Women's Suffrage: A Short History of a Great MovementFawcett, Millicent Garrett, Dame
Philosophy
Women's Suffrage: A Short History of a Great Movement
Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, Dame
Women -- Suffrage -- Great Britain
that to take part in the strife and turmoil of practical politics
is in its essence degrading to women, and calculated to sully their
refinement and purity. If this, indeed, is so, why invite women into
the turmoil? Why advertise, as the anti-suffragists do, the holding of
classes to train young women to become anti-suffrage speakers, and thus
be able to proclaim on public platforms that "woman's place is home?"
This second absurdity appears to have occurred to the late editor of
_The Nineteenth Century_, Sir James Knowles, for a note is added to
the 1889 protest apologising, as it were, for the inconsistency of
asking women to degrade themselves by taking part in a public political
controversy:--
"It is submitted," says this note, "that for once and in order to
save the quiet of Home Life from total disappearance they should
do violence to their natural reticence and signify publicly and
unmistakably their condemnation of the scheme now threatened."
If this note was, as it appears, by the editor, how much he, too,
needed the lesson which Canute gave to his courtiers. The waves were
not to be turned back by a hundred and odd great ladies doing violence
to their natural reticence and signifying publicly that they were very
well satisfied with things as they were. "Just for once, in order to
save the quiet of home life from total disappearance," these milk white
lambs, bleating for man's protection, were to cast aside their timidity
and come before the public with a protest against a further extension
of human liberty. The anti-suffrage protest of 1889 had the effect
which similar protests have ever since had of adding to the numbers and
the activity of the suffragists.
Women anti-suffragists formed themselves into a society in July 1908
under the leadership of Mrs. Humphry Ward, and a men's society was
shortly afterwards formed under the chairmanship of the Earl of Cromer.
These two societies were amalgamated in December 1910. Lord Cromer is
the President, and exerts himself actively in opposition to women's
suffrage, and in obtaining funds for the League of which he is the
leader. In the previous spring of 1910 the Anti-Suffrage League had
adopted as part of its programme, besides the negative object of
opposing women's suffrage, the positive object of encouraging "the
principle of the representation of women on municipal and other bodies
concerned with the domestic and social affairs of the community." But
male anti-suffragists dwell chiefly on the negative part of their
programme. As a fairly regular reader of the _Anti-Suffrage Review_ I
may say that the advocacy of municipal suffrage and eligibility for
women bears about the same proportion to the anti-suffrage part of it
as Falstaff's bread did to his sack; it is always one halfpennyworth
of bread, and even that is sometimes absent, to an intolerable deal of
sack.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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