'Do you know how that has come about? I'll tell you. It's come about through your keeping the women out of your Unions. You never would have done that if they'd had votes. You saw the important people ignored them. You thought it was safe for you to do the same. But I tell you it isn't ever safe to ignore the women!'
High over the groans and laughter the voice went on, 'You men have got to realize that if our battle against the common enemy is to be won, you've got to bring the women into line.'
'What's to become of chivalry?'
'What has become of chivalry?' she retorted; and no one seemed to have an answer ready, but the crowd fell silent, like people determined to puzzle out a conundrum.
'Don't you know that there are girls and women in this very city who are working early and late for rich men, and who are expected by those same employers to live on six shillings a week? Perhaps I'm wrong in saying the men expect the women to live on that. It may be they know that no girl can—it may be the men know how that struggle ends. But do they care? Do they bother about chivalry? Yet they and all of you are dreadfully exercised for fear having a vote would unsex women. We are too delicate—women are such fragile flowers.' The little face was ablaze with scorn. 'I saw some of those fragile flowers last week—and I'll tell you where. Not a very good place for gardening. It was a back street in Liverpool. The "flowers"' (oh, the contempt with which she loaded the innocent word!)—'the flowers looked pretty dusty—but they weren't quite dead. I stood and looked at them! hundreds of worn women coming down steep stairs and pouring out into the street. What had they all been doing there in that—garden, I was going to say!—that big grimy building? They had been making cigars!—spending the best years of their lives, spending all their youth in that grim dirty street making cigars for men. Whose chivalry prevents that? Why were they coming out at that hour of the day? Because their poor little wages were going to be lowered, and with the courage of despair they were going on strike. No chivalry prevents men from getting women at the very lowest possible wage—(I want you to notice the low wage is the main consideration in all this)—men get these women, that they say are so tender and delicate, to undertake the almost intolerable toil of the rope-walk. They get women to make bricks. Girls are driven—when they are not driven to worse—they are driven to being lodging-house slaveys or over-worked scullions. That's all right! Women are graciously permitted to sweat over other people's washing, when they should be caring for their own babies. In Birmingham'—she raised the clear voice and bent her flushed face over the crowd—'in Birmingham those same "fragile flowers" make bicycles to keep alive! At Cradley Heath we make chains. At the pit brows we sort coal. But a vote would soil our hands! You may wear out women's lives in factories, you may sweat them in the slums, you may drive them to the streets. You do. But a vote would unsex them.'
Her full throat choked. She pressed her clenched fist against her chest and seemed to admonish herself that emotion wasn't her line.
'If you are intelligent you know as well as I do that women are exploited the length and the breadth of the land. And yet you come talking about chivalry! Now, I'll just tell you men something for your future guidance.' She leaned far out over the crowd and won a watchful silence. 'That talk about chivalry makes women sick.' In the midst of the roar, she cried, 'Yes, they mayn't always show it, for women have had to learn to conceal their deepest feelings, but depend on it that's how they feel.'
Then, apparently thinking she'd been serious enough, 'There might be some sense in talking to us about chivalry if you paid our taxes for us,' she said; while the people recovered their spirits in roaring with delight at the coolness of that suggestion.
'If you forgave us our crimes because we are women! If you gave annuities to the eighty-two women out of every hundred in this country who are slaving to earn their bread—many of them having to provide for their children; some of them having to feed sick husbands or old parents. But chivalry doesn't carry you men as far as that! No! No further than the door! You'll hold that open for a lady and then expect her to grovel before such an exhibition of chivalry! We don't need it, thank you! We can open doors for ourselves.'