My first parliament was the parliament of the Suffragettes.I don't propose to tell here of that amazing campaign, with its absurdities and follies, its courage and devotion.There were aspects of that unquenchable agitation that were absolutely heroic and aspects that were absolutely pitiful.It was unreasonable, unwise, and, except for its one central insistence, astonishingly incoherent.It was amazingly effective.The very incoherence of the demand witnessed, I think, to the forces that lay behind it.It wasn't a simple argument based on a simple assumption; it was the first crude expression of a great mass and mingling of convergent feelings, of a widespread, confused persuasion among modern educated women that the conditions of their relations with men were oppressive, ugly, dishonouring, and had to be altered.They had not merely adopted the Vote as a symbol of equality; it was fairly manifest to me that, given it, they meant to use it, and to use it perhaps even vindictively and blindly, as a weapon against many things they had every reason to hate....
I remember, with exceptional vividness, that great night early in the session of 1909, when--I think it was--fifty or sixty women went to prison.I had been dining at the Barham's, and Lord Barham and Icame down from the direction of St.James's Park into a crowd and a confusion outside the Caxton Hall.We found ourselves drifting with an immense multitude towards Parliament Square and parallel with a silent, close-packed column of girls and women, for the most part white-faced and intent.I still remember the effect of their faces upon me.It was quite different from the general effect of staring about and divided attention one gets in a political procession of men.There was an expression of heroic tension.
There had been a pretty deliberate appeal on the part of the women's organisers to the Unemployed, who had been demonstrating throughout that winter, to join forces with the movement, and the result was shown in the quality of the crowd upon the pavement.It was an ugly, dangerous-looking crowd, but as yet good-tempered and sympathetic.When at last we got within sight of the House the square was a seething seat of excited people, and the array of police on horse and on foot might have been assembled for a revolutionary outbreak.There were dense masses of people up Whitehall, and right on to Westminster Bridge.The scuffle that ended in the arrests was the poorest explosion to follow such stupendous preparations....
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Later on in that year the women began a new attack.Day and night, and all through the long nights of the Budget sittings, at all the piers of the gates of New Palace Yard and at St.Stephen's Porch, stood women pickets, and watched us silently and reproachfully as we went to and fro.They were women of all sorts, though, of course, the independent worker-class predominated.There were grey-headed old ladies standing there, sturdily charming in the rain; battered-looking, ambiguous women, with something of the desperate bitterness of battered women showing in their eyes; north-country factory girls; cheaply-dressed suburban women; trim, comfortable mothers of families; valiant-eyed girl graduates and undergraduates; lank, hungry-looking creatures, who stirred one's imagination; one very dainty little woman in deep mourning, I recall, grave and steadfast, with eyes fixed on distant things.Some of those women looked defiant, some timidly aggressive, some full of the stir of adventure, some drooping with cold and fatigue.The supply never ceased.I had a mortal fear that somehow the supply might halt or cease.I found that continual siege of the legislature extraordinarily impressive--infinitely more impressive than the feeble-forcible "ragging" of the more militant section.I thought of the appeal that must be going through the country, summoning the women from countless scattered homes, rooms, colleges, to Westminster.
I remember too the petty little difficulty I felt whether I should ignore these pickets altogether, or lift a hat as I hurried past with averted eyes, or look them in the face as I did so.Towards the end the House evoked an etiquette of salutation.
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There was a tendency, even on the part of its sympathisers, to treat the whole suffrage agitation as if it were a disconnected issue, irrelevant to all other broad developments of social and political life.We struggled, all of us, to ignore the indicating finger it thrust out before us."Your schemes, for all their bigness," it insisted to our reluctant, averted minds, "still don't go down to the essential things...."We have to go deeper, or our inadequate children's insufficient children will starve amidst harvests of earless futility.That conservatism which works in every class to preserve in its essentials the habitual daily life is all against a profounder treatment of political issues.The politician, almost as absurdly as the philosopher, tends constantly, in spite of magnificent preludes, vast intimations, to specialise himself out of the reality he has so stupendously summoned--he bolts back to littleness.The world has to be moulded anew, he continues to admit, but without, he adds, any risk of upsetting his week-end visits, his morning cup of tea....
The discussion of the relations of men and women disturbs every one.
