THE NEVER-SAY-DIE GIRLS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 10106, 18 March 1911, Page 7

THE NEVER-SAY-DIE GIRLS.

<S (By ONE OF THEM.) Miss Evelyn Sharp lias a spirited article in the " New Idea " on the militant, suffragettes. As sho has been in the thick of tho fight in London, her up-to-date presentment of the case is as authoritative as it is ■ optimistic:— "If one thing more than another characterises tho militant suffragist,' she says, "it is the equanimity with which sho has learned to acceot contradictory' statements about herself. During tho last three years sho has been told alternately that she is in the pay of the Socialists, and is financed entirely by Tory gold; that she is promoting a sex war by creating a situation in which all men are opposed to all women, and that she has still to convert her own sex; that it is her exclusive business to mind the baby, whether she has one or not. And although the male objector of the street corner tells every suffragist he sees that the campaign is directed against the sanctity of marriage, he is equally ready to jeer if he thinks he detects in her any desire to seek that sanctity on her own account. All this would be very confusing if the militant suffragist had not discovered long ago that it is her business to go straight ahead without listening to anybody. " Suffragist though I am, I find it sometimes difficult not to listen when tho enemy is being particularly illogical ; as, for instance, when, though a bachelor himself, he tells a passing procesion of women to go home and darn their husbands' socks. And this in a country where, even, if all men were compelled by law to marry, there would still be a large proportion of women forced into the unwomanly sphere of spinsterhood. The man in the street, especially if he is unmarried, always talks as though every woman were a wife, every wife a mother, and every baby endowed with the elixir of perpetual infancy; and it never seems to occur to him that this theory of his should logically force him at once to quit his single state and so to save one woman from tho reproach of having no socks to darn. "It is satisfactory, however, at the end of three years of militant effort, to count the many bogeys that have been overthrown by courageous action. Three years ago we were all dismissed as female hooligans bent on notoriety. To-day, in the face of the fact that over four hundred women, drawn from every class of society, have suffered terms of imprisonment ranging from seven days to three months under conditions meted out to common criminals and not under those enjoyed by men political offenders; in face of the fact that every day fresh women are volunteering for what they call danger services, leading _ almost inevitably to arrest and punishment, it is no longer easy to maintain the theory that notoriety is the aim of those, who, after a forty years' campaign of patience I and gentle persuasion, have been driven to extreme measures in the hope of winning their enfranchisement. Nor is it safe any longer for the anti-suf-ragist in society to jeer at female hooligans when the lady he takes in to dinner may have been, thrown out of a Cabinet Minister's meeting the night before, merely for protesting against the refusal of the Government to deal with her question. The notoriety bogey has received another blow in the formation of professional women's franchise leagues, in which are found many militants. WoI men who are painters, actresses, authoresses, are out after fame, not notoriety. It is not usual for the eagle to give up his possession of the mountain heights to lord it over a moleheap down in the valley. " I remember seeing a young woman dragged away from the Strangers' Entrance to the Her hat had been torn off, her hair was dishevelled, her dress rent and covered with mud. I happened to know how bitterly she would feel these defects in an appearance usually neat and pleasing, and how great must be the mental torment she must be going through under the public gaze. For all that, she was smiling, and when some thoughtless person gave a huge laugh, I told him. who she was, and how many academic letters she was entitled to place after her name. He did not laugh any more, but passed on the information to the bystanders. Later, when she was taken to the police station, she was greeted with cheers all along the route. Only the members of the House of Commons, secure in the protection of some thousands of police, stood and looked through the bars of their locked gates and did not cheer. " Personally, I find the open-air crowd more intelligent in this connection than the ordinary drawing-room audience. "It is much more difficult to combat the veiled contempt for women that characterises the polite remarks of the well-groomed objector in the drawing-room audience, than it is to meet the actual stono thrown hy some open enemy at a street corner. " But the man who throws stones does know that no one goes to prison gladly, even for a political reason, and that the woman who stands up suddon]y at a street corner and begins by saying valiantly ' People of London' to a little girl and a baby, is not doing this because she likes it. j " It must not be thought, however, that tho support of our militant movement comes only from the working classes._ A glance down the name 6 on our prison list and our balance-sheet will show that there is not a class in tho Kingdom that is unrepresented in the Women's Social and Political Union. I sometimes think that muoh of our success is due to this fact. A war-chest into which women have poured their thousands of pounds as well as their hard-earned pence is worthy to rank with all the horns of plenty in fairyland. Whether you have gone without your summer frock or your dinner in order to help the suffragette exchequer, the money you raiso brings luck to the 'cause for which you have raised it; and that is why suffragette gold becomes fairy gold. " In the same way women of all kinds work together in carrying out the smaller details of the militant campaign. Strictly speaking, our militant tactics are shown only in two Avays — in protesting at political meetings because our questions are unanswered, and in standing our ground when wo are refused admittance to tho House of Commons. In both instances what we do is not in itself militant, though it becomes so through tho foolish opposition shown to us. If our questions were answered, the meetings of Cabinet Ministers would ;iot be disturbed, as they now are, by the tumult caused by those who throw out the women; if our deputations to the Premier were received, there would bo no hostile demonstration in Parliament Square, ending in tho imprisonment of women. Still, in the result, these two actions of onrs are distinctly militant. But the public says we aro militant in all our actions, because, I suppose, everything we set out to do is carried through irrespective of the cost or the suffering to ourselves. "Wo are called militant, for instance, when wo go to by-elections to speak against the nominee • of the Government that refuses to enfranchise women, though this is a perfectly constitutional form of agitation. We aro militant when we stand in rain and snow, selling our paper, ' Votes for Women,' though we have a police permit enabling us to do so. We aro militant when we patrol the gutter in single file, carrying on our backs sand-wich-boards for the same purpose. If to do things that aro disagreeable, things that bring us tho publicity that no woman courts willingly, things that none of us, three years ago, would have felt capable of doing, then the suffragette is never anything but militant. " And though she may suffer both physical and mental discomfort in. the process, the suffragette finds her reward in tha>+i very public opinion sho

goes forth to bravo. The omnibusdriver who waves his whip at her and shouts, 'Stick to it, ladies!' when he sees her campaigning in the street; the gentleman who raises his hat to her with the words, ' That's to your colours;' the lady who dropiS her skirt in the mud in order- bo cneour«i£e the woman in the gutter by taking from her a handbill she has seen before ; the small boy who testifies to the strength of the movement by saying, in a hushed tone, ' There goes one of them!' when, a year-ago, it would have been: ' Yah ! Suffragette! Votes for women indeed! Votes for my old tom-cat I'— these and other signs make it more than worth while to be a suffragette out on the warpath.