Women Pressures British Government for Voting Rights

No general dares throw away his men when nothing is to be gained, and our analysis shows that the interval between women and the vote can only be shortened by bringing on a general election.

Continuing Women;s Suffrage Movement, Part 1,
with a selection from a special aticle to The Great Event Evemts by Famous Historians, Volume 20 by Israel Zangwill published in 1914. This selection is presented in 2.5 installments, each one 5 minutes long. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Women;s Suffrage Movement, Part 1.

Time: Before 1914

The suffragettes who run amuck have, in fact, become the victims of their own vocabulary. Their Union was “militant,” but a church militant, not an army militant. The Salvation Army might as well suddenly take to shooting the heathen. It was only by mob misunderstanding that the suffragettes were conceived as viragoes, just as it was only by mob misunderstanding that the members of the Society of Friends were conceived as desperadoes. If it can not be said that their proceedings were as quintessentially peaceful as some of those absolutely mute Quaker meetings which the police of Charles II. humorously enough broke up as “riots,” yet they had a thousand propaganda meetings (ignored by the Press) to one militant action (recorded and magnified). Even in battle nothing could be more decorous or constitutional than the overwhelming majority of their “pin-pricks.”

I remember a beautiful young lady, faultlessly dressed, who in soft, musical accents interrupted Mr. Birrell at the Mansion House. Stewards hurled themselves at her, policemen hastened from every point of the compass; but unruffled as at the dinner-table, without turning a hair of her exquisite chévelure, she continued gently explaining the wishes of womankind till she disappeared in a whirlwind of hysteric masculinity. But in gradually succumbing to the vulgar misunderstanding, playing up to the caricature, and finally assimilating to the crude and obsolescent methods of men, the suffragettes have been throwing away their own peculiar glory, their characteristic contribution to history and politics. Rosalind in search of a vote has supplied humanity with a new type who snatched from her testifyings a grace beyond the reach of Arden. But Rosalind with a revolver would be merely a reactionary. Hawthorne’s Zenobia, who, for all her emancipation, drowned herself in a fit of amorous jealousy, was no greater backslider from the true path of woman’s advancement. It is some relief to find that Mrs. Pankhurst’s latest program disavows attacks on human life, limiting itself to destruction of property, and that the Pethick Lawrences have grown still saner.

There might, indeed, be — for force is not always brute — some excuse and even admiration for the Terrorist, did the triumph of her cause appear indefinitely remote, were even that triumph to be brought perceptibly nearer by forcibly feeding us with horrors. But the contrary is the case: even the epidemic of crime foreshadowed by Mrs. Pankhurst could not appreciably delay woman suffrage. It is coming as fast as human nature and the nature of the Parliamentary machine will allow. To try to terrorize Mr. Asquith into bringing in a Government measure is to credit him with a wisdom and a nobility almost divine. No man is great enough to put himself in the right by admitting he was wrong. And even if he were great enough to admit it under argument, he would have to be godlike to admit it under menace. Rather than admit it, Mr. Asquith has let himself be driven into a position more ludicrous than perhaps any Prime Minister has occupied. For though he declares woman suffrage to be “a political disaster of the gravest kind,” he is ready to push it through if the House of Commons wishes, relying for its rejection upon the House of Lords, which he has denounced and eviscerated. He is even not unwilling it shall pass if only the disaster to the country is maximized by Adult Suffrage. It is not that he loves woman more, but the Tory party less.

All things considered, I am afraid the Suffrage Movement will have to make up its mind to wait for another Parliament. There is more hope for the premature collapse of this Parliament than for its passing of a Suffrage Bill or clause. And at the general election, whenever it comes, Votes for Women will be put on the program of both parties. The Conservatives will offer a mild dose, the Liberals a democratic. Whichever fails at the polls, the principle of woman suffrage will be safe.

This prognostic, it will be seen, involves the removal of the immovable Asquith. But he must either consent to follow a plebiscite of his party or retire, like his doorkeeper, from Downing Street, under the intolerable burden of the suffragette. Much as his party honors and admires him, it can not continue to repudiate the essential principles of Liberalism, nor find refuge in his sophism that Liberalism removes artificial barriers but can not remove natural barriers. What natural barrier prevents a woman from accepting or rejecting a man who proposes to represent her in Parliament? No; after his historic innings Mr. Asquith will sacrifice himself and retire, covered with laurels and contradictions. Pending which event, the suffragettes, while doing their best to precipitate it through the downfall of the Government, may very reasonably continue their policy of pin-pricks to keep politicians from going to sleep, but serious violence would be worse than a crime; it would be a blunder. No general dares throw away his men when nothing is to be gained, and our analysis shows that the interval between women and the vote can only be shortened by bringing on a general election.

There are, indeed, skeptics who fear that even at the next general election both parties may find a way of circumventing woman suffrage by secretly agreeing to keep it off both programs; but the country itself is too sick of the question to endure this, even if the Women’s Liberal Federation and the corresponding Conservative body permitted it. That the parties would go so far as to pair off their women workers against each other is unlikely. At any rate, now, when other forms of agitation are more or less futile, is the moment for these and cognate bodies to take up the running.

But even if these women workers fail in backbone, and allow themselves, as so often before, to be lulled and gulled by their male politicians, there yet remains an ardent body to push forward their cause. Mrs. Humphry Ward and the Anti-Suffragists may be trusted to continue tireless and ever-inventive. Mrs. Ward’s League to promote the return of women as town and county councilors is her latest device to prove the unfitness of women for public affairs, and since the Vegetarian League for combating the carnivorous instincts of the tigress by feeding her on blood, there has been no quite so happy adaptation of means to end. If anything could add to the educative efficiency of the new League, it is Mrs. Ward’s scrupulousness in limiting it exclusively to Anti-Suffragists.

Ida Husted Harper begins here. Israel Zangwill begins here. Jane Addams begins here.

More information here and here, and below.

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