The Suffragettes

New Zealand Tablet, 4 November 1909, Page 1729

The Suffragettes

Great movements sometimes turn on very small pivots. In the strenuous days of 1866 one .man. in a vast crowd shook the railings of Hyde Park, London.-.The railings were soon levelled, and a series of connected' v events followed* in swift succession which won Reform. The jyr&tory' belonged to the man who first shook the railings.! TBut he was, so to speak, merely the trigger that fired the heavily-charged mass of popular feeling. There is little in common .between the Reform movement, in any of its varied times and phases, and the freakish skirmishings and kickings and hysteria and illaimed brickbats and vicious vitriol or pyrogallol of the British suffragettes. We believe in. women's suffrage. Assassination, we are told, never changed the history of the world. And the history of the suffrage in Great Britain is not likely to be altered by the unwomanly and insensate flopping and high-kicking and screeching *of unsexed females,.like those of the Women's Freedom League, who have^lately been dancing political can-cans in the limelight of London's famous town. Pope tells us that — 'The mouse that always trusts to one poor hole Can never be a mouse of any;soul.' - , - The suffragettes who trust to one poor method of -political agitation —the method of hysteria ' and * epileptic fits —have not in them the soul that is to carry to a, successful issue a movement for raising women to a higher. political level. Hysteria makes but little history. / * In a recent issue of the 'Living Age,' Gilbert K. Chesterton aims at the suffragettes the winged arrows of- his subtle satire. 'The female suffrage movement,' says he, 'is simply the breakdown of the pride of woman, y her surrender of that throne of satire, realism, and detachment, from which she has so long laughed at the solemnities and moderated the manias of the mere politician. * Women tempered the gravity -of politics as she tempers the gravity of

golf. She reminds us -that . it is only about things that are Blightly unreal that; a man can be as solemn as that. The line of life was kept straight and level because the -man and the woman were pulling at opposite ends of it in an amicable tug-of-war. But- now the woman has suddenly let go. The man is victorious — but on his back. The suffragettes are victims of male exaggeration, but not of male cunning. "We did tell women that the vote was of frightful importance; but we never supposed that "any woman would believe it. "We men exaggerated our side of life as the women exaggerated the dfeadf ulriess of smoking in the' drawing-room. The war was healthy. '.It is a lovers' quarrel which should continue through, the ages. But an awful and unforeseen thing has happened to us who are masculine : We have won. '