The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward

by Janet Penrose Trevelyan

Her opposition to Mrs. Fawcett’s organization was, of course, conducted on very different lines from this. Quite early in the campaign, in February, 1909, a debate was arranged to take place at the Passmore Edwards Settlement (under the auspices of the St. Pancras Branch of the Women’s Suffrage Society) between the two protagonists, Mrs. Ward and Mrs. Fawcett. The organizers of the meeting were besieged with applications for seats. Mrs. Ward reserved 150 for herself and the Anti-Suffrage League, while about 300 went to the Suffrage Society, so that the voting was a foregone conclusion; but the debate itself reached a high level of excellence, though it suffered from the usual fault which besets such tournaments—that the champions did not really meet each other’s arguments, but cantered on into the void, discharging their ammunition and returning gracefully to their starting-points when time was called.

“Surely,” wrote Mrs. Ward afterwards to her old friend, Miss McKee, the Chairman of the St. Pancras Suffrage Society, “surely you don’t think that Mrs. Fawcett answered my main contentions! Does anyone deny the inequality of wage?—but what Mrs. Fawcett never attempted to prove was how the vote could affect it. And why compare doctor and nurse? Does not the doctor pay for a long and costly training, while the nurse is paid her living at least from the beginning? Would it not have been fairer to compare woman doctor with man doctor, and then to show that under the L.C.C. at the present moment medical appointments are open to both women and men, and the salaries are equal?”

It could not be expected that such combatants would influence each other, but Mrs. Ward’s campaign went far to influence the doubting multitude, torn by conflicting counsels, harassed by the Militants, worried by accounts of prison tortures suffered by the “martyrettes,” and generally bothered by the obscuring of the good old fight between Liberals and Tories which the importation of the Suffrage into every by-election caused. The Suffrage battle was indeed waged upon and around the vile body of the Liberal Party in a very special degree from 1908 to 1914, for Mr. Asquith was Prime Minister, and Mr. Asquith—encouraged thereto by every device of provocation and exasperation which the Militants could spring upon him—was an Anti-Suffragist. Yet the influence of his Suffragist colleagues and of the constitutional agitation throughout the country was sufficient to induce him, in November, 1911, to give a very favourable answer to a deputation introduced by Mrs. Fawcett, who put to him a series of questions with regard to the Reform Bill announced by the Government for the Session of 1912 and the possibility of adding Suffrage amendments to it. The Suffragists withdrew with high hopes of a real measure of enfranchisement in the ensuing year. But less than a month later Mr. Asquith was receiving a similar deputation from the Anti-Suffrage League, introduced by Lord Curzon and including Mrs. Ward, Miss Violet Markham and Mr. McCallum Scott. His reply showed unmistakably that he was exceedingly glad to have his hands strengthened by the “Antis” in his own domestic camp, and he only begged them to carry on their crusade with the utmost vigour, since “as an individual I am in entire agreement with you that the grant of the parliamentary suffrage to women in this country would be a political mistake of a very disastrous kind.”

When the Session of 1912 opened it was evident that very strong influences were at work within the walls of Parliament for the defeat of the “Conciliation Bill,” which was due to come up for Second Reading at the end of March, and it is significant that Mrs. Ward was able to say, at a meeting of the Oxford Branch of the Anti-Suffrage League held on March 15, that “Woman Suffrage is in all probability killed for this Session and this Parliament.” The prophecy was partly fulfilled; like the prayers of Homer’s heroes, Zeus “heard part, and part he scattered to the winds.” At any rate, in the Session of 1912, not only was the Conciliation Bill defeated on March 28, by fourteen votes (after its very striking victory the year before), but the Suffrage amendments to the Reform Bill never even came up for consideration. At the very end of a long Session, that is in January, 1913, the Speaker ruled that the Bill had been so seriously altered by the amendments regarding male franchise already passed that it was not, in fact, the same Bill as had received Second Reading, while there were also “other amendments regarding female suffrage” to come which would make it still more vitally different. For these reasons he directed the withdrawal of the Bill. The fury of the Suffragists at the “trick” which had been played them may be imagined, but apart from the sanctity of Mr. Speaker’s rulings I think it is evident that the lassitude and discouragement about the Suffrage which pervaded the House of Commons at that time, and which contributed to the withdrawal of the Bill, was largely due to the recognition that there was a considerable body of Anti-Suffrage opinion in the country, both amongst men and women, the strength of which had not been realized before Mrs. Ward began her campaign. Well might she draw attention to this at a great meeting held at the Queen’s Hall on January 20, when it was still expected that the Suffrage amendments would be moved:

‘Naturally, I am reminded as I stand here, of all that has happened in the four and a half years since our League was founded. All I can tell you is, that we have put up a good fight; and I am amazed at what we have been able to do. Just throw your minds back to 1908. The militant organization was fast over-running the country; the cause of Women Suffrage had undoubtedly been pushed to the front, and for the moment benefited by the immense advertisement it had received; our ears were deafened by the noise and the shouting; and it looked as though the Suffrage might suddenly be carried before the country, the real country, had taken it seriously at all. The Second Readings of various Franchise Bills had been passed, and were still to be passed, by large majorities. There was no organized opposition. Suffragist opinions were entrenched in the universities and the schools, and between the ardour of the Suffragists and the apathy of the nation generally the situation was full of danger.

‘What has happened since? An opposition, steadily growing in importance and strength, has spread itself over the United Kingdom. Men and women who had formerly supported the Suffrage, looked it in the face, thought again and withdrew. Every item in the Suffragist claim has been contested; every point in the Suffragist argument has been investigated, and, as I think, overthrown. It is a great deal more difficult to-day than it was then to go about vaguely and passionately preaching that votes will raise wages in the ordinary market—that nothing can be done for the parasitic trades and sweated women without the women’s vote—for what about the Trade Boards Bill? or that nothing can be done to put down organized vice without the women’s vote—for what about the Criminal Law Amendment Bill? or that nothing can be done to help and protect children, without women’s votes—for what about the Children’s Act, the First Offenders’ Act, the new Children’s Courts and the Children’s Probationary Officers, the vast growth of the Care Committees, and all their beneficent work, due initially to the work of a woman, Miss Margaret Frere?

‘Witness, too, the increasing number of women on important Commissions: University—Divorce—Insurance; the increasing respect paid to women’s opinions; the strengthening of trade unionism among women; the steady rise in the average wage.

‘No, the Suffragist argument that women are trampled on and oppressed, and can do nothing without the vote, has crumbled in their hands. It had but to be examined to be defeated.

‘Meanwhile, the outrages and the excitement of the extreme Suffragist campaign gave many people pause. Was it to this we were committing English politics? Did not the whole development throw a new and startling light on the effect of party politics—politics so exciting as politics are bound to be in such a country as England—on the nerves of women? Women as advisers, as auxiliaries, as the disinterested volunteers of politics, we all know, and as far as I am concerned, cordially welcome. But women fighting for their own hands—fighting ultimately for the political control of men in men’s affairs—women in fierce and direct opposition to men—that was new—that gave us, as the French say, furiously to think!

‘And now, the coming week will be critical enough, anxious enough; but we all know that if any Suffrage amendment is carried in the House, it can only be by a handful of votes—none of your majorities of 160 or 170 as in the past.