Labrador (N.L.) -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Love stories, English
Miss Alimony, who was wearing an enormous hat with three nodding ostrich
feathers, a purple bow, a gold buckle and numerous minor ornaments of
various origin and substance, said they had all of them listened with
the greatest appreciation and sympathy to the speech of their hostess.
Their hostess was a newcomer to the movement, she knew she might say
this without offence, and was passing through a phase, an early phase,
through which many of them had passed. This was the phase of trying to
take a reasonable view of an unreasonable situation. (Applause.) Their
hostess had spoken of science, and no doubt science was a great thing;
but there was something greater than science, and that was the ideal. It
was woman's place to idealize. Sooner or later their hostess would
discover, as they had all discovered, that it was not to science but the
ideal that women must look for freedom. Consider, she said, the
scientific men of to-day. Consider, for example, Sir James
Crichton-Browne, the physiologist. Was he on their side? On the
contrary, he said the most unpleasant things about them on every
occasion. He went out of his way to say them. Or consider Sir Almroth
Wright, did he speak well of women? Or Sir Ray Lankester, the biologist,
who was the chief ornament of the Anti-Suffrage Society. Or Sir Roderick
Dover, the physicist, who--forgetting Madame Curie, a far more
celebrated physicist than himself, she ventured to say (Applause.) had
recently gone outside his province altogether to abuse feminine
research. There were your scientific men. Mrs. Trafford had said their
anti-census campaign would annoy scientific men; well, under the
circumstances, she wanted to annoy scientific men. (Applause.) She
wanted to annoy everybody. Until women got the vote (loud applause) the
more annoying they were the better. When the whole world was impressed
by the idea that voteless women were an intolerable nuisance, then there
would cease to be voteless women. (Enthusiasm.) Mr. Asquith had said--
And so on for quite a long time....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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