Voting for women

Friday, February 2nd., 59 Rue de Grenelle, Paris.

I like women. And I think that, by and large, I understand them. Certain persons of intelligence and discernment have gone so far as to intimate that this is evident from my books. My time as editor of Woman was invaluable in this respect, but also I find women more interesting than men, less predictable, less arrogant ..... and better looking! Not surprising them that when I was asked today, by a man, what I thought about woman's suffrage, I was able to repond promptly and unequivocally.

The most powerful argument for woman's suffrage is the fact that women want it. There are odd exceptions, but undoubtedly a large majority of women who have studied the question feel a strong desire for woman's suffrage. There is and there can be no answer to this argument. To attempt to answer it is to be, in my opinion, gulity of fatuousness.

Regrettably there is no reasonable prospect of obtaining woman's suffrage in the present Parliament. The Government has no mandate of any kind to deal with it, and its time will be fully occupied by subjects which the (male) electorate considers far more important. Such as how best to prepare to kill people more effectively when war starts. This is of course a circular situation: there will never be a mandate for woman's suffrage delivered by a male electorate.

Hence the need for militant methods which have, in my opinion succeeded so far. They would have succeeded more completely if the women who sought martyrdom had played the game when they found martyrdom. Not only their dignity but their intellectual honesty too often gave way under the strain of martyrdom. Really women are too sensible to become martyrs. At the same time it must be admitted that the organisers were frequently badly advised by their more zealous male supporters who did not always escape the fatuity which masks their opponents. In particular the behaviour of certain husbands of martyrs did much to alienate the sympathies of the lukewarm. No hysterical male antics would in the slightest degree weaken my own support convinced support of woman's suffrage; but then I am not lukewarm, while the (male) electorate is either lukewarm or indifferent.


I can suggest no alternative to militant methods lest it be mass withdrawal of conjugal privileges, as originally envisaged by Aristophanes. That would certainly work, but I doubt that women have the collective will to organise and sustain it! I think that if the organisers of militancy were to make a closer and franker study of human nature as it notoriously is, with a view to avoiding in future the rather silly air of being constantly horrified by the spectacle of human nature in activity, the result might be a shortening of the war. I use the word metaphorically, but it may take a real war to 'shake-up' society sufficiently for woman's suffrage to succeed.