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
"It is a calumny on men to say that they are roused to heroic action
by ease, hope of pleasure--sugar plums of any kind. In the meanest
mortal there lies something nobler. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom,
death, are the allurements which act upon the heart of man."--Thomas
Carlyle.
In Chapters II. and III. an outline was given of the Parliamentary
history of women's suffrage between 1867 and 1897. In those thirty
years the movement had progressed until it had reached a point when
it could count upon a majority of suffragists being returned in
each successively elected House of Commons. In 1899 came the South
African War, and the main interest of the nation was concentrated on
that struggle till it was over. A war almost invariably suspends all
progress in domestic and social legislation. Two fires cannot burn
together, and the most ardent of the suffragists felt that, while the
war lasted, it was not a fitting time to press their own claims and
objects. The war temporarily suspended the progress of the suffrage
movement, but it is probable that it ultimately strengthened the demand
of women for citizenship, for it has been observed again and again
that a war, or any other event which stimulates national vitality,
and the consciousness of the value of citizenship is almost certain
to be followed by increased vigour in the suffrage movement, and not
infrequently by its success. For instance, suffrage in Finland in 1907
followed immediately upon the great struggle with Russia to regain
constitutional liberty; women as well as men had thrown themselves into
that struggle and borne the great sacrifices it entailed, and when
Finland wrung from the Czar the granting of the Constitution, women's
suffrage formed an essential part of it, and was demanded by the almost
unanimous voice of the Finnish people. Again, when suffrage was
granted to women in Norway in 1907, it was immediately after the great
outburst of national feeling which led to the separation from Sweden,
and established Norway as an independent kingdom. Upon the rights and
wrongs of the controversy between the two countries it is not for us
to enter, but the intensity of the feeling in Norway in favour of
separation is undoubted. The women had shared in the national fervour
and in all the work and sacrifices it entailed. The Parliamentary
Suffrage was granted to women as one of the first Acts of the Norwegian
Parliament.
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