The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward

by Janet Penrose Trevelyan

‘And our high hope is that none will pass, that every Suffrage amendment will be defeated.

“That state of things is the exact measure of what has been done by us, the Anti-Suffrage party, to meet the Suffragist arguments and to make the nation understand what such a revolution really means—though I admit that Mrs. Pankhurst has done a good deal! It is the exact measure of the national recoil since 1908, and if fortune is on our side next week, we have only to carry on the fight resolutely and steadily to the end in order finally to convince the nation.”

After the collapse of the Government Reform Bill just described, the deadlock in the Parliamentary situation as regards Women’s Suffrage continued right down to the outbreak of the War. Mrs. Fawcett transferred the allegiance of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies to the Labour Party, the only party which was prepared to back the principle of women’s votes through thick and thin; the Militants continually increased in numbers, agitation and violence, and Mrs. Ward and her friends concentrated their energies more and more on the positive side of their programme, that is on the active development of women’s work in Local Government. But it was a heavy burden. Mrs. Ward felt, as she said in a speech at Oxford in 1912, that “it is a profound saying that nothing is conquered until it is replaced. Before the Suffrage movement can be finally defeated, or rather transformed, we who are its opponents must not only have beaten and refuted the Suffrage argument, but we must have succeeded in showing that there is a more excellent way towards everything that the moderate Suffragist desires, and we must have kindled in the minds, especially of the young, hopes and ideals for women which may efface and supersede those which have been held out to them by the leaders of the Suffrage army.”

Her artistic imagination was already at work on the problem, for in 1913 she wrote her Suffrage novel, Delia Blanchflower, in which the reader of to-day may still enjoy her closely observed study of the militant temperament, in Gertrude Marvell and her village followers, while on Delia herself, an ardent militant when the story opens, the gradual effect is traced of the English traditions of quiet public service, as exemplified—naturally!—in the person of the hero. Incidentally it may here be remarked that Mrs. Ward always believed that her Anti-Suffrage activities, culminating in the writing of this novel, had a markedly bad effect on the circulation of her books. Certainly she was prepared to suffer for her opinions, for the task of diverting and of carrying forward the Women’s Movement into other lines than those which led to Westminster was one that was to wear her out prematurely, though her gallant spirit never recognized its hopelessness.

Her organized attempt to give effect to these aspirations, in the foundation (early in 1914) of the “Joint Advisory Council” between Members of Parliament and Women Social Workers, arose out of the stand which she made within the National Union of Women Workers[32] for the neutrality of that body on the Suffrage question. The National Union was bound by its constitution to favour “no one policy” in national affairs, and many moderate Suffragists agreed with Mrs. Ward that sufficient ad hoc Societies existed already for carrying on the Suffrage campaign, and that it would have been wiser for the National Union to remain aloof from it altogether. But the feeling among the rank and file of the Union was too strong for the Executive, so that in the autumn of 1912 a Suffrage resolution was passed and sent up to the Prime Minister and all Members of the House of Commons. Mrs. Ward protested, but suspended her resignation until the next Annual Conference, which met at Hull in October, 1913. There Mrs. Ward’s resolutions were all voted down by the Suffragist majority, so that she and some of her friends felt that they had no choice but to secede from the Union, on the ground that its original constitution had been violated. They drew up and sent to the Press a Manifesto in which the following passage occurred:

“Under these circumstances it is proposed to enlarge and strengthen the protest movement, and to provide it, if possible, with a new centre and rallying-point for social work involving, probably, active co-operation with a certain number of Members of Parliament, who, on wholly neutral ground from which the question of Suffrage, for or against, has been altogether excluded, desire the help and advice of women in such legislation.”

Mrs. Ward had, throughout the controversy, carried on an active and most amicable correspondence with her old friend, Mrs. Creighton, the President of the National Union of Women Workers, who had for some years been a convert to Women’s Suffrage, on the ground that, since women had already, for good or ill, entered the political arena with their various Party Associations, it would be more straight-forward to have them inside than outside the political machine. Mrs. Ward now wrote to tell her of the progress of her idea for a “Joint Advisory Committee”:

“STOCKS,
”December 18, 1913.

...“The scheme has been shaping beyond my hopes, and will I hope, be ready for publication before Parliament meets. What we have been aiming at is a kind of Standing Committee composed equally of Members from all parts of the House of Commons, and both sides of the Suffrage question—and women of experience in social work. I do not, I hope, at all disguise from myself the difficulties of the project, and yet I feel that it ought to be very useful, and to develop into a permanent adjunct of the House of Commons. From this Joint Committee the Suffrage question will be excluded, but it will contain a dozen of the leading Suffragists in the House, which ought, I think, to make it clear that it is no Anti conspiracy!—but a bona-fide attempt to get Antis and Pros to work together on really equal terms.”

She was much gratified by the cordial response to her invitation on the part of M.P.’s of all shades of opinion, while some seventy women—both Suffragists and “Antis”—representing every field of social work, presently joined the Committee. Naturally the reproach levelled against it by those who did not believe in it was that the Committee was wholly self-appointed, but Mrs. Ward replied that, self-appointed or not, it was an instrument for getting things done, and that it would soon prove its usefulness. Under the Chairmanship of Sir Charles Nicholson, M.P., the Committee had held four meetings at the House of Commons between April and July, 1914, and had got through a great deal of practical work in the drafting of various amendments to Bills then before the House, when the curtain was rung down on all such fruitful and peaceable activities. Henceforth the guns were to speak, and such things as the education of crippled children, or the pressing of a wider qualification for women members of local bodies, were to disappear within the shadow that fell over the whole country. So at least it appeared at the time, but the Joint Advisory Council, like all really practical bodies, survived the shock, and lived to devote to the special questions arising from the War the experience gained in these first meetings.