Like this, the trust and the burden have rested heavier and heavier on woman’s heart and hands. Millions of men will never be able to lift it for her again. No one knows when the others will. Men must fight and women must work.
So many men are with the flag at the front. So many men are under the crosses, the acres of crosses with which battle fields are planted. So many men are in wheel chairs and on crutches. Women are carrying on in the home, in industry, in commerce and in the professions. Then why not in the State?
MRS. MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT OF LONDON
For fifty years leader of the Constitutional Suffragists, whose cause triumphed in 1918 when Parliament granted the franchise to English women.
Little by little, in every land, a voice began to be heard. It was the voice of the man with the flag, and the man with the twisted face, and the man with the blinded eyes, and the voice of Sergeant Jones. It said what the sergeant said, when from his wheel chair by the window where his wife had placed it, he took his pen in hand and wrote back to Endell Street hospital: “Women are wonderful. I didn’t know before. Now I wouldn’t be afraid for you even to have the vote.”
And curiously enough, what the man in the wheel chair and the man in the Green Park and the Tuileries and the man with the flag was saying, the newspapers began to repeat as if it had been syndicated round the world. The Matin had it in Paris, the Times in London and the Tageblatt in Berlin. You read it in all languages: “The women are wonderful. We didn’t know before.”
GREATEST DRIVE FOR DEMOCRACY
Then couldn’t a woman who could cast a shell, cast a vote? Parliaments trembled on the verge of letting her try.
It wouldn’t be at all the difficult undertaking it used to look to those women of yesterday, whose place was in the home pouring afternoon tea or embroidering a flower in a piece of lace. Why, to-day they would scarcely have to go out of their way at all to the polls! They could just stop in as easily as not, as they went down the street to their day’s work in shop and office and factory. Sergeant Jones’s wife is out of the home now anyway from six o’clock in the morning until seven at night making munitions. Some one must support her family, you know. Well, all over the world a new call began. Simultaneously in every civilised land, through the crack in the window of the government house where man gathered with his fellow man, you could hear it. In some lands yet it is only a murmur of dissent. But in many lands now it is a rising chorus of consent: “Women wanted in the counsels of the nation!”
At the gates of government, the new woman movement has arrived. And not through the broken window is it entering in. Without benefit of even a riot, suffrage walking very softly and sedately is going through an open door. In England, a gentleman holds it ajar, a gentleman suave and smiling and bowing the ladies to pass!