VIOLENCE IN THE WOMAN’S SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT
A DISAVOWAL OF THE MILITANT POLICY
BY MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT
President of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (Great Britain)
I WRITE from the standpoint of those who regard the women’s movement for political freedom as incomparably the most important political fact of the present day; and who look upon the women’s movement, as a whole, in its social, economical, political, industrial, and educational developments as one of the most remarkable events which have ever taken place in the history of the world. I do not know where one could look for another so nearly universal in its operation, making itself felt in every country in the world, in all civilizations, whether eastern or western, and affecting the well-being of such masses of men and women of all races and nations.
Men’s political movements toward freedom have nearly always been accompanied by “confused noise and garments rolled in blood.” No great emancipating evolution for men has taken place without violence and bloodshed. One of our most learned historians, Lord Acton, wrote: “It seems to be a law of political evolution that no great advance of human freedom can be gained except after the display of some kind of violence.” Yet notwithstanding all precedents to the contrary, but just because men are men and women are women, the women’s movement toward freedom did progress and progress marvelously for the first half of the nineteenth century till about six years ago without the use of any kind of violence. We shot no one, we exploded no bombs, we destroyed nothing; but we have been building up and creating a new social order in which the women of to-day occupy a wholly different and better place from that occupied by the women of preceding ages. The universities have been opened; girls’ schools have been made over again, and made different; the medical and, in many countries, the legal, professions have been opened; municipal and all other local franchises in Great Britain and her colonies have been won; women have been made eligible for election on all local governing bodies; the civil service has been opened; the barbarity of medieval laws founded on the absolute subjection of women in marriage has been modified; full parliamentary suffrage has been won for women in New Zealand and Australia, in Finland and Norway, in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Washington, and California, and women’s suffrage amendments have been recommended to the electorate by the representative governing bodies of six other of the United States. All these actual victories and indications of further victories in the near future have been won (Lord Acton notwithstanding) without violence of any kind. The American humorist Mark Twain, with his keen practical insight into the essence of things, remarked this strange feature of the women’s movement. He wrote in “More Tramps Abroad,” p. 208:
For forty years they have swept an imposingly large number of unfair laws from the statute books of America. In this brief time these serfs have set themselves free—essentially. Men could not have done as much for themselves in that time without bloodshed, at least they never have, and that is an argument that they didn’t know how.
All these great and indeed immense victories for the cause of human freedom have been accomplished by moral force and not by physical force. Physical force as a means of promoting women’s freedom was never even heard of till about six years ago, and for the first two and a half years of their activity the so-called militant suffragists did not use physical violence toward their adversaries; they suffered violence far more than they inflicted it.
At the outset, so long as they confined themselves merely to sensational and eccentric means of propaganda, they could hardly be looked upon as a physical force party; they undoubtedly did service to our common cause by making the claims of women more widely known; there is probably hardly a village, hardly a family in which the claims of women to share in the representative system of the country has not been eagerly discussed. This to a very large extent we owe to the activities of the “militants.” But when they departed from the attitude they first adopted, of suffering violence but using none, in my judgment they put themselves in the wrong morally; and if judged from the point of view of practical success have put back the cause rather than promoted it. For twenty-six years from 1886 to 1912 women’s suffrage was never once defeated in the House of Commons. The Conciliation Bill, which had been carried in second reading in 1911 by a majority 316 to 143 after a truce from militancy of nearly eighteen months, was defeated in 1912 by a narrow majority. This was very largely due to the intense indignation and resentment caused by the window-smashing outrages which had taken place a few weeks earlier.
The carrying of a women’s suffrage amendment to the government Reform Bill is the next stage either of victory or defeat which awaits us. If militancy is renewed, defeat is almost certain. The average man is not convinced of the value of conferring full citizenship on women by hearing of tradesmen’s windows being broken, or of attempts to set houses and theaters on fire. The militants often claim that a display of physical violence is the only way to success. This, I maintain, is a wholly mistaken reading of the facts. Our victories have been won through convincing large masses of quiet, sensible, average men and women that the citizenship of women would be good for women themselves and for the State as a whole. We can point to the activities of such women as Julia Ward Howe and Jane Addams in the United States, of Florence Nightingale and Josephine Butler in Great Britain, and can more and more convince our countrymen of the futility and absurdity and the loss to the community of excluding such women, and women at large, from the rights of citizenship. I regard the militants as misguided enthusiasts, and believe that at this moment they are the most dangerous obstacles in the way of the immediate success of our cause in England. But when I compare the degree of violence they have used with the excesses of, say, the French Revolution or the destructive fury which swept over our own and other countries, in connection with the Reformation, or with the awful violence which has occasionally been associated with the Labor movement both in this country and in the United States, we may feel that there is no cause for panic and still less for despair. The political emancipation of women has made immense strides toward complete realization in the English-speaking countries on both sides of the Atlantic. Every victory scored by either of us helps the other. The latest honors are with America. We do not grudge them; but hope soon to vie with them.
