Democracy, the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own government, is breaking through apparently on all the fronts at once. It is a most remarkable coincidence. In August, 1917, Parliament in England removed the “grille,” the brass lattice barring the ladies’ gallery in the House of Commons and symbolising what had been the English woman’s position. The Times, commenting on the proceeding, characterised it as a “domestic revolution.” In the same month in India 5000 Hindus were applauding Shimrati Pandita Lejjawati who at Jullundur had come out on a public platform to urge that her country abolish purdah!
But the great drive for Democracy that now thrills around the world at the International Suffrage Alliance headquarters, began unmistakably in Britain. Mrs. Pankhurst in the old days never staged a raid on the houses of Parliament more spectacularly. Just see the gentleman bowing at the open door! It is Mr. Asquith, the former leader who for years held the Parliamentary line against all woman’s progress. And smiling right over his shoulder stands Mr. Lloyd George, the present premier. Oh, well! The girl in the green sweater who horsewhipped one member of Parliament, at the Brighton races, is driving a Red Cross ambulance in Flanders. The quiet little woman in a grey coat, who fired the country house of another in 1912, is rolling lint bandages. Sergeant Jones’s wife has become a bread winner. Soldiers are not afraid for women to vote. And cabinet ministers take courage!
There is a town in the north of England with a monument erected to a shipwrecked crew: “In memory of 17 souls and 3 women,” says the marble testimonial. That categorical classification to which the English ivy clings is about to be changed. Six million English women are about to be made people![3]
[3] Bill passed by House of Lords and received King’s sanction, Feb. 6, 1918.
At the outbreak of hostilities, politicians the world over hastened to declare woman’s suffrage a “controversial” question that must be put aside during the war. And every government engaged said to its suffragists: “We’re in so much trouble, for heaven’s sake don’t you make us any more.”
“Well, we won’t,” the women agreed, as the organisations in land after land called off their political campaigns. It was for his sake—the man in khaki. And in every land, the trained women of the suffrage societies assembled their countrywomen to stand ready with first aid for him. Day by day, week after week, now year after year, they have been feeding the nation’s defenders, clothing them, nursing them, passing up ammunition to them. To-day there isn’t an army that could hold the field but for the women behind the men behind the guns.
In England Mrs. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, had been a member of the committee that in 1866 sent up to Parliament the first petition for the enfranchisement of women. She had been a girl of twenty then. It was a cause, you see, to which she had given a lifetime, that she now laid aside. With the summons, “Let us show ourselves worthy of citizenship,” she turned 500 women’s societies from suffrage propaganda and Parliamentary petitioning to hospital and relief work.
But it was when Mrs. Pankhurst, the dramatic leader of the Woman’s Social and Political Union who had first smashed suffrage into the front page of the newspapers of all nations, lay down her arms to give her country’s claims precedence above her own, that the world realised that there was a new formation in the lines of the woman movement.
Emmeline Pankhurst was on parole from Holloway jail recuperating from a hunger strike, when there came to her from her government the overtures for a peace parley. When the authorities offered her release for all of the suffragettes in prison and amnesty for those under sentence, she ran up the Union Jack where her suffrage flag had been. In no uncertain terms she announced in Kingsway, “I who have been against the government, am now for it. Our country’s war shall be our war.”
For a minute after that proclamation, you could have heard a pin drop in the great assembly hall of the smashing suffragettes. Then in a burst of applause she had them with her: they would follow their leader. Some few at first drew back in consternation. Had their late leader lost her mind? The girl in the green sweater looked dazed: “I was in the front ranks of her body guard when we stormed Buckingham Palace,” she murmured. A very few were angry: “She’s selling out the cause,” they exclaimed bitterly.