Our plans included the introduction of a Government suffrage bill at the earliest possible moment, and in the spring of 1906 we sent a deputation of about thirty of our members to interview the Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. The Prime Minister, it was stated, was not at home; so in a few days we sent another deputation. This time the servant agreed to carry our request to the Prime Minister. The women waited patiently on the doorstep of the official residence, No. 10 Downing Street, for nearly an hour. Then the door opened and two men appeared. One of the men addressed the leader of the deputation, roughly ordering her and the others to leave. ‘We have sent a message to the Prime Minister,’ she replied, ‘and we are waiting for the answer.’
‘There will be no answer,’ was the stern rejoinder, and the door closed.
‘Yes, there will be an answer,’ exclaimed the leader, and she seized the door-knocker and banged it sharply. Instantly the men reappeared, and one of them called to a policeman standing near, ‘Take this woman in charge.’ The order was obeyed, and the peaceful deputation saw its leader taken off to Canon Row Station.
Instantly the women protested vigorously. Annie Kenney began to address the crowd that had gathered, and Mrs Drummond actually forced her way past the doorkeeper into the sacred residence of the Prime Minister of the British Empire! Her arrest and Annie’s followed. The three women were detained at the police station for about an hour, long enough, the Prime Minister probably thought, to frighten them thoroughly and teach them not to do such dreadful things again. Then he sent them word that he had decided not to prosecute them, but would, on the contrary, receive a deputation from the W.S.P.U., and, if they cared to attend, from other suffrage societies as well.
All the suffrage organisations at once began making preparations for the great event. At the same time 200 members of Parliament sent a petition to the Prime Minister, asking him to receive their committee that they might urge upon him the necessity of a Government measure for woman suffrage. Sir Henry fixed 19th May as the day on which he would receive a joint deputation from Parliament and from the women’s suffrage organisations.
The W.S.P.U. determined to make the occasion as public as possible, and began preparations for a procession and a demonstration. When the day came we assembled at the foot of the beautiful monument to the warrior queen, Boadicea, that guards the entrance to Westminster Bridge, and from there we marched to the Foreign Office. At the meeting eight women spoke in behalf of an immediate suffrage measure, and Mr Keir Hardie presented the argument for the suffrage members of Parliament. I spoke for the W.S.P.U., and I tried to make the Prime Minister see that no business could be more pressing than ours. I told him that the group of women organised in our Union felt so strongly the necessity for women enfranchisement that they were prepared to sacrifice for it everything they possessed, their means of livelihood, their very lives, if necessary. I begged him to make such a sacrifice needless by doing us justice now.
What answer do you think Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman made us? He assured us of his sympathy with our cause, his belief in its justice, and his confidence in our fitness to vote. And then he told us to have patience and wait; he could do nothing for us because some of his Cabinet were opposed to us. After a few more words the usual vote of thanks was moved, and the deputation was dismissed. I had not expected anything better, but it wrung my heart to see the bitter disappointment of the W.S.P.U. women who had waited in the street to hear from the leaders the result of the deputation. We held a great meeting of protest that afternoon, and determined to carry on our agitation with increased vigour.
Now that it had been made plain that the Government were resolved not to bring in a suffrage bill, there was nothing to do but to continue our policy of waking up the country, not only by public speeches and demonstrations, but by a constant heckling of Cabinet Ministers. Since the memorable occasion when Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney were thrown out of Sir Edward Grey’s meeting in Manchester, and afterwards imprisoned for the crime of asking a courteous question, we had not lost an opportunity of addressing the same question to every Cabinet Minister we could manage to encounter. For this we have been unmercifully criticised, and in a large number of cases most brutally handled.
In almost every one of my American meetings I was asked the question, ‘What good do you expect to accomplish by interrupting meetings?’ Is it possible that the time-honoured, almost sacred English privilege of interrupting is unknown in America? I cannot imagine a political meeting from which ‘the Voice’ was entirely absent. In England it is invariably present. It is considered the inalienable right of the opposition to heckle the speaker and to hurl questions at him which are calculated to spoil his arguments. For instance, when Liberals attend a Conservative gathering they go prepared to shatter by witticisms and pointed questions all the best effects of the Conservative orators. The next day you will read in Liberal newspapers headlines like these: ‘The Voice in Fine Form’, ‘Short Shrift for Tory Twaddle’, ‘Awkward Answers from the Enemy’s Platform’. In the body of the article you will learn that ‘Lord X found that the Liberals at his meeting were more than a match for him,’ that ‘there was continued interruption during Sir So-and-so’s speech’, that ‘Lord M fared badly last night in his encounter with the Voice,’ or that ‘Captain Z had the greatest difficulty in making himself heard.’
In accordance with this custom we heckle Cabinet Ministers. Mr Winston Churchill, for example, is speaking. ‘One great question,’ he exclaims, ‘remains to be settled.’
‘And that is woman suffrage,’ shouts a voice from the gallery.
Mr Churchill struggles on with his speech: ‘The men have been complaining of me –’
‘The women have been complaining of you, too, Mr Churchill,’ comes back promptly from the back of the hall.
‘In the circumstances what can we do but –’
‘Give votes to women.’
Our object, of course, is to keep woman suffrage in the foreground of interest and to insist on every possible occasion that no other reform advocated is of such immediate importance.
From the first the women’s interruptions have been resented with unreasoning anger. I remember hearing Mr Lloyd-George saying once of a man who interrupted him:
‘Let him remain. I like interruptions. They show that people holding different opinions to mine are present, giving me a chance to convert them.’ But when suffragists interrupt Mr Lloyd-George he says something polite like this: ‘Pay no attention to those cats mewing.’
Some of the ministers are more well bred in their expressions, but all are disdainful and resentful. All see with approval the brutal ejection of the women by the Liberal stewards.
At one meeting where Mr Lloyd-George was speaking, we interrupted with a question, and he claimed the sympathy of the audience on the score that he was a friend to woman suffrage. ‘Then why don’t you do something to give votes to women?’ was the obvious retort. But Mr Lloyd-George evaded this by the counter query: ‘Why don’t they go for their enemies? Why don’t they go for their greatest enemy?’ Instantly, all over the hall, voices shouted, ‘Asquith! Asquith!’ For even at that early day it was known that the then Chancellor of the Exchequer was a stern foe of women’s independence.
In the summer of 1906, together with other members of the W.S.P.U., I went to Northampton, where Mr Asquith was holding a large meeting in behalf of the Government’s education bills. We organised a number of outdoor meetings, and of course prepared to attend Mr Asquith’s meeting. In conversation with the president of the local Women’s Liberal Association, I mentioned the fact that we expected to be put out, and she indignantly declared that such a thing could not happen in Northampton, where the women had done so much for the Liberal party. I told her that I hoped she would be at the meeting.
I had not intended to go myself, my plans being to hold a meeting of my own outside the door. But our members, before Mr Asquith began to speak, attempted to question him, and we
re thrown out with violence. So then, turning my meeting over to them, I slipped quietly into the hall and sat down in the front row of a division set apart for wives and women friends of the Liberal leaders. I sat there in silence, hearing men interrupt the speaker and get answers to their questions. At the close of the speech I stood up and, addressing the chairman, said: ‘I should like to ask Mr Asquith a question about education.’ The chairman turned enquiringly to Mr Asquith, who frowningly shook his head. But without waiting for the chairman to say a word, I continued: ‘Mr Asquith has said that the parents of children have a right to be consulted in the matter of their children’s education, especially upon such questions as the kind of religious instruction they should receive. Women are parents. Does not Mr Asquith think that women should have the right to control their children’s education, as men do, through the vote?’ At this point the stewards seized me by the arms and shoulders and rushed me, or rather dragged me, for I soon lost my footing, to the door and threw me out of the building.
The effect on the president of the Northampton Women’s Liberal Association was most salutary. She resigned her office and became a member of the W.S.P.U. Perhaps her action was influenced further by the press reports of the incident. Mr Asquith was reported as saying, after my ejection, that it was difficult to enter into the minds of people who thought they could serve a cause which professed to appeal to the reason of the electors of the country by disturbing public meetings. Apparently he could enter into the minds of the men who disturbed public meetings.
To our custom of public heckling of the responsible members of the hostile Government we added the practice of sending deputations to them for the purpose of presenting orderly arguments in favour of our cause. After Mr Asquith had shown himself so uninformed as to the objects of the suffragists, we decided to ask him to receive a deputation from the W.S.P.U. To our polite letter Mr Asquith returned a cold refusal to be interviewed on any subject not connected with his particular office. Whereupon we wrote again, reminding Mr Asquith that as a member of the Government he was concerned with all questions likely to be dealt with by Parliament. We said that we urgently desired to put our question before him, and that we would send a deputation to his house hoping that he would feel it his duty to receive us.
Our first deputation was told that Mr Asquith was not at home. He had, in fact, escaped from the house through the back door, and had sped away in a fast motor car. Two days later we sent a larger deputation, of about thirty women, to his house in Cavendish Square. To be accurate, the deputation got as near the house as the entrance to Cavendish Square; there the women met a strong force of police, who told them that they would not be permitted to go farther.
Many of the women were carrying little ‘Votes for Women’ banners, and these the police tore from them, in some cases with blows and insults. Seeing this, the leader of the deputation cried out: ‘We will go forward. You have no right to strike women like that.’ The reply, from a policeman near her, was a blow in the face. She screamed with pain and indignation, whereupon the man grasped her by the throat and choked her against the park railings until she was blue in the face. The young woman struggled and fought back, and for this she was arrested on a charge of assaulting the police. Three other women were arrested, one because, in spite of the police, she succeeded in ringing Mr Asquith’s doorbell and another because she protested against the laughter of some ladies who watched the affair from a drawing-room window. She was a poor working-woman, and it seemed to her a terrible thing that rich and protected women should ridicule a cause that to her was so profoundly serious. The fourth woman was taken in charge, because after she had been pushed off the pavement, she dared to step back. Charged with disorderly conduct, these women were sentenced to six weeks in the second division. They were given the option of a fine, it is true, but the payment of a fine would have been an acknowledgement of guilt, which made such a course impossible. The leader of the deputation was given a two months’ sentence, with the option of a fine of ten pounds. She, too, refused to pay, and was sent to prison; but some unknown friend paid the fine secretly, and she was released before the expiration of her sentence.
About the time these things were happening in London, similar violence was offered our women in Manchester, where John Burns, Lloyd-George and Winston Churchill, all three Cabinet Ministers, were addressing a great Liberal demonstration. The women were there, as usual, to ask government support for our measure. There, too, they were thrown out of the meeting, and three of them were sent to prison.
There are people in England, plenty of them, who will tell you that the Suffragettes were sent to prison for destroying property. The fact is that hundreds of women were arrested for exactly such offences as I have described before it ever occurred to any of us to destroy property. We were determined, at the beginning of our movement, that we would make ourselves heard, that we would force the Government to take up our question and answer it by action in Parliament. Perhaps you will see some parallel to our case in the stand taken in Massachusetts by the early Abolitionists, Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. They, too, had to fight bitterly, to face insult and arrest, because they insisted on being heard. And they were heard; and so, in time, were we.
I think we began to be noticed in earnest after our first success in opposing a Liberal candidate. This was in a by-election held at Cockermouth in August 1906. I shall have to explain that a by-election is a local election to fill a vacancy in Parliament caused by a death or a resignation. The verdict of a by-election is considered as either an endorsement or a censure of the manner in which the Government have fulfilled their pre-election pledges. So we went to Cockermouth and told the voters how the Liberal party had fulfilled its pledges of democracy and lived up to its avowed belief in the rights of all the people. We told them of the arrests in London and Manchester, of the shameful treatment of women in Liberal meetings, and we asked them to censure the Government who had answered so brutally our demand for a vote. We told them that the only rebuke that the politicians would notice was a lost seat in Parliament, and that on that ground we asked them to defeat the Liberal candidate.
How we were ridiculed! With what scorn the newspapers declared that ‘those wild women’ could never turn a single vote. Yet when the election was over it was found that the Liberal candidate had lost the seat, which, at the general election a little more than a year before, had been won by a majority of 655. This time the Unionist candidate was returned by a majority of 609. Tremendously elated, we hurried our forces off to another by-election.
Now the ridicule was turned to stormy abuse. Mind you, the Liberal Government still refused to notice the women’s question; they declared through the Liberal press that the defeat at Cockermouth was insignificant, and that anyhow it wasn’t caused by the Suffragettes; yet the Liberal leaders were furiously angry with the W.S.P.U. Many of our members had been Liberals, and it was considered by the men that these women were little better than traitors. They were very foolish and ill-advised, into the bargain, the Liberals said, because the vote, if won at all, must be gained from the Liberal party; and how did the women suppose the Liberal party would ever give the vote to open and avowed enemies? This sage argument was used also by the women Liberals and the constitutional suffragists. They advised us that the proper way was to work for the party. We retorted that we had done that unsuccessfully for too many years already, and persisted with the opposite method of persuasion.
Throughout the summer and autumn we devoted ourselves to the by-election work, sometimes actually defeating the Liberal candidate, sometimes reducing the Liberal majority, and always raising a tremendous sensation and gaining hundreds of new members to the Union. In almost every neighbourhood we visited we left the nucleus of a local union, so that before the year was out we had branches all over England and many in Scotland and Wales. I especially remember a by-election in Wales at which Mr Samuel Evans, who had accepted an officership under the Crown, had to stand for
re-election. Unfortunately no candidate had been brought out against him. So there was nothing for my companions and me to do but make his campaign as lively as possible. Mr – now Sir Samuel – Evans was the man who had incensed women by talking out a suffrage resolution introduced into the House by Keir Hardie. So we went to two of his meetings and literally talked him out, breaking up the gatherings amid the laughter and cheers of delighted crowds.
On 23rd October Parliament met for its autumn session, and we led a deputation to the House of Commons in another effort to induce the Government to take action on woman suffrage. In accordance with orders given the police, only twenty of us were admitted to the Strangers’ Lobby. We sent in for the chief Liberal whip, and asked him to take a message to the Prime Minister, the message being the usual request to grant women the vote that session. We also asked the Prime Minister if he intended to include the registration of qualified women voters in the provisions of the plural voting bill, then under consideration. The Liberal whip came back with the reply that nothing could be done for women that session.
‘Does the Prime Minister,’ I asked, ‘hold out any hope for the women for any session during this Parliament, or at any future time?’ The Prime Minister, you will remember, called himself a suffragist.
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