“You might begin,” said one of the men, with a faint accent of sarcasm, “by telling us what good the vote’ll do you when you get it.”
Julia began by reminding them of the interest that so many of the factory women of the north had taken in the enfranchisement of their sex for several years before the militant movement began, and of the many Annie Kennys whose eyes were opened to the injustice of the absence of a minimum wage for women. One of the men interrupted her.
“Yes, ma’am, and if you raise women’s wages so that they can no longer undercut men, the lot of ’em’ll be kicked out.”
“Not all. The best will be retained, for the best are as efficient as the men. The inferior ones will find other employment, or be taken care of by men, who will then be able to support their families. They can return to their place in the home, that woman’s sphere of which we hear so much.”
This was received with cheers, but the man growled: —
“It’ll take time. It’ll take time. Better let well enough alone.”
“As it is the women that suffer, it is for them to say whether it is well enough. Of course it will take time. We do not promise Utopia in a day—nor ever, for that matter. But, if you will take the trouble to observe, it is the women of this country that are waging war on poverty, not the men. Without the ballot they are forced to advance at a snail’s pace. On all the boards to which they are admitted they do the work, and the men, who outnumber them, defeat every project for the betterment of the poor that would force the ratepayers to disgorge a few more shillings. Doctors, and all thinking and humane men, for that matter, would be thankful if these boards were composed entirely of women, for they alone understand the needs of other women and of children. Man lacks the instinct, to begin with, and has long since grown callous to the sources of his income. Higher wages mean smaller dividends, and he chooses to close his eyes to the fact that his dividends are largely due to the toil of wornout women and stunted children; of women that have all the duties of their households to discharge after they come home from the mills, children whose minds must remain as undeveloped as their ill-nourished bodies.”
“You want to go to Parliament, and right all that, I suppose?”
“We have not even thought of it. What we want is the power to send men to Parliament, who will be forced to keep their election promises if they would be returned a second time. Doubtless an ultimate result of the ballot would be a Woman’s Parliament which would deal exclusively with the Poor Laws. Then the men who oppose us now will be profoundly relieved that they no longer are obliged to waste valuable hours solemnly sitting upon such questions as the proper sort of nursing bottles to be adopted for pauper children, what shall be done with milk, or whether cabbage is a normal breakfast for school children. Do you know that if the House sat day and night for 365 days of the year, they could not begin to dispose of all the bills brought before it, and that many of these bills are of a pressing domestic nature? However well disposed, they cannot deal adequately with the Poor Laws, and that they do not welcome the assistance of women is but one more evidence of that conservatism in men’s minds which is a logical result of having had their own way, uncriticised, too long. Their fear of us is childish. They would not be thrown out of business. Every day they are confronted by questions of the gravest nature—questions of national and international policy which require their best faculties and all of their time. Women have more time than man ever thinks he has, in any case; and we have the maternal instincts and the nagging conscience which would force us to discharge our duties to the poor.
“Let me add that the women of this new militant movement have eliminated from their compositions all the old sentimentality and bathos which weakened the Suffrage cause for so many years. Sentimentality is sympathy run amôk. It roused that distrust of men we are fighting to-day, and made many of their public utterances asinine. You will hear no frantic protests to-day that women want the vote because they have as much right to it as men. That is a good argument in itself, but the women of to-day have progressed far beyond that or even of the old war cry, ‘Taxation without representation.’ They are animated, in their greater experience, by one purpose only, the desire to eliminate poverty and all the evils, moral and physical, that are always its partners; to reduce the hours of work and increase wages, to give every child good food, a decent education, and a comfortable home. The millions must work, but we are determined that they shall work for their own comfort as well as for that of their employers, that they shall have a reasonable amount of leisure and of the pleasures of life, cease to be machines whose only object in living is to contribute to the comfort and idleness of the thousands above them. We appreciate the wastage among the poor of England. Given strong bodies and a fair education, many would rise in the world and have respectable if not distinguished careers. What we further desire is to give these exceptional boys and girls a chance, the same chance they would have if born in the middle class. Beyond that we promise nothing. The point now is, not only that the misery in this country is appalling, but that these boys and girls have no chance of rising out of the rut unless possessed of positive genius. Hundreds have latent talent, thousands a certain amount of ability which would raise them above the station in which they were born —”