WOMEN AND THE VOTE

New Zealand Herald, Volume L, Issue 15237, 26 February 1913, Page 7

WOMEN AND THE VOTE

DISORDEfy.Y MEETINGS. FREE FIGHTS WITH MEN. WOMEN EJECTED FROM A HALL. GIFT OF PARAFFIN. "NO GUNPOWDER WANTED." By Telegraph. Association.— (Received February 26, 12.20 a.m.) London, February 25. A suffregette meeting which was being held at the' Pavilion Music Hall last night, developed into a; succession of free fights with male interrupters, who successfully resisted ejectment. Mrs. Drummond, in appealing for contributions to the fighting fund, said that they did not require gunpowder. '':" One contributor promised to give a quantity of paraffin. Another speaker declared that the arrest of Mrs. Pankhurst wo aid increase militancy a hundredfold. Suffragettes interrupted Mr. John Burns (President of the Local Government Board) when he was speaking at Battersea last night, and several were ejected. Mr. Burns said that this tyranny of organised blackguardism must be broken down. It was, he said, in the interests of democracy that such despotism, which had desecrated and thrown back the women's cause for years, should be terminated.

MORE MILITANT TACTICS. RAILWAY SIGNAL WIRES CUT. WOMEN . REFUSED HEARINGS. PELTED WITH ROTTEN EGGS. London, February 24. The suffragettes are still pursuing their militant tactics in various districts. The signal' wires on the Great Western railway line at Newport have been cut. :''' The damage which the suffragettes did last week to property amounted to £6000. Miss Annie ' Kenny (a member of the committee of the Women's Social and Political Union), in a speech to-day, dared the authorities to allow any woman to die in prison. She said that such an event would make militant suffragettes by the hundred. '. '.--O- •-_-' Mrs. Despard, president of the Women's Freedom League, was compelled to abandon a meeting at Thornton Heath to-day, and other suffragettes were refused a hearing at Wimbledon. . A party of suffragettes, bearing sandwich boards, was pelted with rotten eggs' at Preston to-day, and obliged to take refuge in the neighbouring shops. A number of the seats at Hampstead Heath have been stencilled "Votes for Women" in green paint. The wet paint has damaged the dresses of a number of people using the seats.

Miss Lenton, one of the two suffragettes who were arrested on a charge of setting fire to the teahouse in Kew Gardens, has been released in a state of collapse owing to her having carried out her threat to refuse to take food. ■

The Daily Citizen (the new Labour newspaper), in an article on the situation, says that the public temper is rising against.the Pankhurst policy of'militancy, and that the present methods are causing more injury to the cause than a score of antisuffrage leagues could do.