(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.
