The Women's Victory—and After: Personal Reminiscences, 1911-1918
John Stuart Mill · en
About this time the editor of the _Daily Telegraph_ allotted space in
his paper once a week, under the heading of "Women in Public Life,"
for the discussion of all kinds of women's activities, including
suffrage. It also gave good telegraphic summaries of events bearing on
the women's cause in foreign countries, and sometimes even printed the
speeches of suffrage leaders verbatim. As our struggle for suffrage
became more and more a struggle with Mr. Asquith it not unnaturally
followed that those papers were naturally estranged from us which
lived, and moved, and had their being in believing that he was the
first of men, and that everything he said and did was perfect. They
did not go back definitely, and in so many words, upon their former
record in support of free representative institutions, but they gave
us many a back-hander, published everything conspicuously which they
thought likely to be damaging to us, and suppressed such events as
told in our favour. I give an instance. In a copy of an evening
paper in 1913 I saw in one column, apropos of some House of Commons
incident, that "Mrs. Fawcett was in despair"; in another that "Mr.
Birrell had finished with women's suffrage for ever"; and that "Mr.
Wilfred Ashley had felt compelled to vote against it." As I knew I
was not in despair, and had never given any justification for the
assertion that I was, I contemplated with some calm the assertions
about Mr. Birrell and Mr. Ashley. We did not complain of this sort
of treatment. The tactics it revealed were too transparent to do our
movement any real harm. The papers which we familiarly referred to as
"the three _Posts_"—the _Morning Post_, the _Birmingham Post_, and the
_Yorkshire Post_—remained out-and-out antisuffrage all through down to
the very end of our struggle. But the _Standard_, which at one time
had refused even to insert colourless paragraphs of suffrage news,
passed to new editorship, and became much more favourable. It referred
sympathetically to our by-election campaigns in 1912 and 1913, saying
that suffragists "were displaying energy of the first order"; and
after the procession in the Coronation year, which had attracted much
favourable notice, it arranged for the daily appearance of a special
page, entitled "Woman's Platform," in which facts and arguments for
and against suffrage were inserted. This was of great use to us, and
we welcomed the publication of the antisuffrage copy, because this
gave the paper an entry into the strongholds of our opponents, and
also enabled us to judge of their policy and tactics. For instance,
it was in the "Woman's Platform" of the _Standard_, in 1913, that Mr.
MacCallum Scott called upon his Liberal friends in the House of Commons
to break their suffrage pledges in order to save Mr. Asquith from the
humiliation of keeping the promises he had made to us.