Along with her mother, Emmeline, and sister, Christabel, the British suffragette, Sylvia Pankhurst, is best known for her committed and ultimately successful struggle to win the vote for women. A profilic writer and activist, she also campaigned on a range of other issues, and in 1914 created her own newspaper, The Woman’s Dreadnought, in which to air these views. In the following article she explains the thinking behind her drive for women’s suffrage, the cause for which she would soon become famous, if not legendary.
Before the War large numbers of women and men were giving all their thought and energy to securing a million votes for the women of the British Isles – a million votes for thirteen million women!
The demand was recommended on account of its ‘moderation.’ In the light of the great world conflict does it not seem miserably inadequate, timidly weak and mean?
‘I believe that a woman should have a vote if she pays rates and taxes.’ How that phrase jars and wearies one? Can any tax count beside the toil of hand and brain that a human worker gives in a life time, or in comparison with the bringing into the world of another living, sentient human being, whose thoughts and deeds may add immeasurably to the common stock? When a man goes out to take part in the hideous slaughter of the battlefield the paying of rates and taxes is a forgotten thought to him; the fact that he has paid cannot buy him off, and his being too poor for taxing will not save him from being sent to the front if Conscription comes.
Cast away the trivial ideas of the professional politician. The world conflict, with its dehumanising hate and violence, and the widespread peril and loss that draw poor mothers and wives together, should cause our minds to dwell only on real, vital things.
What is a vote but a voice in the affairs that concern us all? Surely there was never a time in which we could see so clearly as now that the interests of all the people are closely interwoven, and that everyone of us must have a vote in the management of our world.
Cast away the idea that it is expedient to ask for an instalment of justice in accordance with some petty, ill-drafted, fugitive politician’s rule, instead of basing our demand on the infinite and eternal fact of our common humanity.
In the hard, hungry days that followed the Napoleonic wars, the brave old reformers did not want the vote for merely academic reasons. They fought for it because they saw in it a means of giving all the people the power to free themselves from gaunt and urgent want, and to protect themselves from cruel exploitation and harsh injustice. They wanted to give every man an equal chance to share in controlling the destinies of the nation.
Those old reformers asked for no half-measures, suggested no paltering compromises, but demanded Universal Suffrage. They were determined to wring from the autocrats in power as much justice as they could, and not to abate their demands until they had got all they asked. Theirs is a spirit that we may well emulate. Our experiences are likely to reproduce theirs in many things.
The War, with its waste and destruction, is intensifying the international strife that is always with us, the struggle of human evolution towards a higher development of social life.
In every nation the forces of reaction are gaining ground because of War conditions. Militarism is becoming more strongly entrenched.
Unorganised individualism is shown to be wasteful, and the extraordinary strain which war is putting upon human energy and material resources, has necessitated, and after the War will continue to necessitate, in every country more extensive control and co-ordination by the central government than has hitherto been known.
State action may be of two kinds. It may mean compulsory regulation of the bulk of the population by a small official class, in the interests of the powerful wealthy few who pull the strings – the vast mass of the people being used as mere pawns in an almost limitless army. Or State action may mean the co-operation of free citizens, each with an equal voice in the decisions which are adopted for the benefit of all.
After the War, in every country the struggle that is always going on between these two ideas, the idea of coercion and the idea of cooperation, will be intensified, and become the supreme issue, both in national and international affairs. In the international field the application of these ideas will be seen, on the one hand by a demand for larger armies and navies, a warfare of tariffs, and a more truculent dealing with the claims of rival nations. On the other hand will be a striving towards international arbitration and disarmament, and the building up of a league of peace to include all nations.
Our attitude towards the franchise issue will be one of the test questions which shall decide whether we are on the side of coercion or on that of co-operation.
At present the franchise qualification in this country is based on property. It is suggested that there should also be a qualification for naval and military service. The forms of service which human beings can render to the nation are infinite. Who shall measure them or decide between them? Every one of us should spend our lives in doing some part of the general service. The only qualification on which we should base our demand for the franchise is that of our common humanity. We should demand a vote for every human being of full age, without regard to property or sex.
The article which we publish from Martina Kramers, of Holland, shows us that the Dutch women have adopted the procedure which the Women’s Suffrage Movement has hitherto followed here. When the men had only a narrow and restricted franchise, the Dutch women Suffragists asked that that narrow franchise should be extended to women also. Now that Manhood Suffrage has been extended to the men of Holland, the women at last are pressing for a vote for every woman. Hitherto, they have been sitting on the fence of compromise, and have refrained from declaring themselves for human suffrage. Only now are they making whole-hearted common cause with the forces of democracy.
In every country where the women have begun working for their enfranchisement before the enactment of Manhood Suffrage, the same thing appears to have happened. The women have not thought it expedient to demand human suffrage; they have asked for admission to the existing narrow franchise. But in each country they have had to wait until the narrow franchise has been swept away.
They have had the humiliation of seeing their demand for citizenship thrust aside again and again, whilst men have secured concession after concession, until at last, by the granting of Manhood Suffrage, the principle of human right to the franchise has been admitted. Then, in Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and thirteen States of America full human suffrage, including men and women, has been secured in a comparatively short time.
In no country, save the little Isle of Man with its handful of inhabitants, have women succeeded in winning the vote before the property qualification for men had been abolished.
This fact should not for one moment lead us to think that women should wait for the vote in this country until men have secured Manhood Suffrage. No, indeed! It should spur us on to throw ourselves unreservedly into the struggle for human Suffrage, for every woman and for every man.
Every property qualification must of necessity act more unjustly towards women than towards men, because so much of women’s service receives no monetary recompense, because the husbands, and, not the wives, are householders.
It is true that the franchise on the men’s present terms would give a majority of votes to women of the working class, because the working class is actually in such an immense majority; but an undue proportion of the women voters of every class would be elderly widows, whose time for developing new ideas, in most cases, has gone by. The young mother with her children growing up around her, who should be voicing the ideals of the coming womanhood, would be disqualified, together with the mass of women factory workers, who need the power of the vote most urgently.
How can we expect that such a restricted form of franchise should arouse that immense volume of popular enthusiasm that assuredly will be needed to sweep votes for women past the old political prejudices, on to the Statute Book?
Women who cling to the narrow demand for the old out-of-date form of franchise will be driven into the camp of the coercionists, and separated from the great democratic movement which, in spite of all attempts at restriction, is growing and consolidating and, perhaps even before the War is over, will arise in full force of overwhelming fervour to demand that the democratic principle shall be applied to every department of our national life.
People say: ‘You cannot ask for a vote for every woman, because every man has not got one’; and add: ‘You must not ask for a vote for every woman, because the men ought to get more votes, if they want them, for themselves.’
Such arguments are cramping and destructive, they should be cast away from us – lovers of freedom. Fight for freedom for all humanity – they make no distinction of sex.
Surely it is time that the British Suffrage movement should come together, reorganise its programme, and write on its banners: ‘Human Suffrage – a vote for every man and woman of full age!’