THE SUFFRAGIST PROCESSION.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 226, 17 June 1908, Page 5

THE SUFFRAGIST PROCESSION.

The compliment paid by " The Times ." .to the beauty of the suffrage procession will give great gratification to those who took part. It is by no means easy to import beauty into any political demonstration—probably the attempt has not often been mado sinco medieval days—but the women had taken great pains'in preparing for this big day.• They seem to have .gone on. the principle that those, women who in earlier days had worked for the advancement of their coun-' try would havo been willing had they lived in these days to join 'tho women's great political movoment. It is not always easy to know on what;they base their claim to the moral support of famous names. Why, for instance, ao they believe that . Jane Austen, had she lived, would have, been a w'oiuan suffragist? They do make' that claim, and the Artists' Suffrage League made a beautiful banner to represent her in the procession of tho constitutional woman suffragists. When ono thinks of Elizabeth Bennet and the way she shocked the neighbourhood by' wearing thick boots and actually getting them, wet, it is impossible .-to deny • (says .a 'Scottish paper)' that the incomparable author of "Pride and ; Prejudice" ■ might easily have waved a flag of revolt in a suffrage .procession. But the Chelsea makers of _ banners have gone further back still into history in their search for early suffragists, and they have found, amongst others, tlireo saints— St Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa of Spain, and St. Hilda of : Whitby—as well as two Biblical women rebels in Deborah and Vashti. They uttered a counter gibe, too, to the one which denies ;Women the right to vote because they cannot fight, by representing among their flags Joan of Arc, with the appropriate motto,"Sans peur et sans reprocho," Boadicea, etc. Later women who have helped to make history are Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Fry, Josephine Butler, Frances, Power Cobbe, and Queen Victoria, to name'a few of those who were also to bo commemorated.by banners. .