After Miss Becker’s lamented death the great schism between Unionists and Home Rulers extended far enough to split even our Committee, (which was avowedly of no party,) into two bodies. I naturally followed my fellow-Unionist, Mrs. Fawcett when she re-organized the moiety of the Society and established an office for it in College Street, Westminster. Believing her to be quite the ablest woman-economist and politician in England, I entertain the hope that she may at last carry a Woman Suffrage Bill and live to see qualified single women recording their votes at Parliamentary elections. When that time arrives every one will scoff at the objections which have so long closed the “right of way,” to us of the “weaker sex.”
Beside the Committee of the Society for Woman Suffrage, I also joined for a time the Committee which,—long afterwards,—effected the splendid achievement of procuring the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act; the greatest step gained up to the present time for women in England. I can claim no part of that real honour, which is due in greatest measure to Mrs. Jacob Bright.
The question of granting University Degrees to women, was opened as far back as 1862. In that year I read, in the Guildhall in London at the Social Science Congress, a paper, pleading for the privilege. Dean Milman, who occupied the Chair, was very kind in praising my crude address, and enjoyed the little jokes wherewith it was sprinkled; but next morning every daily paper in London laughed at my demand, and for a week or two I was the butt of universal ridicule. Nevertheless, just 17 years afterwards, I was invited to join a Deputation headed by Lady Stanley of Alderley, to thank Lord Granville for having (as President of London University) conceded those degrees to women, precisely as I had demanded! I took occasion at the close of the pleasant interview, to present him with one of the very few remaining copies of my original and much ridiculed appeal.
From this time I wrote and spoke not unfrequently on behalf of women’s political and civil claims. One article of mine in Fraser, 1868, was reprinted more than once. It was headed “Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors;” and enquired “Whether the classification should be counted sound?” I hope that the discussion it involved on the laws relating to the property of married women was of some service in helping on the great measure of justice afterwards granted.
Another paper of mine, circulated by the London National Society for Women’s Suffrage, for whom I wrote it, was entitled “Our Policy.” It was, in effect, an address to women concerning the best way to secure the suffrage. I began this pamphlet by the following remarks:—
“There is an instructive story, told by Herodotus, of an African nation which went to war with the South Wind. The wind had greatly annoyed these Psyllians by drying up their cisterns, so they organised a campaign and set off to attack the enemy at head-quarters—somewhere, I presume, about the Sahara. The army was admirably equipped with all the military engines of those days; swords and spears, darts and javelins, battering rams and catapults. It happened that the South Wind did not, however, suffer much from these weapons, but got up one fine morning and blew!—The sands of the desert have lain for a great many ages over those unfortunate Psyllians; and, as Herodotus placidly concludes the story, ‘The Nasamones possess the territory of those who thus perished.’
“It seems to me that we, women, who have been fighting for the Suffrage with logical arguments—syllogisms, analogies, demonstrations, and reductions-to-the-absurd of our antagonists’ position, in short, all the weapons of ratiocinative warfare—have been behaving very much like those poor Psyllians, who imagined that darts, and swords, and catapults would avail against the Simoom. The obvious fact is, that it is Sentiment we have to contend against, not Reason; Feeling and Prepossession, not intellectual Conviction. Had Logic been the only obstacle in our way, we should long ago have been polling our votes for Parliamentary as well as for Municipal and School Board elections. To those who hold that Property is the thing intended to be represented by the Constitution of England, we have shown that we possess such property. To those who say that Tax-paying and Representation should go together, we have pointed to the tax-gatherers’ papers, which, alas! lie on our hall-tables wholly irrespective of the touching fact that we belong to the ‘protected sex.’ Where Intelligence, Education, and freedom from crime are considered enough to confer rights of citizenship, we have remarked that we are quite ready to challenge rivalry in such particulars with those Illiterates for whose exercise of political functions our Senate has taken such exemplary care. Finally, to the ever-recurring charge that we cannot fight, and therefore ought not to vote, we have replied that the logic of the exclusion will be manifest when all the men too weak, too short, or too old for the military standard be likewise disfranchised, and when the actual soldiers of our army are accorded the suffrage.
“But it is Sentiment, not Logic, against which we have to struggle; and we shall best do so, I think, by endeavouring to understand and make full allowance for it; and then by steady working, shoulder to shoulder so as to conquer, or rather win it over to our side.”
In 1876, May 13th, I made a rather long and elaborate speech on the subject of women’s suffrage in a meeting in St. George’s Hall, at which Mr. Russell Gurney, the Recorder of London, took the chair. John Bright had spoken against our Bill in the House, and though I had not intended to speak at our meeting, I was spurred by indignation to reply to him. In this address I spoke chiefly of the wrongs of mothers whose children are taken from them at the will of a living or dead father. I ended by saying:—
“I advocate Woman Suffrage as the natural and needful constitutional means of protection for the rights of the weaker half of the nation. I do this as a woman pleading for women. But I do it also, and none the less confidently, as a citizen, and for the sake of the whole community, because it is my conviction that such a measure is no less expedient for men than just for women; and that it will redound in coming years ever more and more to the happiness, the virtue and the honour of our country.”