Militant Suffragettes Justified in England.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 16, 19 October 1910, Page 33

Militant Suffragettes Justified in England.

According to American Observers. — “English Girls Being Made b$ Injustice ”

LONDON, September 3. THE gage of battle has again been thrown in the contest between male authority and rebellious women in England. Unfailing evidence of the vast difference between the women’s suffrage campaign.? here and in America is provided by the comments that fall from the lips of American suffragists who have been aiding their sister enthusiasts in London. For scores of Americans have been active this summer in the agitation over the Women Householders’ Bill. In the big demonstrations they have been much in evidence, and crowds of tourists fell in line all along the inarch under their streaming “Old Glory.” They spoke from the platforms at Hyde Park, they sold the journal “Votes for Women” in the crowds, they visited “headquarters” at Clement’s Inn to give all kinds of friendly help and sympathy. And all the time they were watching and listening—paying strict heed to the opportunity for coming into close contact with the most earnest and businesslike suffragettes in the world. Their conclusions have been various, but very decided and very amazing. They came over expecting to be surprised at the suffragettes; they go home shocked at England. They come over to study the evil effects of military and they spend all their time conning the causes which make it the last resort. A veteran among these tourist-suffra-gists is Rev. Dr. Anna B. Shaw, the energetic parson-president of the American National Women.? Suffrage Association. Before Dr. Shaw left England, she announced some very strong views on Engliswomen and the suffrage. They may stand as a good sample of the impressions of an observant American visitor, refined by Dr. Shaw’s especially active mind, broad sympathies, and wide experience. They should prove matter for interest to her countrywomen. ■ “American women find, first of all.’ says Dr. Shaw, “that in coming to England they have left a woman’s country for a man’s. They begin to understand the meaning of the saying that ‘Americans put their women on a pedestal.’ In England such is decidedly not the case. The plain and obvious distinctions are well known, those that keep women out of the law and the ministry, and the discriminations of divorce and inheritance legislation. But an American gradually comes to perceive that beneath these common manifestations there is an implicit, traditional discrimination against women at the very rock-bottom of British life. “Of this preference, newspapers say nothing, and there is little inkling of it in America. It finds expression, for instance, in a world of fashion, whose social arbiters are men—where the lions patronise the belles, not the belles the lions. You see it in an educational regime, which carefully segregates girls ami boys from kilts up, and has only lately submitted to colleges for women. A rhetorical opponent to woman suffrage exclaimed in Parliament that the intellect of women .first inspired respect, then alarm, and finally abject terroi. It takes a foreign observer, with a recollection of American social life in her mind’s eye, to point out that it has hardly' received consideration here, to say nothing of respect. “It is this very attitude of regarding women as a dainty but dispensable incident to national life, that denies to girls in England the free, natural intercourse with men that American ami colonial girls have become accustomed to. lhe French go a step or two farther in this hot-house policy, and have attained the distinction of producing the most artificial women in the civilised world. But in England the very sufficiency of their grievances has bestirred women to action.

And, as they are to-day, they are a much keener and more capable lot, as far as the service of the state is concerned, than their American sisters. There is a live and intelligent interest in publie affairs among the women of England that is quite astonishing to an American visitor.” Dr. Shaw and many other clear-headed women lay the cause of this rapidlyincreasing self-reliance among Englishwomen to the plain obviousness of their grievances. “If American girls are being spoiled by too much chivalry,” says Dr. Shaw, “English girls are being made by injustice. And the martyrs of their progress are the suffragettes.” There is nothing in America to compare with the conditions under which thousands of women work in England. The unsettled labour conditions and the half a million surplus women in the country’s population cause thousands of women to be thrown on the market as

cheap labour. The man-prejudice is at work, and employers consider it unnecessary to pay' women more than 10/ per week; consequently they receive, on the average, as carefully computed by Mrs. Sidney Webb, only 7/ a week. The average man’s wage is small enough, about 20/ a week, but it is almost two and a-half times as much as a female worker gets, because she’s a woman. Making just allowance for such reasons for preference as the greater strength and superior training of the men, and for their obligation to support a family—though there is no distinction in paybet ween the bachelors and the married men—-the large surplus left over after counting in all these traditional reasons, can only be accounted for by the abundance of cheap female labour. It is the woman’s side of a problem America has not yet realised —the unemployed problem—and it is the desperate and the hopeless side. In America the saloon is a man’s evil, but in London, out of every’ publie house there sounds the strident revelry' of women as well as men. It is a visible evidence of their misery, and the only woeful relief within their reach. Whether they work at sweated labour or not at all they’re all in the same box. They may be able to get poor relief, but their wages will never go up, because there are plenty’ more right behind them scrambling for the job they would relinquish. And their men employers will pay them what the economic market forces them to and not a red cent more. That squares with the law of competition. Such is a hint of the condition of affairs which sends back American suffra-

gettes amazed at England. “Clearly,” says Dr. Shaw, “there is only one relief, and that is the vote. By systematising female casual labour, the root cause of the employer’s power to keep down the wages, by' opening up other fields of occupation to women, or perhaps by being so Socialistic as to introduce justice by means of a minimum wage scale, a constituency of women, with these grievances one hundredth as much at heart as their pioneers, the suffragettes, would go a long way toward lightening up the intolerable burdens of their sisters. They are out of patience with Royal Commissions, which have been nosing around the facts for years, and have let most of them pass by unnoticed; and with Parliaments, too, that have ignored the only Royal Commission that ever got really at the truth—the Poor Law ( oimnission.” So Dr. Shaw is thoroughly in accord with militant methods in England. “When constitutional rights of petition and deputation to the Government are ignored, when a majority of a representative House declares for the principle by a bigger majority than the Government itself can muster, only to Ft! put off and outwitted by shrewd ‘politics,’ what game is there left?" In America, she adds, however, there seems to be no need for militancy. Deputations and petitions are received—and the bill is voted down. There is no appeal from that decision, except to try again next year. But it is time to get another condition of things now, and this fall hard campaigns will be fought in Oregon, Washington. South Dakota, anil Okla-

ho ma, as well as in Arizona and New Mexico, where the suffrage qualification will l>e urged for the new constitutions. The other points of leverage, where the best progress is going on, are Massachusetts, New York, and Illinois. At all these vantage-grounds, Dr. Shaw and her colleagues will employ many methods which she has seen at work in England. Open-air and street meetings will be more frequent than ever before, and advertising will be a great feature. But

the most important English importation will be the electioneering. Every man who comes out for suffrage in any of these critical States will be cordially supported by the women; those who don’t will be treated as nearly like the English “anti’s” as American conditions warrant. And in England the suffragettes claim to have succeeded in deciding many elose seats by the small balance of their favour. Two other notable differences in the English and American campaigns es-

pecially appealed to Dr. Shaw, one in personnel, another in methods. The English movement embraces all classes; the nobility, the well-to-do, the middleclass, the respectable poor, and the very poor, are all represented. But in America it is from the two extremes of society that most of the support has come —from combinations like that of Mrs. Belmont and the shirt-waist girls. The rest of the women —the middle-class—-have a chance to rise considerably above their present station, which they would not enhance by joining a risky and unpopular movement. In England people are mostly born to their station, and stand little chance of rising to another. Hence the movement has progressed here with middle-class assistance, which will only come about in America when suffrage becomes an innocuous fashion. While many of the British nobility, including the Duchess of Portland, Lady Betty Balfour, Lady Constance Lytton, and others have come out for suffrage without the slightest fear of losing caste, it is very illuminating to notice that not a single American, who only entered this nobility through marriage, has dared to stake her social prestige on woman’s suffrage. As to methods, Dr. .Shaw finds those of America the methods of peace ae compared to the methods of war employed by the;- sisters across the water. In England all is system, the order of a military campaign. Orders come from headquarters, and are implicitly obeyed. No questions are asked. The foe is a single one, and efforts are concentrated. But Americans wage over forty campaigns at the same time. So the dictatorial attitude by which the English can accomplish most not only could not possibly succeed in America, but the suffragists there would not tolerate it themselves. Another American whose opinions on the English suffragettes are based on intimate experience is Miss Elizabeth Freeman, now one of Mrs. Pankhurst's right-hand assistants. Many people will be surprised to hear, in fact, that three of the most valiant of all the militant suffragettes are Americans. There is Miss Lucy Burns, a graduate of Vassar, who has abandoned her university work at Berlin to join the cause of woman

suffrage. She is a tireless organiser and agitator in Scotland, where her name is as effective as her talents. Then there is Miss Alice Paul, daughter of ex-Governor Paul, of New Jersey, and a graduate of “Pennsy”. Miss Paul won her laurels in the celebrated Guildhall affair, gaining admittance to a State banquet by disguising herself as a charwoman. She is studying social conditions in England, but spends most of her time, in prison

and out, working for ‘‘Votes for Women.” Miss Freeman is chiefly noted as a speaker. Before she knew anything about the movement, she came to the rescue of a suffragette who was being roughly handled by a policeman, ami was promptly arrested too. Since then she has been heart and soul in the cause. The more thoroughly to understand the soeial conditions she was attacking, she entered

the “living in” system, where girls in apprenticeship for shop assistants are housed and fed in a thoroughly disgraceful manner and paid 2/6 a week, while the firms that are employing them yield 22 to 25 per cent dividends. Miss Freeman knows the movements in both England ami America, and is very emphatic in her admiration of the

superior nobility and high-mindedness of ■the English cause. "Women of all ranks and classes have gone to prisou for it; they have suffered every kind of mortification and ridicule in its name—and that means more than all the talking on earth. Their earnestness and sincerity and the bonds of sacrifice and service that hold together all these women of different degree and station in the common cause of their sex, these have laid what ean be the only true foundations of democracy. "American women are not so much to blame for their inactivity,” adds Miss Freeman. “They haven’t had so much to put up with. Equal chances for an educated and a common sentiment that it is a good thing that they should have one, have led American men to listen to their wives’ opinions with respect. A different order of sex-relations has induced the American man, also, to consider himself as woman’s natural protector. Here in England the attitude is one of absolutely unaffected callousness to the finer potentialities in women and persistent discrimination and pooh-poohing against their progress. They don’t seem to realise that the growing tendencies among modern women towards responsible and efficient service in society are of quite invaluable assistance to them——if they will only give the women a chance. “It is chiefly due to this intolerable masculine egotism that there is so much less 'chumming’ between the two sexes than in America. It is hard for young people to meet without senseless restrictions. In self-defence, women have to scramble for husbands, and the girls who are not trained to do so from youth up are likely to get last in the shuffle. Thousands of . these young girls began to understand why these conditions existed with the rise of militant suffragism, and since then a steady stream of them lias 'been flowing to the Cause.” In this militancy Miss Freeman firmly believes, and in its resumption in the late Fall, now a certaintv, she plans to take a prominent part. ’ G. L. HARDING.