Dr. Elsie Inglis

by Lady Frances Balfour

It is now admitted that this country was unprepared for war, and incredulous as to the German menace. The services of women have now attained so high a value in the State that it is difficult to recast their condition in 1914.

In politics there had been a succession of efforts to obtain their enfranchisement. Each effort had been marked by a stronger manifestation in their favour in the country, and the growing force of the movement, coupled with the unrest in Ireland, had kept all political organisations in a high state of tension.

It has been shown how fully organised were all the Women Suffrage societies. Committees, organisers, adherents, and speakers were at work, and in the highest state of efficiency. Women linked by a common cause had learnt how to work together. The best brains in their midst were put at the service of the Suffrage, and they had watched in the political arena where to expect support, and who could be trusted among the leaders of all parties. No shrewder or more experienced body of politicians were to be found in the country than those women drawn from all classes, in all social, professional, and industrial spheres, who acknowledged Mrs. Fawcett as their leader, and trusted no one party, sect, or politician in the year 1914.

When the war caused a truce to be pronounced in all questions of acute political difference, the unenfranchised people realised that this might mean the failure of their hopes for an indefinite time. They never foresaw that, for the second time within a century, emancipation was to be bought by the life blood of a generation.

The truce made no difference to any section of the Suffrage party. It was accepted by the whole people. War found both men and women unprepared, but the path of glory was clear for the men. A great army must be formed in defence of national liberty. The army was mobilised. It would have been well had the strength of the women been mobilised in the same hour. Their long claim for the rights of citizenship made them keenly alive and responsive to the call of national service.

War and its consequences had for many years been uppermost in their thoughts. In the struggle for emancipation, the great argument they had had to face among the rapidly decreasing anti-party, was the one that women could take no part in war, and, as all Government rested ultimately on brute force, women could not fight, and therefore must not vote.

In countering this outlook, women had watched what war meant all over the world, wherever it took place. With the use of scientific weapons of destruction, with the development of scientific methods of healing, with all that went to the maintenance of armies in the field, and the support of populations at home, women had some vision in what manner they would be needed if war ever came to this country.

The misfortune of such a controversy as that of the ‘Rights of Women’ is that it necessarily means the opposition has to prove a negative proposition—a most sterilising process. Political parties were so anxious to prove that women were incapable of citizenship, that the whole community got into a pernicious habit of mind. Women were underrated in every sphere of industry or scientific knowledge. Their sense of incapacity and irresponsibility was encouraged, and when they turned militant under such treatment, they were only voted a nuisance which it was impossible to totally exterminate.

Those who watched the gathering war clouds, and the decline of their Parliamentary hopes, did not realise that, in the overruling providence of God, the devastating war among nations was to open a new era for women. They were no longer to be held cheap, as irresponsibles—mere clogs on the machinery of the State. They were to be called on to take the place of men who were dying by the thousand for their homes, fighting against the doctrine that military force is the only true Government in a Christian world.