Just a few months after the first issue of the New Statesman, the suffragette and co-founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union, Christabel Pankhurst, calls for a militant approach in the fight for a female vote.
Militancy is, as it were, the flowering of the woman’s movement for equality. Women’s long-existing, hidden discontent with their condition of inferiority, and the patient and law-abiding Woman Suffrage campaign of the last century, were the preparation for militancy.
The non-militant suffrage agitation was of the nineteenth century; the militant agitation is of the twentieth. The anti-militant Suffragism of the present day is, in the opinion of the militant women, an anachronism. Militancy is a political weapon used by women as the only discoverable substitute for the vote. But it is more than that. It is a means of breaking up the false relation of inferior to superior that has existed between men and women, and it is a means of correcting the great faults that have been produced in either sex by the subjection of women.
Subjection had made women unnaturally diffident and unnaturally submissive. Their dominion over women has made men overbearing and vainglorious. Militancy is a sign and an expression of the fact that women have shaken off their diffidence and their servility. Women’s militancy is an education to men, because it shows them women not any longer appealing to them – “coaxing them”, as Mr Lloyd George has put it – but, instead, denying their title to withhold the vote.
Anti-militancy involved an admission that men ought to be obeyed and their laws obeyed by women in spite of the disfranchisement of women. Anti-militancy is therefore perilously near to anti-Suffragism. It is, in fact, indistinguishable from the policy of patient Griselda. For Suffragists to be law-abiding at any and every cost is an evil, because this flatters the self-importance of men and disinclines them to concede a demand so meekly made of them. Militancy has not only educated men by proving that there is a limit to women’s endurance, but it has roused the best in them. Never since the days of John Stuart Mill, who, with other men of a most exceptional quality, made the Woman Suffrage cause his own, have men so greatly served this cause as during the days of militancy. The spectacle of women fighting for liberty and literally facing death for its sake has more power to rouse men’s sense of justice than have any words, however wise and eloquent.
There has been much vague denunciation of militancy, but not a single valid argument has been brought against its use. As a political method it holds the field to the exclusion of every other, save that of voting. It is idle to point to other countries in which women have won the vote by peaceful means. These other countries are not Britain. Politics and political activity do not in any other country hold the same high place in the interest of men as they hold in Britain. Ours is an old country. Prejudice and conservatism in the ugliest sense of the term are entrenched here as they are entrenched nowhere else, unless it be in Turkey. The British man’s attitude towards women – above all the British politician’s attitude towards women – is a matter of contempt and derision in our Colonies, in America, and in all those enlightened countries where women have the vote. Comparisons between Suffrage conditions in Britain and Suffrage conditions elsewhere are in the highest degree misleading. Besides, it is impossible to ignore the fact that it is since the beginning of British militancy, which has called to attention the whole civilised world, that the greater number of Suffrage victories have occurred. Nothing can be more unprofitable than for a British Suffragist to be daydreaming about the victories won by peaceful methods in countries more enlightened than her own. There is for her no wisdom save in reflection upon the past political history of her own country, in observation of the conditions now existing there, and in the invention of a policy based upon historical knowledge and upon a knowledge of the temperament of her countrymen and the political conditions of her own land. For the British Suffragist militancy is the only way. Militancy will succeed where all other policies will fail.
The virtue of militancy proceeds from the fact that government rests upon the consent of the governed. When the unenfranchised become ungovernable, then is enfranchisement given to them. The only reason why militancy has not long ago resulted in the conquest of votes for women is that not enough women have been militant. The number of militants required to create a situation from which the Government will be driven to escape by granting votes for women is a matter which experiment alone can determine. To those who still doubt the necessity of militancy, the final answer is this. Consider the men who now are at the head of the political parties, consider the men not yet advanced to leadership who are likely to succeed them, and then say whether you believe that the Asquiths, the Lloyd Georges, or the FE Smiths, of the present or of the future, are likely to be moved to give votes to women by reasoned and patient appeal – by anything save sheer compulsion!
The case for militancy as a political method is unassailable. Attacks upon militancy have, however, been made chiefly on the score of morality. Militancy, we are told, is wrong, and lawlessness and violence are wrong. The breach of a law, as John Hampden and others have taught by word and by example, is right or wrong according to the nature of the law and the authority possessed by the lawgiver. Bad laws made without due authority ought not to be obeyed, but ought to be resisted by every honest man and woman. It is such laws that militant Suffragists have broken. By marching to Parliament Square they have broken laws which seek to prevent them as voteless citizens from using the only means available to them of claiming the redress of their grievances. But apart from that, all the laws on the Statute book are, as they affect women, bad for want of lawful authority in those who have made them. Women’s claim to the vote implies a denial of the validity of any law to which their consent has not been obtained.
Violence is wrong, say the anti-militants. Nothing could be more untrue. Violence has no moral complexion whatsoever. In itself it is neither right nor wrong. Its rightness or wrongness depends entirely upon the circumstances under which it is used. If violence is wrong in itself, then it is wrong to break a breakfast egg, it is wrong to hammer in a nail, it is wrong to pierce a tunnel through the rock, it is wrong to break into a burning house to save the life of a child. Yet, as we know, all these actions are entirely moral. This is because, though violent, they, like militancy, are justified by the motive of those who do them and the object with which they are done. If there are any who still condemn militancy, then they must condemn Nature herself, the Arch-Militant, who to achieve her purposes works so much violence.
The strange fact is that many fervent anti-militants are themselves in favour of militancy – when it is the militancy of men. Some of the foremost amongst them vigorously upheld the South African war, with all its accompaniments of farm-burning and concentration camps. Their souls were thrilled to sympathetic approval when men were militant in Turkey at the time of the revolution, when men were militant during the Chinese revolution, and when men were militant in the Balkan States. Approval of all this militancy was publicly expressed by the leaders of anti-militant Suffragism. Even women they will allow to be militant provided they are not militant in the cause of votes for women. Thus in the official organ of the law-abiding movement we read these words:
The world is governed by ideas, and force is helpless against them. Not the arms of France, but the faith of Joan of Arc turned the tide of fortune against the English in the Hundred Years’ war. Not the arms of William of Orange, but his spirit and the spirit of his people, their patriotism, their religion, wore down the innumerable hosts of Spain.
These words represent precisely the view held by the militants, though they come strangely from the pen of women who condemn militancy. It is the conviction of the militants that their lesser force will overcome the greater force directed against them by the Government. This will happen because of the faith that is in the militants, and because of the spirit of which militancy is the expression. But that does not mean that Suffragists can win without the use of force. If Joan of Arc had relied upon faith without force it is not unlikely that the English would have been in possession of France at the present day. If William of Orange had trusted to spirit, patriotism and religion and nothing more to win his battles, his military successes would have been inconspicuous indeed! The truth is that violence in such cases is itself the expression of the faith, spirit, patriotism and religion of those who employ it. It is then that we have militancy. Violence that is not inspired by spirit and illuminated by faith is not militancy, it is brutality. It is the Suffragettes who are militant, while the Government seek to overcome them by brutality.
People have said as an argument against militancy that it “rouses the beast in men” – the beast that, as they say, civilisation has put to sleep. If there are men possessed by a familiar spirit so unpleasant as to deserve this name, it is time that that spirit were driven out of them. Better by far that well-fed, self-reliant, happy women should undertake the task of luring forth the beast and slaying it than that its victims should be, as now they are, white slaves and other unhappy, exploited women. It would seem that the anti-militants take a less favourable view of the nature of the opposite sex than do the Suffragettes. The Suffragettes pay men the compliment of believing that the brutal is not an essential and unchangeable part of them to be drugged into quiescence, but never to be eradicated.
There are people, again, whose objections to militancy seem to be based on the fact that it involves destruction of property. They would appear to forget that human liberty may, after all, be worth some broken windows or a blaze or two. Whatever may happen, militancy done for the sake of votes for women is not likely to be so destructive to the material interests of the country as was the South African war, waged for the sake of votes for men. In answering objections to militancy, the Suffragettes have regard to the objections raised by the women rather than to those raised by men. To men critics a sufficient reply is this: “If you don’t like militancy give us the vote, and that quickly!” It ill becomes men to prate of mere property and the Suffragettes’ destruction of it, while the nation is being ravaged by venereal disease and innocent women in thousands are being infected by such disease.
The opposition to women’s militancy is founded upon prejudice, and upon nothing else. For the very same acts of militancy that militant women commit would, if they were committed by voteless men, be applauded. The moral law which the Suffragettes have defied is not the moral law accepted for themselves by men. It is slave morality that the militant women have denied and defied – slave morality according to which active resistance to tyranny is the greatest crime that a subject class or a subject sex can commit.
[See also: Lord Byron’s sex education]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 27 Aug 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Gentle Parent Trap
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment