Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World WarDaggett, Mabel Potter
History
Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World War
Daggett, Mabel Potter
Women -- Employment; World War, 1914-1918 -- Women
There is a town in the north of England with a monument erected to a
shipwrecked crew: “In memory of 17 souls and 3 women,” says the marble
testimonial. That categorical classification to which the English ivy
clings is about to be changed. Six million English women are about to
be made people![3]
[3] Bill passed by House of Lords and received King’s sanction, Feb. 6,
1918.
At the outbreak of hostilities, politicians the world over hastened
to declare woman’s suffrage a “controversial” question that must be
put aside during the war. And every government engaged said to its
suffragists: “We’re in so much trouble, for heaven’s sake don’t you
make us any more.”
“Well, we won’t,” the women agreed, as the organisations in land after
land called off their political campaigns. It was for his sake—the
man in khaki. And in every land, the trained women of the suffrage
societies assembled their countrywomen to stand ready with first aid
for him. Day by day, week after week, now year after year, they have
been feeding the nation’s defenders, clothing them, nursing them,
passing up ammunition to them. To-day there isn’t an army that could
hold the field but for the women behind the men behind the guns.
In England Mrs. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, president of the National
Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, had been a member of the
committee that in 1866 sent up to Parliament the first petition for
the enfranchisement of women. She had been a girl of twenty then. It
was a cause, you see, to which she had given a lifetime, that she
now laid aside. With the summons, “Let us show ourselves worthy of
citizenship,” she turned 500 women’s societies from suffrage propaganda
and Parliamentary petitioning to hospital and relief work.
But it was when Mrs. Pankhurst, the dramatic leader of the Woman’s
Social and Political Union who had first smashed suffrage into the
front page of the newspapers of all nations, lay down her arms to give
her country’s claims precedence above her own, that the world realised
that there was a new formation in the lines of the woman movement.
Emmeline Pankhurst was on parole from Holloway jail recuperating from a
hunger strike, when there came to her from her government the overtures
for a peace parley. When the authorities offered her release for all
of the suffragettes in prison and amnesty for those under sentence,
she ran up the Union Jack where her suffrage flag had been. In no
uncertain terms she announced in Kingsway, “I who have been against the
government, am now for it. Our country’s war shall be our war.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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