When the Women’s Social and Political Union sprang into public view some eight years ago, the time was certainly ripe for a revival. Some people still think that the Union has done nothing but harm. This has always seemed to me an unreasonable opinion. Undoubtedly they made other work extraordinarily difficult in some ways, and for a time. They captured the press, but, since they did not win the approval of the press for their object, but only secured notices by their sensationalism, it was, for some years, actually more difficult for other workers to get any publicity at all for their views or their work. The report of a street row always gets precedence of the report of a peaceful meeting, and the result of this was that, for some years, the newspapers were filled with reports of militancy, while their columns showed nothing of the great and steady growth of the non-militant movement, nor did they even do justice to the educational side of the militants’ work. This condition of things was in itself intensely provocative, and nothing is a more striking example of women’s level-headedness and far-sightedness than the fact that the enormous mass of suffragists refused to be provoked to any unconsidered act of retaliation. Some of them had the political sense to note that the newspapers which gave most prominence to militancy were those most hostile to women’s suffrage.
It would take very much more space than I have, thoroughly to argue the pros and cons of militancy, to distinguish its different forms, and to disentangle its motives. Like all great movements, this one contains people who have joined it for very different motives, and some of the arguments by which it has been defended are mutually destructive. Its greatest achievement in my opinion is that it woke people up and opened their purses, in a way totally unprecedented. It made those who had never cared realise that some women cared intensely, and made them ask why. It made those who had been working for long years realise that there were many yet untried methods, and that some of them were good. Above all, it made many women feel that, if they desired the enfranchisement of women, and if they did not like the methods of the W.S.P.U., the only respectable thing to do was to work as hard, and give as much for what they thought right, as these other women did. To the constitutional suffragists, it is a matter of complete indifference who gets the credit, when the vote is won; but it is a matter of the utmost import to them, not only that the vote should be won, but that both women and men should be prepared to make the best use of so great a reform.
Something can, of course, be done by telling people they are ready. This is what the early militants did. There was no real opposition in the country; there was a very large favourable majority in the House, and there had been a majority since 1886. One can quite conceive a revival which would in a few years have carried mere inertia. What happened was that the W.S.P.U. inflamed a party against the movement, and this party was the one which by its first principles was actually pledged to support the movement. Temper, party advantage, personal loyalties were all aroused; but, instead of being aroused for the suffrage movement, they were inflamed against it. It was to be war. All possible peaceful methods had, we were told, been tried and had failed. (This was, of course, the great and fundamental untruth. The work up to that time had not had anything like the popular appeal of recent years.) At first, by skilful advertisement, it almost seemed as if elections might be lost and won by these means, and some alarm was felt in party circles; but it did not take long to show that there were very few men who were going to vote against their party at the command of the militant suffragists, and the cry of “Keep the Liberal out!” became ineffective. It caused the maximum of irritation and the minimum of effect.
The militant campaign would have succeeded if the majority of women, even perhaps if the majority of suffragists, had backed it. I am not afraid of making this concession, holding, as I do, that the enormous majority of women kept out of the militant movement from ethical considerations. It is not easy to bring the ethical case against the militants, because they themselves waver incessantly between two positions. Sometimes they are soldiers, fighting a battle, inflicting damage, having a “siege of Whitehall” (to quote from one of their posters), “proving that women can fight.” Sometimes they are martyrs, who do injury to no one but themselves; who merely refuse to be governed without their consent; who have adopted the Oriental device of dying on their enemy’s doorstep. Now this second policy is the very reverse of the first, and the only thing that can be said against it is, that it is an extreme measure which should on no account be undertaken, until ordinary methods of education and organisation have been fully tried. To become a martyr as soon as you can’t get your own way, is a form of spiritual bullying that is extraordinarily exasperating.
But the first policy cuts away the whole ground upon which the women’s demand is based; upon this ground not only would men infallibly beat women, but the great mass of women, as well as men, would feel that the militant women had invited defeat. When Mrs. Leigh adjures her women hearers to use their nails upon the eyes of men who attempt to arrest them, does she not know that this could only succeed for as long as the men disbelieved the women’s intentions? As soon as the men apprehended real danger, they could effectively dispose of the women. Even if it were not wrong, it would be futile in the extreme. But it is wrong, inexcusably wrong, on the part of women, whose experience of life ought to have proved to them that for women to invite physical force against themselves is to provoke all the forces of reaction against which their movement is, in reality, directed. Long years ago, men threw stones and filth at women who asked for enfranchisement. Gradually public opinion killed out this hooliganism. Then came the militants, and, by smashing windows and arson and general terrorism, revived the ape in men, so that, for some years past, all women are once more in danger of violence from men. It is degrading to both men and women, and the only merit that I can see in the process is, that men who have so loved to exercise all the virtues vicariously in their women, are being a little shocked to see how ugly violence can be, and, from seeing it ugly in a woman may, by and by, turn to see it ugly in themselves.
It is hypocrisy, of course, for men to say that they refuse women’s claims because some women have been violent, firstly, because they refused them just the same, before women became violent; secondly, because only a few women have been violent; thirdly, because the vote was not given to men as a reward for their abstinence from violence. In fact, the brutalities of anti-suffragists might make the more sensitive Antis cease, for very shame, to reproach the other side with violence, their own side having been guilty of personal assaults of the most disgusting nature.
Men have not yet given women the vote, partly because they are very slow to move and indifferent about women’s questions; partly because they are still somewhat fearful of what women may do; but chiefly because no political party has yet seen a clear party gain to be made by it. This last, which has been the greatest obstacle to the accomplishment of this reform, will be its great safeguard once it has been won. The women’s vote would be on a precarious tenure if it were won by one party in the teeth of the bitter opposition of the whole of the other party. The peaceful and fruitful use of the vote depends upon a general conversion of the country to the principles involved. Representative institutions can only work well by common consent and goodwill.
Militants sometimes defend their violence by saying how trivial, after all, it has been. This, of course, is true. But what a strange argument to use in defence of war! “See how little damage our guns do!” And although I am convinced that they refrain from more serious crime, because their consciences revolt from it, they lay themselves open to the unthinking retort that they only do not do more because they can’t; a retort not only untrue, but provocative, to people sufficiently childish to be “dared” into action. What women have to do is to make their demand a formidable demand, and they cannot do this by adopting methods which the enormous mass of women will never whole-heartedly apply. By continued education, by well-considered and thoroughly prepared political action, by constant readiness for negotiation, by taking men always on their best side, and by making the help of women worth having, suffragists will enlist an ever-growing mass of women to hard work and sacrifice, and, what is more, they will convince men of the constructive ability of women, and of the possibility of men and women working together in the future.
In the course of the militant movement, one has seen a vast amount of femininity using the old weapons, which one hopes will be gradually laid aside. Defiance alternating with injured innocence. The smashing of a window by a woman, who cries, when a man apprehends her, “You mustn’t touch me! I’m a woman!” The frequent inexcusable untruth that “women are being imprisoned for daring to ask for the vote,” and that the Home Secretary is starving women in prison. It would have been too wonderful if women, in their fight for liberty, had proved themselves perfect. We have not. We have shown human foibles, like men, partisanship and violence, like men, and we have shown some faults which, though not specifically feminine, are the faults natural to subjected persons.
When all is said about the mistakes and faults and follies of suffragists, those of the Government have been far greater. They belittled the women’s movement, and treated it with the sort of sneering contempt which is more provocative than anything in the world. They magnified the first importunities into crimes. The early militants were treated with monstrous and disproportionate severity, and this contributed largely to their early popularity. They were treated like the worst criminals, for mere impropriety, or for the technical offence of obstruction. They were subjected to the most abominable brutalities when they asked questions at meetings. (It was a most unhappy thought which struck them, when they found out how easy men’s nerves and men’s passions make it for a woman to break up a meeting.) Two Acts of Parliament and innumerable special orders have been devised to deal with them, and have failed. Everybody with the slightest political insight knows that the reform must come. When Mr. Asquith (House of Commons, 6th May 1913) attempted to define what he meant by a demand for the vote, he said—