My own story
We say, 'Then, gentlemen, we must teach you the value of your own
principles, and until you are prepared to stand for the right of women
to decide their lives and the laws under which they shall live, you,
with Mr. Asquith and company, are equally responsible for all that has
happened and is happening to women in this struggle for emancipation.'"
Outlining further our new and stronger policy of aggression, I said:
"There is a great deal of criticism, ladies and gentlemen, of this
movement. It always seems to me when the anti-suffrage members of the
Government criticise militancy in women that it is very like beasts of
prey reproaching the gentler animals who turn in desperate resistance
when at the point of death. Criticism from gentlemen who do not hesitate
to order out armies to kill and slay their opponents, who do not
hesitate to encourage party mobs to attack defenceless women in public
meetings--criticism from them hardly rings true. Then I get letters from
people who tell me that they are ardent suffragists but who say that
they do not like the recent developments in the militant movement, and
implore me to urge the members not to be reckless with human life.
Ladies and gentlemen, the only recklessness the militant suffragists
have shown about human life has been about their own lives and not about
the lives of others, and I say here and now that it has never been and
never will be the policy of the Women's Social and Political Union
recklessly to endanger human life. We leave that to the enemy. We leave
that to the men in their warfare. It is not the method of women. No,
even from the point of view of public policy, militancy affecting the
security of human life would be out of place. _There is something that
governments care far more for than human life, and that is the security
of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the
enemy._ From henceforward the women who agree with me will say, 'We
disregard your laws, gentlemen, we set the liberty and the dignity and
the welfare of women above all such considerations, and we shall
continue this war, as we have done in the past; and what sacrifice of
property, or what injury to property accrues will not be our fault. It
will be the fault of that Government who admit the justice of our
demands, but refuses to concede them without the evidence, so they have
told us, afforded to governments of the past, that those who asked for
liberty were in earnest in their demands!"
I called upon the women of the meeting to join me in this new militancy,
and I reminded them anew that the women who were fighting in the
Suffragette army had a great mission, the greatest mission the world has
ever known--the freeing of one-half the human race, and through that
freedom the saving of the other half. I said to them: "Be militant each
in your own way. Those of you who can express your militancy by going to
the House of Commons and refusing to leave without satisfaction, as we
did in the early days--do so. Those of you who can express militancy by
facing party mobs at Cabinet Ministers' meetings, when you remind them
of their falseness to principle--do so. Those of you who can express
your militancy by joining us in our anti-Government by-election
policy--do so. Those of you who can break windows--break them. Those of
you who can still further attack the secret idol of property, so as to
make the Government realise that property is as greatly endangered by
women's suffrage as it was by the Chartists of old--do so. And my last
word is to the Government: I incite this meeting to rebellion. I say to
the Government: You have not dared to take the leaders of Ulster for
their incitement to rebellion. Take me if you dare, but if you dare I
tell you this, that so long as those who incited to armed rebellion and
the destruction of human life in Ulster are at liberty, you will not
keep me in prison. So long as men rebels--and voters--are at liberty,
we will not remain in prison, first division or no first division."
I ask my readers, some of whom no doubt will be shocked and displeased
at these words of mine that I have so frankly set down, to put
themselves in the place of those women who for years had given their
lives entirely and unstintingly to the work of securing political
freedom for women; who had converted so great a proportion of the
electorate that, had the House of Commons been a free body, we should
have won that freedom years before; who had seen their freedom withheld
from them through treachery and misuse of power. I ask you to consider
that we had used, in our agitation, only peaceful means until we saw
clearly that peaceful means were absolutely of no avail, and then for
years we had used only the mildest militancy, until we were taunted by
Cabinet Ministers, and told that we should never get the vote until we
employed the same violence that men had used in their agitation for
suffrage. After that we had used stronger militancy, but even that, by
comparison with the militancy of men in labour disputes, could not
possibly be counted as violent. Through all these stages of our
agitation we had been punished with the greatest severity, sent to
prison like common criminals, and of late years tortured as no criminals
have been tortured for a century in civilised countries of the world.
And during all these years we had seen disastrous strikes that had
caused suffering and death, to say nothing at all of the enormous
economic waste, and we had never seen a single strike leader punished as
we had been. We, who had suffered sentences of nine months' imprisonment
for inciting women to mild rebellion, had seen a labour leader who had
done his best to incite an army to mutiny released from prison in two
months by the Government. And now we had come to a point where we saw
civil war threatened, where we read in the papers every day reports of
speeches a thousand times more incendiary than anything we had ever
said. We heard prominent members of Parliament openly declaring that if
the Home Rule Bill was passed Ulster would fight, and Ulster would be
right. None of these men were arrested. Instead they were applauded.
Lord Selborne, one of our sternest critics, referring to the fact that
Ulstermen were drilling under arms, said publicly: "The method which the
people of Ulster are adopting to show the depths of their convictions
and the intensity of their feelings will impress the imagination of the
whole country." But Lord Selborne was not arrested. Neither were the
mutinous officers who resigned their commissions when ordered to report
for duty against the men of Ulster who were actually preparing for civil
war.
What does all this mean? Why is it that men's blood-shedding militancy
is applauded and women's symbolic militancy punished with a prison cell
and the forcible feeding horror? It means simply this, that men's double
standard of sex morals, whereby the victims of their lust are counted as
outcasts, while the men themselves escape all social censure, really
applies to morals in all departments of life. Men make the moral code
and they expect women to accept it. They have decided that it is
entirely right and proper for men to fight for their liberties and their
rights, but that it is not right and proper for women to fight for
theirs.[3]
They have decided that for men to remain silently quiescent while
tyrannical rulers impose bonds of slavery upon them is cowardly and
dishonourable, but that for women to do that same thing is not cowardly
and dishonourable, but merely respectable. Well, the Suffragettes
absolutely repudiate that double standard of morals. If it is right for
men to fight for their freedom, and God knows what the human race would
be like to-day if men had not, since time began, fought for their
freedom, then it is right for women to fight for their freedom and the
freedom of the children they bear. On this declaration of faith the
militant women of England rest their case.
FOOTNOTE:
[3] There is no question that a great deal of the animus directed
against us during 1913 and 1914 by the Government was due to sex
bitterness stirred up by a series of articles written by Christabel
Pankhurst and published in _The Suffragette_. These articles, a fearless
and authoritative expose of the evils of sexual immoralities and their
blasting effect on innocent wives and children, have since been
published in a book called "The Great Scourge, and how to end it,"
issued by David Nutt, New Oxford Street, London W. C.
CHAPTER IV
I had called upon women to join me in striking at the Government through
the only thing that governments are really very much concerned
about--property--and the response was immediate. Within a few days the
newspapers rang with the story of the attack made on letter boxes in
London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, and half a dozen other cities.
In some cases the boxes, when opened by postmen, mysteriously burst into
flame; in others the letters were destroyed by corrosive chemicals; in
still others the addresses were rendered illegible by black fluids.
Altogether it was estimated that over 5,000 letters were completely
destroyed and many thousands more were delayed in transit.
It was with a deep sense of their gravity that these letter-burning
protests were undertaken, but we felt that something drastic must be
done in order to destroy the apathy of the men of England who view with
indifference the suffering of women oppressed by unjust laws. As we
pointed out, letters, precious though they may be, are less precious
than human bodies and souls. This fact was universally realised at the
sinking of the _Titanic_. Letters and valuables disappeared forever, but
their loss was forgotten in the far more terrible loss of the multitude
of human lives. And so, in order to call attention to greater crimes
against human beings, our letter burnings continued.
In only a few cases were the offenders apprehended, and one of the few
women arrested was a helpless cripple, a woman who could move about only
in a wheeled chair. She received a sentence of eight months in the first
division, and, resolutely hunger striking, was forcibly fed with unusual
brutality, the prison doctor deliberately breaking one of her teeth in
order to insert a gag. In spite of her disabilities and her weakness the
crippled girl persisted in her hunger strike and her resistance to
prison rules, and within a short time had to be released. The excessive
sentences of the other pillar box destroyers resolved themselves into
very short terms because of the resistance of the prisoners, every one
of whom adopted the hunger strike.
Having shown the Government that we were in deadly earnest when we
declared that we would adopt guerrilla warfare, and also that we would
not remain in prison, we announced a truce in order that the Government
might have full opportunity to fulfil their pledge in regard to a woman
suffrage amendment to the Franchise Bill. We did not, for one moment,
believe that Mr. Asquith would willingly keep his word. We knew that he
would break it if he could, but there was a bare chance that he would
not find this possible. However, our principal reason for declaring the
truce was that we believed that the Prime Minister would find a way of
evading his promise, and we were determined that the blame should be
placed, not on militancy, but on the shoulders of the real traitor. We
reviewed the history of past suffrage bills: In 1908 the bill had passed
its second reading by a majority of 179; and then Mr. Asquith had
refused to allow it to go on; in 1910 the Conciliation Bill passed its
second reading by a majority of 110, and again Mr. Asquith blocked its
progress, pledging himself that if the bill were reintroduced in 1911,