March, 1917. The N.U.W.S.S. did me the honour of
naming the Russian units after me. The doctors and nurses of the M.F.
Hospitals returned finally to England in August, 1917. The welcome our
units received from the Zemstvos and the students, male and female, of
the University of Kazan made us feel that they were appreciated, and we
can only trust that, like other good seed, the work of our units will
bring forth fruit in due season.




CHAPTER VIII

WOMEN'S WAR WORK AS IT AFFECTED PUBLIC OPINION

    "A land of settled Government,
      A land of just and old renown,
      Where Freedom slowly broadens down
    From precedent to precedent."


The war revolutionized the industrial position of women. It found them
serfs and left them free. It not only opened to them opportunities of
employment in a number of skilled trades, but, more important even than
this, it revolutionized men's minds and their conception of the sort of
work of which the ordinary everyday woman was capable. It opened men's
eyes to the national waste involved in condemning women to forms of
work needing only very mediocre intelligence. It also opened their eyes
to the national as well as the personal value of the ordinary domestic
work of women, which has been in their hands for uncounted generations.
It ploughed up the hardened soil of ancient prejudice, dissolving it
and replacing it by a soil capable of fructifying the seeds of new
ideas. Not even the most inveterate of antisuffragists could have
ventured to say, after the experience gained by the war, what one of
them quoted on a previous page had said just before the war, to the
effect that, apart from breeding, women were of no national importance
whatever.

It made women themselves, as well as men, realize the great national
importance of women's ordinary domestic work. One example which went
the round of the Press will illustrate this. In a convalescent camp
of 2,820 men in the South of England the employment of women cooks
in the place of men caused a saving in one month of £900, and at the
same time the men were better and not worse fed. The saving was not
effected by cutting down the wages bill or by stinting the supplies,
but by the more skilful use of food-stuffs and the sensible expedient
of employing those who knew their job in the place of those who did
not. As an example, it may be mentioned that in many soldiers' camps,
employing men cooks, the tea, served out in ample quantities and of
excellent quality, was thrown away in consequence of the adoption of
the odious and filthy trick of boiling the water for it in the same
vessels, uncleansed, in which the meat for the mid-day dinner had been
boiled. The result was illustrative of bad work in general; the tea
was wasted, the men were disgruntled, and a general impression created
that Government property could be thrown away without doing any harm to
anyone.

John Bright used to say that the one good thing about war was that
it taught people geography. If he were living now he might very truly
say that it taught people political economy; that a nation grows rich
by producing, and not by destroying; that all waste is creative of
poverty. War even illuminates the abstruse and difficult subject of
foreign exchanges, and shows that no nation grows rich by printing
promises to pay on pieces of paper. War also teaches the supreme
national value of life, and illuminates Ruskin's saying, "There is no
wealth but life." It is a realization of this which has fundamentally
raised the position of women in every country which has come within the
radius of its great searchlights.

The actual steps by which the war raised the industrial status of
women from serfdom to freedom are not difficult to trace. In the
first eighteen months of the war more than five million young men
from every class, but mainly from the flower of the industrial
population, volunteered for military service. Before the end of the war
Great Britain was maintaining in the war more than eight and a half
million men.[6] This naturally left a shortage of labour in nearly
all industries, including agriculture. Naturally also there was,
simultaneously with this reduction in numbers of the men in industry, a
huge increase in the demand of our own Government and the Governments
of our Allies for arms and ammunition, cloth for uniforms, boots,
ships, hutments, food for the armies, optical glass, and every sort of
military equipment. Every man and woman who could work in the fields
or factories producing these things could get continuous employment at
wages higher than had ever before been paid. In September, 1915, after
fourteen months of war, the rate of unemployment registered at Labour
Exchanges was only ½ per cent., the lowest on record. The weekly sum
paid in wages had gone up by the end of October by £519,484. In March
of the same year what is known as the Treasury agreement with the Trade
Unionists came into existence, by which the trade unions consented, in
face of the national emergency, to suspend for the duration of the war
their rules and customs which prevented the employment of women in most
of the skilled trades. The Treasury, on its part, gave a solemn promise
not to use women as a reservoir of cheap labour, and agreed to give the
same wages for the same output, and, moreover, to restore by Act of
Parliament when the war was over the pre-war practices of trade unions,
which had severely limited the employment of women. Women themselves
were not in any way consulted when this agreement was arrived at. They
were, therefore, not parties to it; and suffragists generally, while
welcoming the breaking down of the barriers which prevented women
having a free choice in industry, even if this were only temporary,
felt that the restoration of pre-war practices by Act of Parliament
when the war was concluded would make the industrial position of women,
in a sense, worse than ever; for formerly, as they pointed out, women
were excluded from nearly all the best paid trades simply by the rules
of private societies: it was a different and a worse position to be
excluded from them by statute.

In 1915, however, it was from every point of view of the first
importance to get the trade union embargo on women's labour removed;
and when it was removed, instantly evidence began to pour in of the
high productivity of women's work. It was almost ridiculous to watch
the amazement of the ordinary man when he saw how rapidly women
learned men's jobs, and how, by their patriotic zeal and entire
innocence of the trade union practice of ca' canny, their output
frequently exceeded, and exceeded largely, the output of men working
the same machinery for the same number of hours. The first evidence
which reached the public of the high efficiency of women's labour was
contained in an article in the trade journal _The Engineer_ of August
20th, 1915, the following passage from which is here quoted:

 "There is a widespread idea that the only machines which women can
 work are automatic or semi-automatic tools with which it is impossible
 to make mistakes. This idea is being daily disproved in the factory
 to which we have referred above, where some most delicate operations,
 necessitating the exercise of great skill and high intelligence, are
 being performed. We need only mention one case, but it will appeal
 to every mechanical engineer. In a certain screwing operation it was
 customary before the employment of women to rough the thread out with
 the tool, and then to finish it off with taps. Some trouble having
 arisen owing to the wearing of the taps, the women of their own
 initiative did away with the second operation, and are now accurately
 chasing out the threads to gauge with the tool alone. This is work of
 which any mechanic might feel proud.... In fact, it may be stated with
 absolute truth that women have shown themselves perfectly capable of
 performing operations which have hitherto been exclusively carried out
 by men."

Sir William Beardmore, then President of the Iron and Steel Institute,
and Chairman of the Parkhead Ironworks, Glasgow, spoke in his
presidential address of the high productivity of women's labour. He
quoted the case of a new machine introduced by his firm, of which it
was desired to test the utility. A good workman was induced with some
difficulty to try it and to lay aside, for the sake of the experiment,
the traditional restriction of output. The machine did well, but not
so well as the firm had been led to expect. Then another experiment
was made, that of putting women on the job. "Using the same machines,
and working the same number of hours, their output was more than
double that of the thoroughly trained mechanic." The newspapers about
this time began to be full of articles praising up to the skies the
"wonderful," "amazing," "extraordinary" mechanical capability of women.
The case was quoted of a woman, formerly a charwoman, who had been put
on to do gun breech work. Her job was to bore a hole ⅛ inch in diameter
dead true through 12 inches of solid steel. The test was the tally of
broken tools, and at the time of writing this woman, the former "char,"
had a clean slate. Every successive Minister of Munitions, and almost
every other Minister, spoke enthusiastically of the extraordinary value
to the nation of women's work. Mr. Lloyd George said: "Their work is
absolutely indispensable, and they themselves are extraordinarily
adaptable." And again: "I am anxious to bear testimony to the
tremendous part played by the women of England in this vital epoch of
human history." Mr. Montagu said in the House of Commons in his first
speech after becoming Minister of Munitions: "Women of every station,
with or without previous experience ... have proved themselves able to
undertake work which before the war was regarded solely as the province
of men, and often of skilled men alone. Indeed, it is not too much to
say that our armies have been saved and victory assured by the women
in the munition factories." Mr. Churchill confessed that without
the work of women it would have been impossible to win the war; and
also referred to the excellence of its quality, as well as the enormous
character of its volume.

[Illustration: PRO PATRIA: A TRIBUTE TO WOMAN'S WORK IN WAR-TIME.

(Reproduced by special permission of the Proprietors of _Punch_.)

_Punch_, January 26, 1916.]

      [Facing page 112.
]

Lord Selborne, as Minister of Agriculture, gave unstinted praise to
women's work on farms, and said he had heard nothing but unqualified
praise of the hundreds of women thus employed.

All the foregoing we were able to reckon among the supporters of
women's political enfranchisement. But we began to be aware of a
new note among the voices that go to make up public opinion when we
discovered commercial and financial magnates, managers of railways and
other great industrial concerns, and old-fashioned country gentlemen
not hitherto connected in any way with our political aims, joining in
the chorus which was now loudly chanting the praises of women's work.

A very interesting and important article on Women in Industry will be
found in the _Quarterly Review_, July, 1919, by Sir Lynden Macassey,
Chairman of the National Tribunal on Women's Wages, Chairman of the
Clyde Dilution Commission, and a member of the War Cabinet Committee on
Women in Industry. In this _Quarterly_ article, among other significant
things, he says that by the end of the war "women had literally leapt
as agents of production, and by inherent economic powers and aptitude,
into a position of eminence in the economic world previously undreamt
of even by themselves" (p. 79). On another page he says that, "where
the work required constant alertness, a sure, deft touch, delicacy of
manipulation—in short, a combination of quick intelligence and manual
dexterity within a limited ambit—women were invariably superior to
men" (p. 81). I, for one, can never believe that any Act of Parliament
can thrust women back into the industrial morass in which they were
stifled before the war.

Lord Revelstoke, speaking as an expert on finance, said that the
tapping of the "new reservoir" of women's labour had saved the
financial situation by enabling the country to keep up the volume of
its exports. Even Lord Curzon, Chairman of the Antisuffrage League, and
Mr. Asquith, our chief political adversary, surprised us by joining
with Mr. Balfour in signing a letter to the Press containing a strong
appeal for funds for the extension of the buildings of the London
School of Medicine for Women. "Is Saul also among the prophets?" we
asked each other. Mr. Walter Long, at that date an opponent of our
enfranchisement, included women in his National Register Bill, saying
that women themselves had made an almost unanimous demand for this,
and he would look upon their exclusion "as a serious rebuff wholly
unjustifiable in face of the splendid services which they had rendered
already to the prosecution of the war." Mr. Walter Long, too, had
greatly delighted us at a meeting in Grosvenor House to promote the
employment of women on the land by exclaiming that, although the
movement was going on well, "yet there were still, unfortunately,
villages to be found where the women had become imbued with the idea
that woman's place is home." "That idea," he added, "must be met and
combated."

Even more extraordinary, however, were the signs which now began to be
seen of Mr. Asquith's change of view. This was first foreshadowed in
his words spoken in the House of Commons on the heroic death of Edith
Cavell in September, 1915. Referring to what that year had produced to
justify "faith in the manhood and womanhood of our people," he added,
speaking particularly of Miss Cavell: "She has taught the bravest man
amongst us a supreme lesson of courage; yes, and in this United Kingdom
and throughout the Dominions of the Crown there are thousands of such
women, _but a year ago we did not know it_." We suffragists rejoiced
in this change of tone. At the same time, we wondered where he could
have lived all his sixty odd years without discovering that courage
was not the exclusive attribute of the male sex. At this time—1916,
1917—conversions of important public men and of newspapers came in,
not by twos and threes, but by battalions. The Press became full of
wonderful instances of women's courage and capacity, and told of nurses
standing back from the lifeboats of a torpedoed ship, who, when the
word went forth, "Save the women first," gave the reply, "Fighting men
first; they are the country's greatest need." The Prefect of Constanza
was quoted, who saw the work of our women orderlies in connection with
the Scottish Women's Hospitals, and said: "It is extraordinary how
these women endure hardships; they refuse help, and carry the wounded
themselves. They work like navvies. No wonder England is a great
country if the women are like that." Another instance of the courage of
women which deeply affected public opinion was afforded at an inquest
on the bodies of the victims of an explosion at a shell factory in the
North of England. Twenty-six women had been killed, and about thirty
injured. The behaviour of the women was declared to be worthy of the
highest praise. "They displayed the greatest coolness and perfect
discipline, both in helping to remove the injured and in continuing to
carry on the work of the factory." It was announced in the Press that
Sir Douglas Haig would be asked to let the men at the front know of the
courage and spirit which animated their womenfolk at home. Our feeling
about all this was, not that women had changed, but that the public
attitude towards them and appreciation of them had changed.

[Illustration: _Man of the World_ (lighting up): "We'll 'ave to give it
'em, I expect, Chorlie!"

(Reproduced by special permission of the Proprietors of _Punch_.)

_Punch_, November 30, 1910]

      [Facing page 116.
]

Among the conversions to suffrage views at this time, none were
more valuable to us than those of which we had evidence in the
Press. Our old friends the _Manchester Guardian_, the _Daily News_,
the _Aberdeen Free Press_, the _Nation_, the _New Statesman_, etc.,
stood by us, and were more valued than ever; but we welcomed new
recruits in _The Times_, the _Daily Mail_, the _Globe_, the _Evening
News_, and _Observer_. Miss Violet Markham, once a chief among the
antisuffragists, was known to have withdrawn her opposition. Her war
work had brought her in contact with some of our most active societies,
and she was understood to have said that she would never in future say
anything against suffragists. Her conversion may be assumed to have
been fairly complete, as she consented to stand as a Liberal candidate
for the Mansfield Division of Nottinghamshire at the General Election
in December, 1918. One of our chief opponents in the Press was reported
to have said: "The women were wonderful! Their adaptability, freshness
of mind, and organizing skill were magnificent. Men were making too
great a mess of the world, and needed helpers without their own
prejudices, idleness, and self-indulgence."

The conversion of other well-known public men, formerly our opponents,
became known about this time. Among these may be mentioned Lord Derby
and his brother, Sir Arthur Stanley, Chairman of the British Red Cross
and St. John of Jerusalem Nursing Association; Lord Faber, Mr. Winston
Churchill, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Sir Croydon Marks. Two former
antisuffragists, both Members of Parliament, one a Liberal and the
other a Conservative, may be quoted as representative of what was going
on in men's minds. The Liberal, who had hitherto pleaded militancy
as an excuse for his antisuffragism, said at the annual meeting of
Liberals in his constituency: "Any party which did not realize that
the women had made good their cause by their services where they had
formerly spoilt it by their threats must be blind"; and he held there
should be no widening of the franchise for men without bringing in
women on the same terms. The Conservative said simply: "I have always
been an antisuffragist, but the women have served their country so
magnificently that after this I shall support giving them the vote."

It is very significant that, while these wholesale conversions were
taking place in this country, thus preparing the way for a sweeping
victory for women's suffrage in the House of Commons, a similar change,
brought about by similar causes, had already, in 1916, taken place in
Canada. In that year a great suffrage movement swept over Canada, like
a mighty wind, from the West to the East. One after another, Alberta,
Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and British Columbia enfranchised their women.
In British Columbia, a referendum (only men voting) showed a majority
of more than two to one for women's franchise, and the soldiers'
vote, which came in later, only swelled the large majority. Ontario
followed. The late Sir Wilfred Laurier, once Liberal Premier, announced
his conversion. He had for years been an important opponent.

The Nova Scotia legislature passed a Women's Suffrage Bill without
opposition; and in May, 1917, Sir Robert Borden announced his intention
to introduce a women's suffrage measure for the whole of Canada, thus
giving women the federal vote. This intention was faithfully carried
into effect in time for women to vote at the General Election, which
was held in 1917. The Province of Alberta, in the meantime, had
bettered its own record by returning a lady, Miss Roberta Catherine
MacAdams, to its Legislative Assembly. An interesting feature of her
election was that she was chosen entirely by men who were performing
military service in Europe. There were twenty men candidates and one
woman, and Miss MacAdams was elected. Thus the whole Empire seemed by
one impulse to be moving in the direction of women's enfranchisement.

About this time a professional man of wide outlook and long experience
wrote:

 "One of the greatest benefits which I look for from the war is that
 women will come by their own. The tribute to the efficiency of women's
 work now being paid by managers of railways and munition works—many
 of them unwilling witnesses—are most hopeful signs. After this it
 seems impossible that women should be denied their fair share in the
 national councils. This opens a wide vista of other resulting reforms,
 which almost makes one wish to be young again, so that one might see
 what will happen in the next fifty years."

Women did come by their own, not quite directly, but through "the
verdurous gloom and winding mossy ways" of the parliamentary wrangle
over the Special Register Bill and the Speaker's conference to be
described in the next chapter.




CHAPTER IX

THE LAST PHASE

 "It consists of an influx—whence or why none can tell—of a wave of
 vitality. It is as if from the central heart of life a ray broke
 suddenly upon the world, inspiring men to feel deeply, to live
 greatly, to do nobly. It makes men. It is not made by men."


Without belittling the importance of the wave of enthusiasm for women's
enfranchisement which swept over the English-speaking world in 1916, it
is impossible to disguise the fact that we in England won our battle
at the exact moment we did in consequence of the absolute necessity
under which the Government laboured of producing a new parliamentary
register and a new voting qualification for men. For this meant that a
real reform of the representation of the people was required; and the
previous stages of our political struggle had demonstrated that when
once the franchise question was dealt with by Parliament it would be
impossible any longer to neglect the claims of women.

It will be remembered that so long ago as 1892 Mr. A. J. Balfour had
said in a suffrage debate in Parliament:

 "If any further alteration of the franchise is brought forward as
 a practical measure, this question [the enfranchisement of women]
 will again arise, menacing and ripe for solution, and it will not be
 possible for this House to set it aside as a mere speculative plan
 advocated by a group of faddists. Then you will have to deal with the
 problem of women's suffrage, and deal with it in a complete fashion."

The moment which Mr. Balfour foresaw in 1892 had arrived in 1916. The
situation was briefly thus: The old register for the whole United
Kingdom, unrevised by the express direction of the Government since
the outbreak of the world war, contained the names of rather over
eight million men, of whom almost seven millions voted as "occupiers"
or householders. There were other qualifications, such as the lodger,
freehold, and University franchises; but they only accounted, between
them, for about a million voters in the three kingdoms. "Occupation"
was, therefore, by far the most important of the qualifications for the
exercise of the parliamentary franchise. To qualify as an "occupier"
it was, however, necessary to prove the unbroken occupation of the
qualifying premises for twelve months previous to the last 15th of
July. This obviously necessitated in some cases continuous residence
for nearly two years. From August, 1914, onwards at least five millions
of men, either actual or potential voters, had volunteered for the
Navy or Army, or had moved, in obedience to national demands, to
munition areas, or other places where they were required. Consequently
very large numbers had ceased to be "occupiers" in the sense legally
required to enable them to become, or remain, voters.

The Government and the country were therefore, in the third year of the
war, face to face with the impossible position that if circumstances
necessitated an appeal to the country there was in existence no
register of voters which could in any sense be looked upon as
representative of the manhood of the nation. The elderly, the infirm,
the shirker, the crank, who had remained at home evading military
service, and "the conscientious objector," would remain on the old and
obsolete register in full numerical strength; the young manhood of the
nation who were fighting for it in the Navy, or the Air Service, or on
the dreary swamps of Flanders, or the tremendous battlefields round
Ypres or on the Somme, would in large proportion have forfeited their
parliamentary votes in consequence of the services they were rendering
to their country. It was an intolerable situation. By-elections
which from time to time took place illustrated the extraordinarily
non-representative character of the old register. Candidates and agents
reported the existence of street after street in which only a handful
of voters remained. It would have been impossible to dissolve on such
a register, and even if it had been possible, Mr. Asquith had himself
declared that a Parliament elected on such a register would be "lacking
in moral sanction."

It will be remembered that the House elected in 1910 had passed an Act
limiting the duration of all future Parliaments to five years. If there
had been no war the dissolution must therefore have taken place by
1915; but as a General Election, except on sheer necessity, could not
be contemplated during the war, the operation of the five years' limit
was more than once suspended by legislation. This, however, was only
postponing the problem, and did not afford any solution of it.

Mr. Asquith's first War Cabinet had suddenly collapsed in May, 1915,
and had been succeeded by the first Coalition Government. Mr. Asquith
remained Prime Minister, but among his colleagues were now found
representatives of the three chief parties—Liberal, Conservative, and
Labour. Mr. Redmond, as leader of the Irish Nationalists, was also
asked to join it, but declined to do so. The changes involved in this
reconstitution of the Government were in several ways favourable to
the suffrage movement: not a few of our most bigoted opponents were
among the Liberals who were shed by Mr. Asquith when he formed his
Coalition Government, whilst among his new colleagues were now to be
found convinced suffragists, such as Mr. A. J. Balfour, Mr. Bonar Law,
Lord Robert Cecil, Lord Lytton, Lord Selborne, Mr. Arthur Henderson,
etc. The formation of the coalition was favourable to us in another
sense. Party discipline and party passion had always been inimical to
our movement. "Yes, I am your friend, but I am not prepared to break up
my party in order to support you," said one party leader. "Yes, I am
your friend, but I tell you frankly, you must not count on my vote if
the success of women's suffrage would mean the withdrawal from public
life of my leader, Mr. Asquith," said another. I had been accustomed to
say of the two chief parties, Liberal and Conservative, that from the
suffrage point of view the first was an army without generals, and the
second was generals without an army. The Coalition gave us the immense
advantage of bringing these two indispensable elements of success
together, and parliamentary suffragists became equally strong in both
officers and men. The commander-in-chief, Mr. Asquith, was still our
opponent, but, as described in the last chapter, we began to see signs
that even he was prepared to recognize that he was beaten, and to ask
for an armistice.

When 1916 arrived no solution of the franchise problem had been found;
the creation of a new register before a General Election could be held
was generally recognized as necessary, but there were no signs of
agreement upon the principles on which it should be based. The end of
the war seemed as far off as ever. Compulsory military service for men
had been adopted, and this strengthened the demand for manhood suffrage
on the very reasonable ground that if a man could be compelled to offer
his life for his country, he should at least have some influence, as a
voter, in controlling the policy which might cause such a sacrifice to
be called for.

Contemporaneously with these events and new developments, Sir Edward
Carson and a group of his parliamentary supporters were urging with
considerable vigour that there should be a new franchise based on
military service. In a sense he had a strong position, for it was an
obvious absurdity that men offering their lives for their country
should incidentally to the fulfilment of that service be struck off the
parliamentary register, while every waster and do-nothing who managed
to stay at home maintaining his occupation franchise would have the
vote. We made some unsuccessful efforts to induce Sir Edward Carson so
to define his definition of "service" as to include the services of
women. Meanwhile, there was a great deal of discussion socially and in
the Press about the possibility of basing the vote on national service
of some kind.

On May 4th, 1916, we addressed a careful letter to Mr. Asquith on the
points raised by the obsolete register and the necessity for a new
one, and also for a new qualification for the franchise. We said that
nothing was farther from our intention than to press our claim at
such a moment if the Government was contemplating legislation simply
to replace on the register those men who had lost their qualification
in consequence of their service in the Navy or Army, or in munition
areas in parts of the country other than those where they had formerly
resided. But we stated that if the Government intended to meet the
situation by altering the whole basis of the parliamentary franchise
and founding it on national service, whether naval, military, or
industrial, we should then use our utmost endeavours to induce a
favourable consideration at the same time of the national services of
women. After referring to some of the very important work of women
during the war, we added:

 "When the Government deals with the franchise, an opportunity will
 present itself of dealing with it on wider lines than by the simple
 removal of what may be called the accidental disqualification of a
 large body of the best men in the country, and we trust that you may
 include in your Bill clauses which would remove the disabilities
 under which women now labour. An agreed Bill on these lines would, we
 are confident, receive a very wide measure of support throughout the
 country. Our movement has received very great accessions of strength
 during recent months, former opponents now declaring themselves on
 our side, or, at any rate, withdrawing their opposition. The change
 of tone in the Press is most marked.... The view has been widely
 expressed in a great variety of organs of public opinion that the
 continued exclusion of women from representation will ... be an
 impossibility after the war."

Mr. Asquith replied almost immediately.

      "10, Downing Street,
      "Whitehall, S.W.,
      "_May 7th, 1916_.

  "Dear Mrs. Fawcett,

 "I have received your letter of the 4th. I need not assure you how
 deeply my colleagues and I recognize and appreciate the magnificent
 contribution which the women of the United Kingdom have made to the
 maintenance of our country's cause.

 "No such legislation as you refer to is at present in contemplation;
 but if, and when, it should become necessary to undertake it, you
 may be certain that the considerations set out in your letter will
 be fully and impartially weighed without any prejudgment from the
 controversies of the past.

  "Yours very faithfully,
  "H. H. Asquith."

This reply was, we considered, very much more encouraging than any
previous letter which we had received from Mr. Asquith. There were
some suffragists who did not fail to point out that it promised us
nothing. This we did not dispute, but we felt, all the same, that the
letter indicated that the turn of the tide in the suffrage direction
was taking effect, and that vessels which had long been high and dry on
the sandbanks of prejudice were beginning to be floated, and would soon
swing round.

On May 7th, Mr. Asquith had said in his letter, "no such legislation
as you refer to is at present in contemplation." Nevertheless, it
was plain two weeks later from the Prime Minister's replies to
questions in the House that this attitude had already been abandoned.
The Government then began a series of futile efforts to deal with
the problems presented by the situation just described by means of
"Special Register" Bills. None of these plans secured the support
of the House of Commons. Mr. Asquith shrank from the thorough-going
method of solving the problem by introducing a Reform Bill which
should frankly provide a new basis for the suffrage. Such a course, he
said, would bring the House "face to face with another most formidable
proposition," the question of women's suffrage. Sir Edward Carson was
meanwhile pressing for a new franchise giving the vote to all sailors,
soldiers, and airmen, on the ground of their services. The comment
of the Press on this was: "It is clear that the Bill cannot include
the soldiers and exclude the women." The hesitation and reluctance
of the Government to face the facts went on all through July. It
was the same attitude which had caused the fiasco of the Government
Bill in January, 1913 when an attempt had been made to pass a Reform
Bill at the tail-end of a Session already thirteen months long by
calling it a Registration Bill. On July 12th, 1916, Mr. Asquith said
that the Government, not having been able to find any practical and
non-controversial solution of the registration question, proposed that
the House itself should settle the matter. This was not a popular
method of proceeding, but the proposition was wrapped up with Mr.
Asquith's well-known skill as a master of parliamentary oratory; and
though the House grumbled it was not in revolt. A week later, however,
the same theme was expounded with much less than the Prime Minister's
tact by Mr. Herbert Samuel, another well-known antisuffragist, who
enraged the House of Commons by saying in effect the same thing as Mr.
Asquith, but in a manner which made it plain, even to the wayfaring
man, that it was because the difficulty was insoluble that the
Government requested the House of Commons to solve it. He set forth all
the difficulties. Something had got to be done; the old register was
useless; a new register on the old basis would be nearly as bad, since
it would disfranchise our fighting men; and therefore the House would
have to take up the difficult controversial points of women's suffrage,
plural voting, adult suffrage, and redistribution. The indignation of
the House on being told bluntly that the problem was handed to them
to solve because it was insoluble caused it to reject the Government
proposal; the matter was thrown back by the House to the Cabinet, who
were told to do their own job; they therefore began another period of
"lengthy consideration."

In the previous spring a leading member of our Executive Committee,
Miss Rathbone, now President of the N.U.S.E.C.,[7] had formed a
consultative committee of constitutional women's suffrage societies,
representative of twenty different organizations. This consultative
committee sought and obtained early in August an interview with Lord
Robert Cecil and Mr. Bonar Law. The deputation urged the necessity
for the enfranchisement of women in time for them to take part in the
election of the Parliament which would have to deal with the problems
of reconstruction after the war; they also repeated that if the new
register simply replaced on the roll of voters those men who had
forfeited their vote in consequence of their patriotic services, we
should not, during the war, raise the question of women's suffrage at
all; but if the whole basis of the suffrage were changed we should
press the consideration of women's claims with all the strength at our
command. Mr. Bonar Law expressed satisfaction with this attitude, but
asked if the suffrage societies would stand aside if the period of
residence required of future male voters was reduced from twelve months
to three. The reply was in the negative, because this change would in
reality be equivalent to a new suffrage, and would add many thousands
of men to the roll of voters. Lord Robert Cecil warmly supported
this view, and said that the reduction in the qualifying period would
constitute a long step towards manhood suffrage, and would seriously
injure the position of women if nothing were done for them at the same
time.

We were getting now very near the keep of the antisuffrage fortress.
We heard of very prolonged and ardent discussions in the Cabinet on
our question, during which the protagonists on our side were Mr. Lloyd
George, Lord Robert Cecil, and Mr. Arthur Henderson, representing
severally the Liberal, Conservative, and Labour Parties. Mr. Asquith
and other antisuffragists clung to the position of simply replacing
on the parliamentary register those men who had forfeited their vote
through ceasing to be occupiers. This, however, was but rumour. What
we knew as a positive fact was that the makeshift proposals brought
by the Government before Parliament were rejected one after another.
August 13th and 14th, 1916, were days of first-rate importance in the
history of our movement. On the 13th the _Observer_, the well-known
Conservative Sunday paper, up to that time a determined opponent
of women's enfranchisement, contained an editorial completely and
thoroughly withdrawing its opposition. Among other excellent things
the editor, Mr. Garvin, wrote: "Time was when I thought that men alone
maintained the State. Now I know that men alone never could have
maintained it, and that henceforth the modern State must be dependent
on men and women alike for the progressive strength and vitality of its
whole organization."

On the 14th Mr. Asquith, introducing yet another Special Register Bill,
announced in the House of Commons a similar change of view. After
acknowledging in a very handsome way the great national value of the
services rendered by women to their country during the war, saying
that these had been as effective as those of any other part of the
population, he added:

 "It is true they cannot fight in the sense of going out with rifles
 and so forth, but they fill our munition factories; they have aided in
 the most effective way in the prosecution of the war. What is more—and
 this is a point which makes a special appeal to me—they say, when the
 war comes to an end, and when these abnormal, and of course to a large
 extent transient, conditions have to be revised, and when the process
 of industrial reconstruction has to be set on foot, have not the women
 a special claim to be heard on the many questions which will arise
 directly affecting their interests, and possibly meaning for them
 large displacements of labour? I cannot think that this House will
 deny that, and _I say quite frankly that I cannot deny that claim_."

We anxiously scanned these words, looking for loopholes from which
the Prime Minister might escape from giving his support in future to
the principle of women's suffrage; but we found none. This speech
in effect made the Liberal Party into a Suffrage Party; it therefore
indicated an enormous advance in the parliamentary history of our
movement.

Our future course at the time was not all quite such plain sailing
as it may appear now to those who only look back upon it. The skill
of the parliamentary leader consists in providing steps or ladders
from which his followers can advance from a more backward to a less
backward position without personal humiliation, and without calling for
moral courage as great as Mr. Garvin had shown when, in the leading
article already quoted, he said in so many words, "I formerly thought
so-and-so, and so-and-so; I was wrong." There were, accordingly,
conferences within the precincts of the House of Commons between
representatives of the suffrage societies and our leading parliamentary
supporters on such points as the most we could safely ask for, and the
least we could be induced to accept. At these conferences Sir John
Simon took a very leading part. When he was present we felt we had as
our ally a man of an extraordinarily alert intelligence, capable at
once of appreciating our point of view, and with unequalled readiness
in showing how it could be carried out. I remember his coming in
late at one of these conferences in a committee-room of the House of
Commons; we had been expounding a particular point to a group of
M.P.'s who seemed neither to understand its significance nor capable
of offering any suggestion as to its realization. The atmosphere
changed directly Sir John Simon took his seat at the table. "Yes, I
see the importance of your point," he said at once; "and you can give
effect to it," he added, taking the current Special Register Bill in
his hand, "by an amendment in line 5, clause 2. I will speak to the
Prime Minister about it this evening." It was an immense relief to our
anxieties to have a man of this practical and capable type working for
us. On August 22nd he handed in to the clerk at the table of the House
of Commons the following resolution; it never materialized, but it
indicated the line which an important group of our friends in the House
were taking, and the general agreement that had been arrived at by the
great majority of suffrage societies:

 "That, in the opinion of the House, the Parliament to deal with
 industrial and social reconstruction after the war should be elected
 on a wide and simple franchise exercised by both men and women, and
 therefore legislation establishing such franchise is urgently required
 and should be passed during the war."

From this point onwards it is no exaggeration to say that Sir John
Simon was, from a parliamentary point of view, the organizer of
victory. The only real obstacle which now confronted us was the
plausible plea that, however desirable women's suffrage was in itself,
it was not the time during the most gigantic war in history to raise
this great question of constitutional reform. It was our business to
show that _now was the time_ when such a reform was not only desirable,
but absolutely necessary. The new register and the new qualification
were needed without delay unless millions of the best men in the
country were to be disfranchised on account of their national services.
Women should be included in the new register on the grounds given by
Mr. Asquith in the speech just quoted. When we were attacked, as we
were, by antisuffragists for our lack of patriotism for raising our
question during the war, we had an easy answer. We had not raised it.
It had raised itself as a consequence of the war and of the peculiar
character of the qualification laid down by former Parliaments for the
occupation franchise.

It was some time, however, before the Government itself grasped
the situation from this point of view. Before Parliament adjourned
for a short vacation in August, 1916, Mr. Walter Long, a typical
English country gentleman, then Colonial Secretary, a Conservative
and antisuffragist, made it clear that he too had withdrawn his
opposition to the enfranchisement of women. It was to him we owed
the suggestion that the whole question of the parliamentary register
and the qualifications for voting should be referred to a non-party
conference, consisting of members of both Houses of Parliament, and
presided over by the Speaker of the House of Commons. He said, after
reciting the difficulties of the situation: "It is our duty, one and
all ... to set ourselves to find a solution which will be a lasting
settlement of a very old and difficult problem." Mr. Asquith concurred,
and, answering by anticipation those who argued that it was unpatriotic
during the war to be considering questions of franchise reform, said
that it was "eminently desirable" that those not actually absorbed in
the conduct of the war should work out a general agreement as regards
these difficult questions of parliamentary reform. The Electoral Reform
Conference, with the Speaker as chairman, was appointed in October,
1916, on the reassembling of both Houses after the recess. Of course
it was not only women's suffrage which it was asked to consider, but
the whole franchise question, including adult suffrage, plural voting,
proportional representation, etc. The Speaker, Mr. J. Lowther, had a
high reputation for fairness, for great personal tact and courtesy,
for humour, and all which it stands for in the management of men, but
he was believed to be a strong antisuffragist. The question of women
was not emphasized in Parliament when the conference was appointed,
but there can be no doubt that it was the real motive power which
had created it. The members of the conference were of all parties
and of both Houses, and, according to the Speaker's knowledge and
belief, suffragists and antisuffragists were given an equal number
of representatives on it. I always said that it was an illustration
of the intense strength and vitality of our movement that, though the
conference was proposed by one antisuffragist (Mr. Long), supported
by another (Mr. Asquith), and presided over by a third (the Speaker),
yet, as a result of its deliberations, some measure of women's
enfranchisement was recommended by a large majority of its members. The
conference, in fact, provided one of those ladders, referred to on a
previous page, which enable men to escape gracefully from an untenable
position. It held its first meeting on October 12th, 1916. Sir John
Simon was a member of it, and a remarkably skilful leader on our side.
He was ably supported by Mr. (now Sir) W. H. Dickinson, Mr. Aneurin
Williams, Sir William Bull (Conservative), and Mr. Goldstone (Labour).
The deliberations were kept absolutely secret. The N.U.W.S.S. asked to
be allowed to give evidence. The request was declined. We then drew
up a memorandum emphasizing the chief points on which we had desired
to give evidence. A copy of this was sent to every member of the
conference. A large number of resolutions from political associations,
town councils, women's societies, trade unions, trade and labour
councils, etc., supporting the claims of women to representation were
also sent to the Speaker as chairman of the conference. The report was
not published until January 28th, 1917. But the mere existence of the
conference began to influence the action of Parliament much earlier
than this. On November 12th, the last of the Government's Special
Register Bills was withdrawn. The Bill was condemned by the House
because the Speaker ruled all widening amendments out of order, and as
the House desired widening amendments the Bill collapsed.

In the interval, before the conference had reported, the whirligig
of time brought about another Cabinet crisis, which was eminently
favourable to us. Mr. Asquith's Government fell, and in mid-December
Mr. Lloyd George became Prime Minister. On Christmas Day, 1916, I
received a letter from a very important public man, who told me that
now was the psychological moment for taking a forward step in the
direction of the immediate enfranchisement of women. He had angered me
by assuming that, because we had not rioted, and had throughout the
war only sought to serve our country, we had done nothing. So I told
him in outline what we had done, and why we had done it. He replied:
"I am going to read your letter at the Prime Minister's to-morrow."
On December 27th I heard from him again. "I talked for some time last
night with the Prime Minister, who is very keen on the subject [of
women's suffrage], and very practical too." After this I knew our
victory in the immediate future was secured, however the Speaker's
conference reported.

It was at first questioned whether the Cabinet crisis and the formation
of a new Government would not mean the suspension of the work of the
Speaker's conference. But in answer to a specific enquiry the new Prime
Minister emphatically expressed his desire that the conference should
continue its labours. After three and a half months' work the report of
the conference was placed in Mr. Lloyd George's hands. It unanimously
recommended thirty-three very drastic reforms in the franchise, the
most important of which were to base the parliamentary franchise for
men on residence and not on "occupation," the adoption of proportional
representation, and a great simplification of the Local Government
Register. On women's suffrage the conference was not unanimous, but
by a majority, which we were privately assured was considerable, it
recommended that some form of women's suffrage should be conferred.[8]
This was hailed with almost universal enthusiasm by the Press. There
was a general chorus of approbation and congratulation.

The changes in the franchise for men amounted in effect almost to
manhood suffrage; but the suffrage for women which was recommended
amounted practically to household suffrage for women, with a higher
age limit than that fixed for men. For purposes of the franchise women
were to be reckoned as "householders," not only when they were so in
their own right, but also when they were the wives of householders.
There was some outcry against this on the part of ardent suffragists as
being derogatory to the independence of women. While understanding this
objection, I did not share it; I felt, on the contrary, that it marked
an important advance in that it recognized in a practical political
form a universally accepted and most valuable social fact—namely,
the partnership of the wife and mother in the home. We did object
to, and strongly protested against, the absurdly high age limit for
women (thirty to thirty-five) suggested by the Speaker's conference,
especially on the ground that a very large proportion of the women
working industrially would be thereby disfranchised. It is only fair,
however, to mention the motive which had prompted this recommendation.
One main objection of the antisuffragists to our enfranchisement was
that the number of women in this country was about one and a half
million in excess of the number of men. It was therefore plausible,
although fallacious, to say that women's suffrage would result in
making over the government of the country to women. What was desired
by the friends of women's suffrage in the Speaker's conference was
accordingly the creation of a constituency in which women, though
substantially represented, would not be in a majority. The changes in
the representation of men would, it was believed, raise the number of
men on the register from eight to ten millions; while the number of
women enfranchised, as householders and wives of householders, would
not, as it was thought, be more than six or seven millions. This, it
was correctly anticipated, the House of Commons would accept with
practical unanimity, whilst the fate of a wider franchise would be, to
say the least, doubtful. The thirty years age limit for women was quite
indefensible logically; but it was practically convenient in getting
rid of a bogie whose unreality a few years' experience would probably
prove by demonstration. We remembered Disraeli's dictum, "England is
not governed by logic, but by Parliament."

A similar but more objectionable method of reducing mechanically the
number of women voters had been adopted in Norway in 1907, and had
lasted for six years, after which women were placed on the register
on terms exactly the same as those for men. Events in the Session of
1919 show that it is very unlikely that the higher age limit for women
will be maintained in Great Britain for so long a time. It may here be
mentioned that the actual numbers both of men and women enfranchised by
the Reform Act of 1918 turned out to be larger than had been calculated
when the Bill was before Parliament. On the first register compiled in
1918 there were over 7,000,000 women, and the official figures of the
number of men and women on the revised register published in 1919 were:
men electors, 12,913,160; women, 8,479,156.

From the date of the presentation of the report of the Speaker's
conference our parliamentary success went forward rapidly, smoothly,
and without check. On March 29th the Prime Minister received a
great deputation of women war workers, organized by the N.U.W.S.S.,
representing every possible form of active service by which women had
worked for their country during the war. The deputation also had the
support of between thirty and forty women's organizations, including
nearly all the existing suffrage societies, besides such well-known
bodies as the British Women's Temperance Association, the National
Union of Women Workers, the National Organization of Girls' Clubs,
and the Women's Co-operative Guild, etc. It had been the intention
of this deputation to ask the Prime Minister to introduce without
delay legislation based on the recommendations of the Speaker's
conference. But we found ourselves in the joyful position of being
a day after the fair; for on the previous evening in the House of
Commons Mr. Asquith had moved a resolution calling for the early
introduction of a Bill on these lines. The whole debate which followed
had dealt, not exclusively, but very nearly so, with the question of
the enfranchisement of women. Mr. Asquith had again emphasized his
conversion, had compared himself with Stesichorus, who had been smitten
with blindness for insulting Helen of Troy, adding, "Some of my friends
may think that, like him, my eyes, which for years in this matter
have been clouded by fallacies and sealed by illusions, at last have
been opened to the truth." In the debate which followed every leader
of every party, Conservative, Liberal, Labour, and Irish Nationalist,
supported the enfranchisement of women, thus foreshadowing the Agreed
Bill for which the N.U.W.S.S. had asked in the previous May. Mr. Lloyd
George, the new Prime Minister, took an important part in the debate,
speaking with all his accustomed vigour and fervour on our side. The
opposition was almost non-existent, and Mr. Asquith's motion was
agreed to by 341 votes to 62. The practical unanimity of the House
was reflected by a similar unanimity in the Press (the three _Posts_,
however, see p. 79, still holding the antisuffrage fort). The general
tone was well expressed in the _Daily Telegraph_, which said:

 "The conference decided by a majority in favour of the principle of
 women's suffrage. The work of women during the war, the new position
 to which they are called in the whole industrial life of the country,
 are considerations which have effected a sweeping change in general
 opinion on this great matter; and it is by this time fairly plain
 that a measure of women's suffrage must be included in any reform
 legislation which is seriously meant."

It will therefore be easily understood that our deputation was of a
very cheerful and congratulatory character on both sides. We were,
however, able to make clear certain points on which doubts had been
expressed. We explained that the support of the suffrage societies
was dependent on our enfranchisement being made an integral part of
the Bill from the first; we were determined not to sanction its being
introduced by amendment. Mr. Lloyd George told us he had already
instructed the parliamentary draughtsman to draw the Bill on the lines
we wished. He also explained that the Bill was not to be a Government
Bill, but a House of Commons Bill; it would be introduced and guided
throughout its passage in the House by a member of the Government, and
would be pushed through by Government machinery, but Members would be
free to vote as they pleased in both Houses on the women's clauses. We
spoke against the high age limit for women, and said if the Government
found it possible to modify this, or otherwise to improve upon the
recommendations of the Speaker's conference in a democratic direction,
we should be gratified; but, at the same time, our chief concern was
for the safety of the whole scheme. We emphasized this, showing how
greatly we preferred an imperfect Bill which could pass to the most
perfect measure in the world which could not. The Prime Minister
smilingly signified his assent to these views. We desired only to press
for such improvements as were consistent with the safety of the whole
Bill.

As the debates went on, and the House of Commons majority for women's
suffrage became more and more overwhelming—the Second Reading being
carried by 329 votes to 40, and the majorities in Committee on Clause
IV., the women's clause, 385 to 55, or 7 to 1, with a majority within
each party into which the House was divided; and, again, on the last
trial of strength, 214 to 17—we felt the ground was sufficiently solid
beneath our feet to attempt an improvement in the Bill. We therefore
urged the Government to apply to women local government electors the
same principle which had already been adopted by the House in regard to
the parliamentary vote—namely, to admit to the register not only those
women who were qualified in their own right, but also the wives of
men similarly qualified. The great importance of this reform had been
urged upon us by a member of our Executive Committee, now President of
the N.U.S.E.C., Miss Eleanor Rathbone, herself a member of the City
Council of Liverpool, and possessing very great experience of local
government matters. The Labour Party gave the proposal its hearty
support. But at first it was resisted by Sir George Cave, who had
charge of the Reform Bill in the House of Commons. A joint deputation
of women's societies and the Labour Party was organized on November
14th, but still Sir George Cave held out no hope that the Government
would accept the amendment. There were vigorous protests in the House
against this attitude; and our societies and other bodies bombarded the
leader of the House and the Minister in charge of the Bill with letters
and telegrams, urging the Government to accept for local government
the principle they had already adopted for the parliamentary register.
This had an excellent effect, and gave us a foretaste of the advantages
of possessing, though at that time only in prospect, real political
power. On November 20th the Government withdrew its opposition, and
the amendment we had urged unsuccessfully on November 14th was agreed
to without a division. The Report Stage of the Bill was concluded on
December 7th, and the Third Reading was taken the same evening without
a division.

The next stage of our battle had to be fought in the House of Lords,
where we had far more formidable opponents than in the House of
Commons. Lord Curzon, the leader of the House and chief representative
of the Government, was also President of the National Society for
Opposing Woman Suffrage. He was an eloquent and polished speaker,
not beloved, but certainly powerful. We had tried to get a personal
interview with him, but without success. His intended line in regard
to the women's clause in the Reform Bill was absolutely unknown to
us. He remained a member of the Government; perhaps, we reflected, it
was to save his face and prevent his resignation that, as Mr. Lloyd
George had told us, the Reform Bill was not a Government but a House of
Commons Bill. Then there was Lord Bryce, from some points of view an
even more formidable opponent, with all his prestige as an historian
and a successful diplomatist. Lord Balfour of Burleigh was another
redoubtable antagonist. We were told no man in the Upper House had more
influence upon the predominant party in it. Then there was a group of
well-known peers, representing both political parties, who were certain
to oppose any sort of enfranchisement of women—Lord Loreburn, Lord
Finlay, Lord Halsbury (these three were Lord Chancellors or ex-Lord
Chancellors), Lord Weardale, Lord Lansdowne, and Lord Chaplin. But
we had powerful friends, too, among whom should be mentioned the two
Archbishops, the Bishop of London, Lord Selborne, Lord Lytton, Lord
Burnham, Lord Milner, Lord Grey, Lord Haldane, and Lord Courtney. The
Second Reading of the Bill went through without a division in the House
of Lords on December 17th, but not without very hostile speeches from
Lord Bryce and the aged Lord Halsbury, who carried his ninety-three
years very vigorously. On comparing the two groups, our friends and
our opponents, in the House of Lords we were cheered to see that our
friends carried away the palm for youth. In so aged an assembly as
the House of Lords this was a distinct advantage: very few peers are
young enough to run the risk of rashness. The real fight in the Lords
began when committee stage was reached, on January 8th, 1918. As a
preliminary step the antisuffragists moved the elimination from the
Bill of all clauses which had not been unanimously recommended by the
Speaker's conference. This was aimed at Clause IV., which enfranchised
women, but was opposed by the Government and withdrawn. Then came
the more direct attack, the deletion of the parliamentary franchise
from Clause IV. This gave rise to a full-dress debate, lasting three
days. On the second of these—January 10th—we received, and looked
upon it as a good omen, the joyful news of the passage through the
American House of Representatives of the Federal Amendment on Women's
Suffrage with the necessary two-thirds majority. The House of Lords was
crowded, and excitement and expectation were very keen on both sides.
On the suffrage side the speech of Lord Selborne was particularly
memorable, first-rate in manner, matter, and method. It produced a deep
impression. In the small space allotted to ladies other than peeresses
on the floor of the House suffragists and antisuffragists were penned
up together, and every shaft from either side told with profound
effect. Before we were conducted to our seats in the House of Lords,
Mrs. Humphry Ward had asked me, in the event of the suffrage clause
being carried, if I would support her in trying to get it submitted
to a referendum. Of course my reply was in the negative. I told her
that, so far as my experience went, the referendum was one of those
instruments of government which was most respected where it was least
known, and that I agreed with the Prime Minister in regarding it as an
expensive method of denying justice; and I asked her why she had not
used her influence to get the referendum considered by the Speaker's
conference. Having missed that opportunity, I thought there was little
or no chance of raising the question at this, almost the last, stage of
the Bill.

As the debate went on the suffragists became more and more confident.
Our whip had been sent out signed by Lord Aberconway and Earl Grey.
The first had been a suffragist from his youth up, the son of one of
our oldest and stanchest friends, Mrs. Priscilla McLaren, sister of
John Bright. The second was the great-grandson of the Earl Grey who had
carried the first great Reform Bill in 1832.

At last Lord Curzon rose to close the debate. The story went the round
in suffrage circles that when this moment was reached a group of
suffrage women who were waiting for news in one of the committee rooms
of the House of Lords saw the door open and a policeman's head put in.
He said: "Lord Curzon is up, ladies. But 'e wont do you ladies no 'arm."

Lord Curzon opened his remarks with what may be best described as the
standardized antisuffrage speech: the pattern and method were familiar
to all of us. His mistrust and apprehension were as great as they had
ever been, and were expressed in his usual language. Then came a slight
pause, and Lord Curzon said:

 "Now, my Lords, I ask you to contemplate what may happen if, over
 this matter, we come into collision with the House of Commons....
 Your Lordships may vote as you please. You can cut this clause out of
 the Bill. You have a perfect right to do so. But if you think that
 by killing the clause you can also save the Bill, I believe you to
 be mistaken. Nothing, to my mind, is more certain ... than that, if
 your Lordships cut this clause out of the Bill, as you may perhaps be
 going to do, the House of Commons will return the Bill to you with
 the clause reinserted. Will you be prepared to put it back? Will you
 be content, if you eliminate the clause, with this vigorous protest
 you have made, and will you then be prepared to give way? Or, if you
 do not give way, are you prepared to embark upon a conflict with a
 majority of 350 in the House of Commons, of whom nearly 150 belong to
 the party to which most of your Lordships also belong?"

Lord Curzon concluded by saying that he could not vote either way
upon the amendment before the House, because he could not take upon
himself the responsibility of "precipitating a conflict from which your
Lordships would not emerge with credit."

The effect of this speech was intensely dramatic. The antisuffragists
were white with rage; the suffragists were flushed by the certainty of
victory. To Lord Aberconway, who was standing at the bar quite near
me, I said, "What will our majority be?" He replied, "Quite thirty."
The division which followed showed that it was rather more than double
this number, for the figures were: For the clause, 134; against it, 71.
Both Archbishops and the other twelve Bishops present voted for the
clause. Only twelve antisuffrage peers followed Lord Curzon's example
and abstained from voting. If Lord Curzon and his twelve followers
had voted against the clause, it would still have been carried by a
substantial majority.

The Royal Assent was given to the Bill on February 6th, 1918.

Thus ended our parliamentary struggle, which had lasted since John
Stuart Mill moved a women's suffrage amendment to the Reform Bill of
1867. The real source of our victory lay in the enormous majorities by
which the suffrage clauses had been carried in the House of Commons,
and to the fact that every political party into which that House was
divided showed a majority for the principle of women's suffrage. People
used to talk about our fifty years' struggle as fifty years in the
wilderness, and offer their sympathy upon the length of time we had had
to work for our cause. But there was no call for commiseration. We had
had a joyful and happy time, marked by victory in some phase or other
of our movement all along. We had won municipal suffrage and all local
government suffrages. Municipal offices had been opened. Women had been
elected to be mayors in important boroughs. The education of girls had
been enormously improved; the Universities had been opened; the medical
profession had admitted women to its ranks; nearly all the learned
societies had followed suit. Women were no longer treated either
socially or legally as if they were helpless children—"milk-white
lambs, bleating for man's protection," as one of our poets had called
them; a fair share of the responsibilities of capable citizenship was
within their reach. To those who were heard to groan from time to time
over the fifty years it took us to win household suffrage for women we
could justly reply that the time we had taken to win household suffrage
for women had been just two years less than the time men had taken to
cover the same ground. For, taking 1832 as their starting-point with
the Reform Bill of that year, it had occupied them fifty-two years
before they won household suffrage for themselves, and they started
with the advantage of about one million of voters already in existence,
and with the further and much greater advantage of the tradition of
seven hundred years of freedom and self-government. We had no such
advantages; we had not one vote between us; "we could not get the vote
because we had not got the franchise," as _Punch_ put it, and in lieu
of the tradition of centuries of freedom behind us, we had the exactly
opposite tradition of unbroken subjection and subordination. The best
men and women in each succeeding generation helped and encouraged our
movement from the days of Mary Wollstonecraft onwards. We were winning
all the time, and never had any cause for despondency.

Our movement goes on all the more surely and rapidly now that we have
what all men have found essential to freedom, the power to control
the Government and by our vote help to decide by what type of men the
country shall be governed.

Very little now remains to be said. The N.U.W.S.S. has changed its
name and extended its objects as described in the following chapter. I
am in hearty sympathy with this development, but I felt that my years
entitled me in the future to a less strenuous existence. I therefore
resigned my presidency of the union, and it was a matter of sincere
satisfaction to me that my old friend and colleague, Miss Eleanor
Rathbone, was elected as my successor.




CHAPTER X

THE DIFFERENCE THE VOTE HAS MADE

 "In the United States the grant of women's suffrage has made no
 difference whatever ... the mere fact that women have a right to
 vote makes no difference at all."—Viscount Bryce, in House of Lords,
 December 17th, 1917.


The words quoted above come strangely from the lips of any man who
believes in the principles of free representative government. If the
vote makes no difference, why have our race all over the world attached
such enormous importance to it? It is bred in our bone, and will never
come out of the flesh, that the possession of the franchise is the
very foundation-stone of political freedom. Our fifty years' struggle
for the women's vote was not actuated by our setting any extraordinary
value on the mere power of making a mark on a voting paper once in
every three or four years. We did not, except as a symbol of free
citizenship, value it as a thing good in itself; we valued it, not as
a ribbon to stick in our coat, but for the sake of the equal laws, the
enlarged opportunities, the improved status for women which we knew it
involved. We worked for it with ardour and passion because it was stuff
of the conscience with us that it would benefit not women only, but
the whole community; this is what we meant when we called our paper
the _Common Cause_. It was the cause of men, women, and children. We
believe that men cannot be truly free so long as women are held in
political subjection.

We have at present—November, 1919—only a very short experience of the
actual results of women's suffrage. It is less than two years since
the parliamentary battle was won, and less than one year since women
voted for the first time, but already the practical results of women's
suffrage have surpassed our expectations. It is no exaggeration to say
that those most closely in touch with work in Parliament on subjects
affecting the welfare and status of women were conscious of a change in
the atmosphere of the House immediately after the passing of the Reform
Bill of 1918.

One instance of the working of this change will suffice to prove my
point. In 1902, after twelve years of hard spade work undertaken by a
group of very able and experienced women, an Act was passed to secure
that those women habitually practising as midwives should receive
adequate training for their calling. The case for such legislation
was overwhelming. In over 70 per cent. of the births in this country
the mothers were attended by midwives. The death percentage was
unnecessarily high, especially from puerperal fever. Remedial
legislation on such a matter called forth no party passions; so the
case for the training of midwives was extremely simple and free from
complication. But a certain amount of opposition was manifested by the
least enlightened section of the medical profession; and this for a
long time was the chief barrier in the way of getting any Government
to adopt the Bill and use their power to pass it. As I said just now,
it took twelve years to overcome this obstacle. But the Act was passed
in 1902; experience proved that there were many weak places in it. No
provision had been made for the payment of doctor's fees where, in
difficult cases, it was desirable that the midwife should have the aid
of a medical practitioner. Neither had any provision been made for the
payment of travelling expenses for members of the Central Midwives
Board, and other expenses incidental to the efficient carrying out of
the Act. No doubt the promoters of the legislation of 1902 were well
aware of these "weak places," but dared not raise a discussion on them
for fear of jeopardizing the whole Bill. So matters stood until the
passing of the Reform Act in February, 1918. Then, that same year,
before any woman had voted, the Government produced the Midwives
Amending Act, 1918. Mr. Hayes Fisher, now Lord Downham, was in charge
of it in the House of Commons, and explained its object as being not
only to amend the "weak places" already referred to, but added that it
also aimed at "attracting to this great profession ... a high class of
midwives.... We want them more in quantity ... and we want to improve
them in status." No one had ever spoken in this tone in Parliament of
midwives and their occupation before women were enfranchised. Words of
this kind would probably have wrecked the Bill of 1902, as many doctors
were extremely jealous of midwives acquiring any professional status at
all. But the amending Bill went through rapidly and quietly. The lives
of women in childbirth were taken account of by Parliament in quite a
different spirit directly women acquired the status of citizens.

It would be easy to give other examples, and I am tempted to add
an appendix to this chapter, giving a list of Acts of Parliament
specially dealing with the welfare and status of women passed year
by year between 1902 and 1919. There are many more entries in the
shorter period than in the longer. This in itself indicates some of the
difference which women's suffrage has made.

As soon as might be after the Royal Assent had been given to the
Reform Bill in February, 1918, the various suffrage societies held
their several council meetings to discuss their future action. Some
societies dissolved and formed themselves into women citizens'
associations. But many resolved to go on working for objects closely
allied with their original purpose. The N.U.W.S.S., meeting in council
in March, 1918, by a practically unanimous vote resolved to extend
its "objects," including in the new programme what had formerly been
its sole object—"to obtain the parliamentary franchise for women on
the same terms as it is or may be granted to men"; but adding to this
two more objects—namely, "to obtain all other such reforms, economic,
legislative, and social, as are necessary to secure a real equality
of liberties, status, and opportunities between men and women"; and
"to assist women to realize their responsibility as voters." The last
of these was an indication of the sympathy of the N.U.W.S.S. with
the women citizens' associations which were quickly springing into
existence.

We should have acted more logically if at the same time that we
enlarged our objects we had also adopted a corresponding change in our
name. However, on this matter being put to the vote, the old name was
retained by a large majority. Many of our members regarded our name as
soldiers regard their flag or regimental badge, and were, from motives
of sentiment, averse to giving it up.

However, a year's experience proved that it would be really useful and
tend to prevent misunderstandings if we changed our name in accordance
with the extension of our objects. Therefore, by formal vote of the
council in 1919, as stated on p. 155, the N.U.W.S.S. ceased to bear
its old name and became the National Union of Societies for Equal
Citizenship. We hope that the letters N.U.S.E.C. will soon become as
well known and be as much beloved by its members as the N.U.W.S.S.

At this same council meeting of 1919 changes were adopted in our
method of attacking what had now become our principal work—viz., the
achievement of a real equality of status, liberties, and opportunities
between men and women. We had learned in the last twelve months that
the field thus covered was so vast that success was jeopardized if we
scattered our energies over the whole of it. We therefore resolved
henceforth at our annual council meetings to select a limited number of
subjects deemed ripe for immediate action, and to concentrate on these,
so far as practical work was concerned. The first selection for the
year 1919-1920 was thus indicated:

 1. We demand _equal pay for equal work_. And we demand an open
     field for women in industrial and professional work.

 2. We demand the immediate reform of the _divorce law_ and the
     laws dealing with solicitation and prostitution. An _equal
     moral standard_ must be established.

 3. The Government is in favour of _widows' pensions_ in
     principle. By constant pressure we mean to make the
     House of Commons turn principle into practice. We demand
     _pensions for civilian widows_.

 4. Women must speak for themselves as well as vote. We want to
     extend the _women's franchise_, and we are determined that
     _women candidates_ holding our equality programme shall be
     returned to Parliament at the next election.

 5. At present women are not legally recognized as the
     guardians of their children. We are working to secure
     _equal rights of guardianship_ for both parents.

 6. Lastly, we are demanding the _opening of the legal
     professions to women_. We wish to enable women to become
     _solicitors, barristers, and magistrates_.

The walls of our Jericho have not fallen at the first blast of our
trumpet, but we have made great progress in promoting the principle of
equal pay for equal work, and with the familiarizing of the British
public with women as candidates for Parliament. Since the General
Election two or three women have been candidates, and one, Lady Astor,
has been returned by an immense majority.

Another important success in 1919 remains to be chronicled. It is
the inclusion in the Charter of the League of Nations of a clause
rendering women, equally with men, eligible to all appointments in
connection with the League, including the Secretariat. This clause
was inserted during the Paris negotiations after deputations of
suffragists from the Allied Nations and the U.S.A. had waited upon all
the Plenipotentiaries. They were most cordially and sympathetically
received; but the definite success of their efforts was in the main
due to the active and whole-hearted support of President Wilson, Lord
Robert Cecil, and M. Venizelos.

In the passing by the Government of their Sex Disqualification Removal
Act more has been done than we ventured to ask for in the sixth item
on our programme—not a bad harvest for one Session, when we remember
the twelve years' work necessary to get the Midwives Bill of 1902
passed into law, or the thirty-two years' hard labour before a Nurse's
Registration Bill was turned into an Act.

I do not propose in this brief chronicle to enter into a detailed
description of the differences between the Government Bill and the
Women's Emancipation Bill introduced by the Labour Party, and carried
through all its stages in the House of Commons, notwithstanding
Government opposition. The Labour Party's Bill after this triumph was
torpedoed in the House of Lords, and the Government Bill was pushed
forward in its place, and eventually carried into law. The Bill of the
Labour Party was much more comprehensive and sweeping; it did what
it professed to do, and removed completely every legal inequality
between men and women, including placing women on the parliamentary
register on the same terms as men. This was probably the reason why
the Government objected to its passing into law, and got it defeated
in the House of Lords. For, according to all precedent, a large
extension of the electorate should be followed as soon as possible by
a General Election; and it is not very wonderful that the Government
did not desire this under present circumstances, and while the new
Parliament had been less than a year in existence. In some respects the
Government Bill goes beyond No. 6 in the demands of the N.U.S.E.C. It
opens to women, whether married or unmarried, the duty, within certain
limits, of sitting on juries and acting as magistrates. It makes it
clear to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge that they have the
power, when they choose to use it, of admitting women to membership.
It opens the legal profession to women. But its most disappointing
provision relates to the entry of women in the Civil Service. It opens
the Civil Service to them, but with certain restrictions. It does not
proceed on the lines of the Government promise of November, 1918, "_to
remove all existing inequalities in the law between men and women_."
The Government reserve for themselves the right in this matter to
proceed by Orders in Council. It is true the Solicitor-General said
in the House on October 28th, 1919, that he wanted to "have the power
to differentiate somewhat in favour of women in order to give them a
better and more equal opportunity than they have at the present time."
We are frankly suspicious of these offers of something better than
equality. Equality before the law is a hundred times more stable
guarantee for justice than favouritism. Women over and over again have
said they are not out for privilege, but for equality of opportunity.
Major Hills, who was in charge of the amendments to the Bill promoted
by the women's societies, said with brutal frankness that the meaning
of the clauses promoted by the Government was "that all the higher-paid
posts in the Civil Service will continue to be reserved to men." These
Orders in Council will have to be closely scrutinized.

Nevertheless, when we remember that between 1902 and 1914 only two
really important Acts bearing specially upon the welfare and status of
women had been passed—namely, the Midwives Act, 1902, and the group of
Acts, dating from 1907 to 1914, dealing with the qualification of women
as candidates in local elections—and that since the passing of the
Reform Act of 1918 at least seven important measures effecting large
improvements in the status of women have rapidly gone through all their
stages in both Houses of Parliament, we shall not be slow to appreciate
the fact that the women's vote has made a very big difference indeed.
The Act which rendered women eligible for Parliament, introduced in the
Commons late in the autumn Session of 1918, went through both Houses in
about a fortnight. In the Lords it was adopted without opposition.

Not of great importance in itself, but significant in its implications,
was the quiet removal of the heavy grille of the Ladies' Gallery of
the House of Commons in the summer of 1918, and the opening to women
on equal terms of the Strangers' Gallery. Part of the grille has been
preserved for the London Museum, and part will be kept in the House
itself. It may be hoped that it will be put up in some appropriate
place, with waxen dummies behind it revelling in the Oriental seclusion
which recommended it to the Commons for about seventy years. One great
discomfort of the grille was that the interstices of the heavy brass
work were not large enough to allow the victims who sat behind it to
focus it so that both eyes looked through the same hole. It was like
using a gigantic pair of spectacles which did not fit, and made the
Ladies' Gallery a grand place for getting headaches.

Suffragists are not labouring under the impression that because women
now have votes no further reform is needed in our representative
system. A large proportion of suffragists are probably in favour of
proportional representation, and would favour its adoption mainly on
the ground that it would secure a much fairer reflection of the whole
nation than the present system, which may, and frequently does, result
in the practical exclusion from representation of large masses of
the voters. A good deal of education and spade work in spreading the
principles of proportional representation are necessary on this and
other important reforms, but now that women form a very considerable
portion of the electorate they have at least the satisfaction of
knowing that their views on this and other important political issues
count for something, and are actually studied and considered, so that
things work out much more rapidly than ever before in the direction
they desire.

The enfranchisement of women, especially the immense addition to the
women municipal electors, has put the position of women in local
elections on quite a new footing. Formerly, when there were only
about a million women voters on the municipal registers of the three
kingdoms, and these, in considerable numbers, were either aged or
on the brink of old age, they were a negligible quantity. They were
neither admitted to the men's organizations nor consulted by them; the
candidature of women for locally elected councils was cold-shouldered
or opposed by all the party organizations; but the situation is quite
different now. The women local electors have increased from one million
to eight and a half millions, and, besides this, women are also
parliamentary electors; the result is that all the parties encourage
the candidature of women, and are pleased to have one or more women's
names on their own tickets. Thus the number of women elected in the
recent borough council elections in London bounded up on November 1st,
1919, to nearly two hundred. Chelsea, which never returned a woman
before, now returns ten; Westminster returns seven; Marylebone returns
four, and so on; and the results in many of the country towns were
equally remarkable. (See the _Common Cause_, November 7th, 1919.)

Some time ago, in one of my controversies with Mrs. Humphry Ward,
she lamented the very small number of women offering themselves as
candidates in local government elections. I pointed out that the
qualification for candidature was such as to exclude, in a large
degree, the mass of the younger and more vigorous women; also, that the
small number of women holding the local government franchise, coupled
with the fact that they had no parliamentary vote, rendered them
negligible from the party point of view, and I suggested to Mrs. Ward
that the best way of increasing the number and improving the status of
women concerned in local government would be to secure the abolition of
their political disabilities. Events since February, 1918, have more
than justified my argument.

Besides the positive gains to women and to the whole country which
women's suffrage has brought about, it satisfactory to note that none
of the disasters so freely prophesied by the antisuffragists have
materialized. The prophets themselves seem to recognize that they
were the baseless fabric of a vision now utterly vanished even from
remembrance.




APPENDIX

A LIST OF ACTS OF PARLIAMENT SPECIALLY AFFECTING THE WELFARE, STATUS,
OR LIBERTIES OF WOMEN PASSED IN THE UNITED KINGDOM BETWEEN 1902 AND
1919 (BOTH INCLUSIVE).


 1902. _The Midwives Act._—This Act aimed at securing for women
     in childbirth attended by midwives a reasonable security
     that these should have received a proper training. The Act
     was in many ways imperfect, but, such as it was, it took
     twelve years' hard and absorbing work from a group of able
     women to get it passed.

 1905. _Married Women's Property Amendment Act._—This Act
     rendered a married woman capable of disposing of a trust
     estate without her husband, as if she were a _femme sole_.

 1907. _Qualification of Women (County and Borough Councils)
     Act._—A similar Act was passed for Scotland in the same
     year, and for Ireland, with modifications, in 1911. These
     Acts removed the disqualification of sex and marriage,
     and rendered eligible on local councils married women
     living with their husbands, and daughters living with
     their parents. Fourteen years' strenuous work up to 1907
     was necessary to secure their adoption. The necessary
     legislation was announced in the King's Speech as part of
     the Government programme of that year. It was the first
     time in the 700 years of British parliamentary history that
     an extension of the civil liberties of women had occupied
     such a position.

 1914. _County and Borough Councils Qualification Act_, and
     similar Act for Scotland in the same year. These Acts
     provide for men and women alike a residential as distinct
     from the rate-paying qualification.

 1914. _Affiliation Orders Act_ sought to improve the position
     of the unmarried mother, but was very imperfect on account
     of its failure to provide any proper machinery for carrying
     it out.

 1918. _The Representation of the People Act_ (passed in
     February, 1918).—It placed nearly eight and a half million
     women upon the registers of voters in parliamentary
     elections. It also multiplied the number of women local
     government electors from one million to over eight and a
     half millions. It applies equally to every part of the
     United Kingdom.

 1918. _Eligibility of Women Act_ (November, 1918) rendered the
     election of women to the House of Commons a possibility.
     No work was required to get the Act passed. It was all
     but unopposed. Owing to the very short time between the
     passing of the Act and the General Election the opportunity
     for women to select constituencies and work up their
     candidature was very inadequate. Nevertheless, there were
     seventeen women candidates, one of whom, in Ireland, was
     elected.

 1918. _Affiliation Orders (Increase of Maximum Payment) Act_,
     1918, amends the Bastardy Laws Act of 1872, which fixed
     five shillings a week as the maximum which the father could
     be made to pay towards the maintenance of an illegitimate
     child, raising this sum to ten shillings a week.

 1918. _Midwives Amending Act_, 1918, removes some of the
     weaknesses of the Act of 1902, and is sufficiently
     described in the foregoing chapter.

 1919. _Sex Disqualification Removal Act._—This Government Act
     has already been sufficiently described. The wider and more
     sweeping measure introduced by the Labour Party passed
     all its stages in the House of Commons, notwithstanding
     Government opposition.

 1919. _The Intestate Moveable Succession (Scotland) Act_
     enlarges a Scottish mother's rights of succession to the
     intestate moveable estate of her children.

 1919. _Nurses' Registration Act_, 1919.—Trained nurses without
     the vote had been working for registration for thirty-two
     years. The principle of registration was accepted by the
     Government, and the Act embodying it carried into law the
     year following the enfranchisement of women.

 1919. _The Industrial Courts Act_ was improved by the
     Government accepting the amendment of the Labour Party that
     one or more members of these courts should be women.

It will be seen from the foregoing survey of the legislative activity
of Parliament in the eighteen years under review that they divide
themselves into two unequal portions, 1902-1914 and 1918-1919. The war
years are omitted for obvious reasons. In the first and longer period
of fifteen years we find five measures of varying importance—that is,
at the rate of one to every three years. By far the most important
of these measures are the Midwives Act, 1902, and the series of
Acts dealing with the qualifications of women for local government
elections; both of these were due to years of hard work—twelve in
one case, and fourteen in the other—of very active and efficient
women's societies. In the second, and far shorter, period, of less
than two years—February, 1918, to November, 1919—we find seven Acts of
value and importance slipping through Parliament without any trouble
at all; ministerial swords leaping from their scabbards to remove
impediments from the path of the free citizenship of women. This is the
"difference" the vote has made.




FOOTNOTES


[1] This pointed to the probable application of the Parliament Act to
the proposed Reform Bill.

[2] In view of the promise which had just been exacted of me not to
use violence towards the Chancellor, the presence of his wife and
daughter might have been explained on the hypothesis that in the event
of assault and battery on our part they could have flung their persons
between their husband and father and his assailants. But this possible
explanation of the presence of these ladies did not occur to me at the
time.

[3] Antisuffragists in the country had taken up the campaign of calumny
against us, and had spoken of suffragists as "purveyors of vile
literature," disseminators of "pestilential doctrines," and had used
other flowers of rhetoric of the same description.

[4] See correspondence in the _Morning Post_, January 14th to 21st,
1918.

[5] The Bill was named the Franchise and Registration Bill, not a Bill
to Amend the Representation of the People.

[6] Of these 8,654,467, more than 7,000,000 were white men enlisted
within the British Empire. (See Report of War Cabinet published in
August, 1919.)

[7] In March, 1919, the Council of the N.U.W.S.S. changed the name of
our society to the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship,
and elected Miss Rathbone as its president.

[8] The report of the Speaker's conference was dated January 27th,
1917. The clause recommending woman suffrage ran as follows:


VIII. WOMAN SUFFRAGE.

The conference decided by a majority that some measure of woman
suffrage should be conferred. A majority of the conference was also of
opinion that if Parliament should decide to accept the principle, the
most practical form would be to confer the vote in the terms of the
following resolution:

 "Any woman on the Local Government Register who has attained a
 specified age, and the wife of any man who is on that register, if she
 has attained that age, shall be entitled to be registered and to vote
 as a parliamentary elector."

Various ages were discussed, of which thirty and thirty-five received
most favour. The conference further resolved that if Parliament decides
to enfranchise women, a woman of the specified age who is a graduate of
any University having parliamentary representation shall be entitled to
vote as a University elector.




INDEX


  Aberconway, Lord, 151-152

  Acland, Mr. F. D., 32-48

  Alberta, province of, returns a woman member of L.A., 119

  Anderson, Dr. L. G., 97

  Antisuffrage press, 71

  Antisuffragist Association, 11, 41, 43

  —— —— meeting, 70

  _Antisuffragist Association Review_, 71

  Antisuffragists, calumnies of, 26 _n._

  —— rapid conversion of, 117-118

  Archbishops, the, support women's suffrage, 149

  Asquith, Mr. H. H., rooted hostility to women's suffrage, 1, 11, 12,
      13, 14, 27, 44

  —— becomes Prime Minister, 2

  —— announces intention of bringing in a Reform Bill, 2, 39, 49

  —— characteristic blow from, 7, 8

  —— speech on second reading of Reform Bill, 1912, 27

  —— _Punch's_ pictures of, 16, 52

  —— promises regarding women's suffrage, 5, 49

  —— deputations to, of suffragists, 8, 17, 18, 61

  —— —— of antisuffragists, 11

  —— questions addressed to him by N.U.W.S.S., 9

  —— forms Coalition Government, 124

  —— compares himself to Orpheus, 15

  —— —— —— to Stesichorus, 144

  —— ceases to be Prime Minister, 139

  —— contrasted with the third Duke of Devonshire, 52, 53

  —— conversion of, to women's suffrage, 133, 144

  —— speech on the death of Edith Cavell, 115

  —— moves women's suffrage resolution in House of Commons, 144

  —— speech on Women's Clauses of Representation of the People Bill, 144

  —— Miss Violet (now Lady Bonham Carter), 17

  —— Mrs., 17

  Astor, Lady, returned as M.P. for Plymouth, 162


  Balfour, Mr. A. J., 32, 114, 121-122, 124

  —— of Burleigh, Lord, 148

  Bath, Mr. Lloyd George speaks on women's suffrage at, 1912, 24

  Beaconsfield, Earl of, 32, 143.
    See also Disraeli

  Blair, Dr. Mary, 100

  Brailsford, Mr. H. N., 5, 37

  Bright, Mr. John, 64, 107

  Bryce, Lord, 148

  Bull, Sir W., M.P., 138

  Burnham, Lord, 149

  Burton, Mr. W., M.P., 73


  Camborne, 57

  Campbell-Bannerman, Sir H., 14, 32

  —— deputation to, 14

  Canada, women's suffrage granted in, 118, 119

  Carson, Sir Edward, 74

  "Cat and Mouse" Act, 65

  Cave, Sir George, 147

  Cecil, Lord Robert, 31-2, 74, 124, 132

  Chamberlain, Mr. A., 4

  Chaplin, Lord, 149

  Church Congress, 75

  Churchill, Mr. W., 4, 112

  Coalition Government formed, 1915, 124

  "Common Cause" quoted, 7

  Conciliation Bill and Committee, 4

  Conciliation Bill, full-dress debate on, in House of Commons, 4

  —— —— second reading carried, 1910, 1911, 5

  —— —— defeated, 1912, 20, 23, 29

  Conservative and Unionist Women's Franchise Association, 80

  Courtney, Lord, 149

  Crewe by-election, 1912, 35

  Curzon, Lord, 11, 114

  —— Chairman of Antisuffrage League, 114

  —— speaks in House of Lords, 72, 73, 151, 152

  Czech woman returned to Diet in Bohemia, 1912, 41


  _Daily Telegraph_, 78, 145

  Davidson, Miss Emily, 66-67

  Davies, Miss Emily, LL.D., 16

  Deputations to Ministers, 1-19, 61-64, 131, 143, 146

  Devonshire, third Duke of, 52, 53

  Dickinson, the Rt. Hon. Sir W., 45, 138

  Disraeli, see Beaconsfield, 32, 143


  Election-fighting policy, 30-38

  —— —— put in force at by-elections, 1912, 13, 35

  Electoral Reform Conference, 137

  —— —— —— report of, 140-142


  Fawcett, Mrs., sends message to societies of N.U.W.S.S., August, 1914,
      88

  Federal amendment carried with S.A. House of Representatives, 150

  Finlay, Lord, 149

  Foch, Field-Marshal, quoted, 30

  Forcible feeding, 65

  Ford, Miss I. O., 16

  Franchise difficulties arising from war, 121-126

  Friends, annual epistle of Society of, 76


  Garvin, Mr., editor of the _Observer_, 134

  George, Mr. Lloyd. See Lloyd George

  Gilhooley, Mr., M.P., 23

  Goldstone, Mr., M.P., 138

  Goschen, Lord, 62

  Grey, Earl, 149, 157

  —— Sir Edward (now Viscount of Fallodon), 6, 13, 20, 32, 44


  Haldane, Lord, 149

  Halsbury, Lord, 149

  Hanley by-election, 35

  Harley, Mrs., 53, 58-61

  —— killed at Monastir, 59

  Healy, Mr. Timothy, M.P., 23

  Henderson, Rt. Hon. A., 7, 45, 125, 132

  Henry, Sir C., M.P., 11

  Hills, Major, M.P., 165

  Holmfirth by-election, 35

  Horticultural Hall, W.L.F. meeting, 13

  Hutchinson, Dr. Alice, 101


  Inglis, Dr. Elsie, 95, 101

  —— life of, by Lady F. Balfour, 95

  —— her services to Serbia, 100

  Insurance Act, 69

  —— —— memorial from Antisuffrage Society, 68

  International Woman Suffrage Alliance meets at Buda Pest, 83

  Irish Nationalist vote on suffrage question, 23, 44

  Ivens, Dr. Frances, of Royaumont, 103


  Joffre, General, 99


  Keogh, Surgeon-General Sir Alfred, 97


  Labour Party support for women's suffrage, 3, 31, 33, 45, 73, 163

  —— —— members absent from division in 1912, 22

  Ladies Gallery, removal of grille from, 166

  Law, Mr. Bonar, 124, 131

  League of Nations Charter recognizes sex equality, 162

  Legislation specially affecting women, periods before and after women's
      suffrage conferred, 169-172

  Lloyd George, the Rt. Hon. D., supports women's suffrage, 6, 10, 11,
      13, 32, 132, 139, 145

  —— —— opposes the Conciliation Bill, 4, 22

  —— —— praises women's national work, 112

  Liberal associations' hostility to women's suffrage, 73

  Liberal Men's Association for Women's Suffrage, 73

  Lichfield, Bishop of, 75

  Local Government Register, 147, 167

  London, Bishop of, 149

  London School of Medicine for Women, 114

  Long, Mr. Walter, 114, 115, 136, 138

  Loreburn, Lord, 149

  Lyttelton, Hon. Alfred, 45

  Lytton, 5, 6, 72, 125, 149


  MacAdams, Miss, returned for L.A. of Alberta, 119

  Macassey, Sir Lynden, article by, in _Quarterly Review_, 113

  Markham, Miss Violet, 11, 117

  Martindale, Dr. Louisa, 24

  McKenna, Rt. Hon. R., 24-26, 60

  McLaren, Mr. Walter, M.P., 31

  McLaren, Mrs. Priscilla, 151

  Manners, Lord John, 32

  Maternity benefit paid to husbands, 69

  Midlothian by-election, 1912, 35

  Midwives Act, 1902, 157

  —— —— amended, 1918, 158

  Militantism, 5, 65, 67, 97

  Mill, John Stuart, 32, 153

  Milner, Lord, 149

  Montagu, Rt. Hon. E., 112

  Motor Traffic Legislation, 40-41

  Murray, Dr. Flora, 97


  _Nineteenth Century and After_, 81

  Norway, women's franchise in, 143

  Nurses, registration of, 163, 171

  N.U.W.S.S., intrigues in House of Commons against, 24, 26

  —— organization of, 54, 55

  —— addresses letter to Mr. Asquith on franchise situation, 1916, 127,
      8

  —— recasts election policy, 29, 30-38, 43

  —— changes its name, 155, 160

  —— enlarges its objects, 161

  —— indignation of, on fiasco of Government Reform Bill, 1913, 50-53

  —— action on outbreak of war, 86-105

  —— medical units for Russia, 104, 105

  N.U.W.W. (now National Council of Women), Hull meeting, 76


  O'Brien, Mr. W., support of women's suffrage, 23

  Obscene literature, trumped-up charges in House of Commons, 24-26

  _Observer_, conversion of the, 132


  Palmer, the Hon. Robert, 81

  Palmerston, Viscount, 62

  Parliament Act used against women's suffrage, 22

  Parliamentary intrigues against women's suffrage, 23, 26, 48-49

  Pilgrimage, the, suggested by Mrs. Harley, 54-58

  "Posts," the Three, 79, 145

  Pott, Miss Gladys, 97

  Press support of women's suffrage, rapid growth of, 117, 145

  Prothero, Mr. R. (now Lord Earle), on Insurance Act, 69

  _Punch_ quoted, 78


  Qualifications for Parliamentary Franchise, 122

  _Quarterly Review_, 113

  Queen Mary's interest in women's war work, 92


  Rackham, Mrs., 61

  Rathbone, Miss Eleanor, 131, 147, 155

  Redmond Mr. John, 44

  Reform Bill, Government, fiasco over, 39-53

  Registration (Parliamentary) neglected during the war, 122

  Registration of Nurses Act, 163, 171

  Revelstoke, Lord, on women's labour, 114

  Robertson, Miss Margaret, 61

  Royal College of Surgeons, 41

  Royaumont, hospital at the Abbaye de, 95, 98, 102

  Royden, Miss A. M., 39, 61, 75


  Salisbury, the late Marquis of, 32

  Scott, Mr. MacCallum, M.P., 11, 12, 21, 81

  Scottish women's hospitals, 95-105

  Selborne, Earl of, services to suffrage in House of Lords, 72, 125,
      149, 151

  —— —— praises women's work in agriculture, 113

  —— Countess of, 80

  Serbian tribute to Mrs. Harley, 59

  Sex Disqualification Removal Act, 1919, 163-165

  Simon, Sir John, M.P., 32, 48, 134-135

  Simpson, Rev. Canon, 57

  Speaker, the, 49, 50, 137, 138

  Speaker's Conference on Electoral Reform, 137

  Special Register Bills, 120, 129, 133, 139

  Sterling, Miss Frances, 16

  St. Paul's, service in, 57

  Strachey, Lady, 16

  Sweden, women's suffrage in, 31, 32


  _The Times'_ opposition to women's suffrage, 4

  —— —— —— gradually weakened, 82

  —— —— supplement on Pacific Coast of U.S.A., 82

  Trades Union support of women's suffrage, 3

  Troyes, Scottish women's hospital at, 100

  Tullibardine, Marquis of (now Duke of Atholl), 24


  Ulster Unionist Council, 74

  U.S.A. victories for suffrage, 41, 150

  —— _questionnaire_ addressed to, 80-81


  Venizelos, M., 163

  Villiers, the Hon. Charles, 32


  War, outbreak of, in 1914 and women's work, 86-105

  Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 11, 41-43, 71, 76-77, 97, 150-151

  Waste in Training Camps, 107

  Weardale, Lord, 149

  Weinberg, Dr., in Royaumont, 102-103

  Williams, Mr. Aneurin, M.P., 138

  Winchester, Bishop of, 156

  Wollstonecraft, Mary, 154

  Women's suffrage, a short history of, by Mrs Fawcett, 1

  —— —— growing support of, by Press, Pulpit, Stage, etc., 77-85

  —— —— victories in House of Commons, 146-148

  —— —— victory in House of Lords, 148-153

  —— Emancipation (Labour Party) Bill, 1919, 163


  Years before and after suffrage compared, 169-172


BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND


       *       *       *       *       *




Transcriber's Notes


Minor punctuation and printer errors repaired.

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_







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