But she wasn’t. The greatest little field marshal the woman movement has ever known, was leading it to final victory.
When Kitchener announced, “We shall not be able to win this war until women are doing nearly everything that men have done,” it was the woman who had organised raids on Parliament who now organised the woman labour of a nation. On the day that she led 40,000 women down the Strand to man the factories of England and turned Lincoln’s Inn House, her headquarters in Kingsway, into a munitions employment bureau, opponents of the woman’s cause the world over began an orderly retirement from their front line trenches. The next morning the London Post announced: “We stand on the threshold of a new age.”
We do. You see, you could not have practically the men of all nations in arms for Democracy without their finding it. And some of them who buckled on their armour to go far crusading for it, are coming to the conviction that there is also Democracy to be done at home. When the history of these days at length is written, it will come to be recorded that the right of women to have a voice in the government to whose authority they submit, was practically assured by the events of 1917.
In that year, the women who came to petition the English Parliament for citizenship, got what they had for fifty years been asking in vain. For the women who with Mrs. Pankhurst and Mrs. Fawcett and Mrs. Despard of the Women’s Freedom League now stood at the gates of government were: women shell makers and howitzer makers, pit brow lassies, chain makers, textile workers, railway engine cleaners, women motor lorry drivers in khaki, women letter carriers, women window cleaners, women bus conductors, women engineers, women clerks, women in the civil service, women tailors, women bakers, women bookbinders, women teachers, women army nurses, women army doctors, women dentists, women chemists, and women farm labourers. Among them was the wife of the man with the twisted face and the wife of the man with the blinded eyes and the wife of Sergeant Jones.
The capitulation of the English Government was assured in the recantations of its greatest men. Ex-premier Herbert H. Asquith spoke first: “I myself,” he declared, “as I believe many others, no longer regard the woman suffrage question from the standpoint we occupied before the war.... I have said that women should work out their own salvation. They have done it. The woman’s cause in England now presents an unanswerable case.”
Mr. Lloyd George agreed: “The place of woman,” he said, “is altered for good and all. It would be an outrage not to give her the vote. The further parliamentary action now involved may be regarded as a formality.”
General French, former commander of the British armies, the brother of Mrs. Despard and of Mrs. Harley who died at the front, crossed the Channel to announce his conversion to the woman’s cause through “the heroism, the endurance and the organising ability of the women on the battlefields of France and Belgium.”
The press of the country burst into print with a new confession of faith. The Observer declared: “In the past we have opposed the claim on one ground and one ground alone—namely, that woman by the fact of her sex was debarred from bearing a share in national defence. We were wrong.” The Daily Mail: “The old argument against giving women the franchise was that they were useless in war. But we have found out that we could not carry on the war without them.” The Evening News: “In the home woman has long been a partner—not always in name, perhaps, but generally in practice. Now she is a partner in our national effort. And if she demands a partner’s voice in the concerns of the firm, who shall say her Nay?” The Northern Daily Telegraph: “The duties of citizenship are fulfilled by women to the uttermost. The continuance of the sex disqualification would be a cruel crime and a blind folly as well.” The Referee: “Women have earned a right to be heard in the nation’s councils. The part they have played in winning the war is their victory.”
Like this, the cause that yesterday was rejected and most bitterly assailed of men was now championed by the nation. This was a kingdom saying Votes for Women. Field Marshal Pankhurst would never again have to. Her war-time strategy had won. When Mr. Asquith rose in the House of Commons himself to move the woman’s suffrage resolution, it had ceased to be a “controversial” question. The measure was passed by an overwhelming majority.
RECORD YEAR FOR SUFFRAGE CAUSE