The Suffragette: The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905-1910Pankhurst, E. Sylvia (Estelle Sylvia)
History
The Suffragette: The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905-1910
Pankhurst, E. Sylvia (Estelle Sylvia)
Women -- Suffrage -- Great Britain
Meanwhile Caxton Hall was kept open all the afternoon and on into the
evening, and the disabled women were constantly returning thither. They
brought with them the news that numbers of women had been arrested, and
that though Lady Harberton had at last got into the House of Commons,
her petition had been ignored. Christabel Pankhurst then advised any
who might succeed in entering Parliament to take sterner measures,--to
rush, if they could, into the sacred Chamber of debate itself, to
seat themselves upon the Government bench and demand a hearing. "If
possible," she cried, "seize the mace, and you will be the Cromwells of
the twentieth century!" The women rushed back with renewed zeal.
It was now dark, and, as the crowds grew denser and denser and the
police turned on them more angrily, many Members of Parliament,
including Mr. Herbert Gladstone and Mr. Lloyd George, came out to watch
the scene. Some showed distress at the way in which the women were
being treated, but others regarded it as a joke. Many of the women were
roughly handled and some were seriously hurt, but, speaking generally,
the violence used against them was not so great as on the previous
February 13th. It was said that no fewer than a thousand extra police
were especially drafted into Parliament Square to guard the House of
Commons.
Amongst those who had been arrested were Dr. Mabel Hardy, Miss Naici
Peters, a Norwegian painter and a friend of Ibsen, Miss Cemino
Folliero, a portrait painter from Rome and Miss Constance Clyde, a well
known Australian journalist and novelist.
Next day when the women were brought up before Mr. Horace Smith
at the Westminster Police Court, Mr. Muskett, who appeared to
prosecute on behalf of the police, protested that the Suffragettes
had hitherto been treated with "the utmost indulgence," and begged
that they should in future be dealt with "as ordinary law-breakers."
Therefore the magistrate gave to most of the women exactly the same
sentences--varying from twenty shillings or fourteen days to forty
shillings or one month's imprisonment--that had been meted out to
their comrades on the last occasion. Miss Patricia Woodlock and Mrs.
Ada Chatterton, the former having only left Holloway on the expiration
of her previous month's imprisonment one week before, were, as "old
offenders," sentenced to one month's imprisonment without the option of
a fine. Mrs. Mary Leigh though this was her first arrest, also received
a month's imprisonment because, by hanging a Votes for Women banner
over the edge of the dock, she annoyed the magistrate, who said that he
did not think it "a decent thing to wave a flag in a court of justice."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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