Emmeline Pankhurst, the English militant suffrage leader, known to thousands in this country, went to Russia in late June of this year to organize the women of the country and help them to support the provisional government and to oppose the Bolsheviki or extremists. She succeeded in organizing a group of strong and influential women leaders, and she might have accomplished great good had not Kerensky frowned on the movement. Mrs. Pankhurst’s project, in my opinion, was one of Kerensky’s many lost opportunities.
This will answer a natural curiosity on the part of the reader as to why Mrs. Pankhurst came to be in revolutionary Russia. She went of her own initiative and under the auspices of her suffrage organization, the Women’s Social and Political Union, but her plan had the warm approval of the English premier, Mr. Lloyd George, who personally issued her passport and that of her secretary, Jessie Kenney. Mr. Lloyd George also gave directions that Mrs. Pankhurst and Miss Kenney should be allowed to travel on the only passenger boat that plies regularly between Great Britain and Norway. This boat is strongly convoyed and it is used by very few people not in the service of the English government. No one in England has a higher esteem for Mrs. Pankhurst than Lloyd George, and since the beginning of the war the two erstwhile enemies have become friends and allies. Mrs. Pankhurst’s suffragettes fired a house that Mr. Lloyd George was building in the country, and Mrs. Pankhurst was sentenced to three years’ penal servitude for the deed. She had served several weeks of the sentence, in hunger strike intervals which extended over a year or more, when the war broke out and all internal feuds were declared off in England. The Pankhursts at once called a truce of militancy and ever since have done yeoman service in recruiting for the army, collecting money for war sufferers, especially in Serbia, and in many other lines of patriotic work.
The whole world admired the statesmanship of this policy, but only a few people know how really statesmanlike it was. Among those who do know is the English premier, for without it he might not have become premier. In abandoning militancy Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel were actuated by two motives: they wanted England and the allies to win the war, and they saw in the war an opportunity to further the cause of woman suffrage. They were under no delusion that a grateful country would bestow the vote on its women as a reward for their unselfish war services. Women have rendered the noblest kind of service in all the wars that have ever been fought, but no country ever showed its gratitude by making them citizens for it. Witness our civil war. Mrs. Pankhurst and Christabel knew that suffrage would come in England when the political situation suffered certain changes, and it would come in no other way.
They were in France in July, 1914, Mrs. Pankhurst out of prison under the famous “Cat and Mouse” act, and resting up for another bout with the Holloway jailers. Christabel lived in Paris and edited there the British suffragette weekly newspaper. They watched with deep emotion the mobilization of the French army and saw the French women drop all their other activities and mobilize for hospital and relief work. They agreed that they must go back to England and organize their women for the same work, and they said: “At last! A chance to get rid of Asquith and Sir Edward Grey!”
These two men, especially Mr. Asquith, were the arch enemies of the women’s cause. Mr. Asquith had consistently blocked the woman suffrage bills in Parliament, even when a large majority of the House of Commons wanted to vote favorably on them. Mr. Lloyd George, on the other hand, was, theoretically at least, a suffragist. He wanted the women to have votes, but he wanted something else a great deal more. He wanted, with an earnestness amounting to a cosmic urge, to be prime minister of England. His whole soul being set on that ambition, he was not going to take people’s minds off of his candidacy by getting into the woman suffrage controversy. So he put the whole subject one side for future reference.
Mrs. Pankhurst, great and wise stateswoman that she is, perfectly understood this. She knew that, if Mr. Lloyd George became premier, he would probably put a suffrage bill through Parliament, and she and Christabel knew that the new war cabinet, which they trusted would come, would probably have Lloyd George at its head. So they bent all their energies to ousting Mr. Asquith and boosting Mr. Lloyd George. They criticized caustically, with pen and voice, the cabinet’s war policies, they turned a whole volume of scorn on England’s Serbian blunders and the Dardanelles failure. They went all over England talking about Mr. Asquith and his ministers, and their work told. So when Mrs. Pankhurst decided to go to Russia and do what she could to rally the women of that distracted country, Mr. Lloyd George knew that she would do it if any one could. He gave her a passport and a safe conduct, and she went. A little later Ramsay Macdonald, leader of England’s “little group of wilful men” opposing the war, thought he would go to Russia and undo any good Mrs. Pankhurst might do.
Mr. Lloyd George at first refused to give Mr. Macdonald a passport, but his refusal so angered the Bolshevik element in the Petrograd Council of Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Delegates that Kerensky was actually forced to ask the English premier to allow Mr. Macdonald to visit Russia. The English premier therefore consented to issue the passport, but the Seamen’s Union, which was not in the least afraid of the Petrograd soldiers and workmen, or of any international misunderstandings, refused point blank to allow Mr. Ramsay Macdonald to travel on any boat crossing to Norway. The union served notice that the moment Mr. Macdonald stepped foot on any boat leaving England the sailors on that boat would step off. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald accordingly never stepped on a boat.
Mrs. Pankhurst was very well received in Russia. The newspapers published columns about her, statesmen and ambassadors called on her, almost as on a visiting royalty, and the finest women in Petrograd came to her and welcomed her proffered aid. Which is certainly discouraging to those suffragists who always try to be good and well mannered and never picket the White House or disturb a congressman’s afternoon nap. A series of meetings were arranged for Mrs. Pankhurst, but they were neither well arranged nor well managed. Some of them got into the hands of women who had movements of their own to push, and who were willing to use Mrs. Pankhurst’s drawing capacity to fill a room, but were not willing to turn the meeting over to her when she got there.
I was present at such a meeting, which had for chairman a lady of title who had a scheme of some kind, and the speakers were mostly women who had other schemes, and they all talked and talked about their schemes, until I feared that Mrs. Pankhurst would never be given a chance to talk at all. One woman spoke for over an hour about the food situation. Her remedy was to send a commission to America and beg that a shipload of food be sent via Archangel to Petrograd. It was pointed out to her at some length by Mr. MacAllister Smith, an American business man living in Petrograd, that there was plenty of food nearer home than America, and that it didn’t need to be begged for.
Through it all Mrs. Pankhurst sat quietly, but I who knew her well saw a suspicious little color creep into her cheeks and a light of battle flash into her gray eyes. I don’t know what might have happened, but what did happen was dramatic. A tall, fine-looking woman in the back of the room sprang to her feet and burst into a passionate speech of protest. While the women in that room were wasting time in inconsequential talk the Germans were steadily advancing, the Russian troops were retreating and ruin and desolation were at their very doors. She begged them for the sake of bleeding Russia to drop all controversy and let Mrs. Pankhurst, if she could, tell them what to do.