Monthly Archives: September 1911

Where Women Fail

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Saturday, September 16, 1911, To the Editor of The Yorkshire Weekly Post, “Where Women

Fail” ([16])

This letter is a classic example of the style and structure Davison adopts in the letters she

writes to rebut erroneous and misguided thinking. She begins with an introduction defining

the subject (women’s lack of initiative, termed “cheek”), develops a pun, “painful,” a play on

the name of the man whose words she refutes, reduces his argument to a stereotype in the

last sentence of the first paragraph, and then proceeds to pick at his points one by one. By

the time she has begun her second paragraph she has set up her opponent—-eliding cheek

with initiative and equating initiative with originality– as an exemplar of the very lack of

originality she accuses him of imputing to women. As it unfolds the letter touches on two

topics suffragists invoked to justify women’s right to vote: the fact that women’s lives are

increasingly impacted by legislation means that women need to be part of the legislative

process–“Politics are every day entering more and more into the home, therefore women

must enter politics” and the then popular but now-disputed myth of a population of “surplus

women” who may never marry and who will need to support themselves. Both are subsets of

the larger argument Davison evinces—that the times are changing and women are leading

England forward, even if they have to drag men all the way.

Sir,–In the last week’s issue of your paper you publish an article by Mr. Barry Pain, entitled

“Where Women Fail.” According to this wit, the quality which differentiates men from

women and makes them successful is “cheek.” Mr. Barry Pain takes it upon himself to give

a “painful” interpretation to this slang term, which has now become incorporated in our

language. The nearest equivalent to the particular sense in which Mr. Barry Pain uses it is

the word “initiative.” In other words, he is writing on the old theory that women have no

originality in them.

Now when Mr. Barry Pain asserts that women are lacking in initiative he is

apparently forgetting the fact that for centuries and centuries the faculty of initiative has

been absolutely taboo to “women.” Their education (if it might be so termed),

surroundings and influences were impossible soil for the rearing of originality. They were

trained up in one groove only, one inexorable routine, that of preparing to be housewives

for their husbands, and the only possible departure from that groove was to train to be the

spouse of the Church, a not very dissimilar vocation. Has Mr. Barry Pain forgotten that

until half a century ago or so the women of England rarely received any education at all,

except in the case of a very few ladies of exceptionally high or royal lineage? The women of

earlier days did not even have their minds opened by travel, and spent their lives in a rigid

groove. Yet even then here and there such wonderful women were produced as Caroline

Herschell [sic], the brilliant Sarah Jennings,18 or Hannah More.

Instead, then, of asserting that women are lacking in initiative, in view of the fact

that they have only been encouraged to think for half a century, and have only dared to give

utterance to independent thought during the last decade or so, we should rather stand lost

in amazement and wonder at the way women have come to the front in the last few years.

Feminine progress is, as even Mr. Barry Pain, allows, a truly marvelous feature of the

present age. This young century is already signalized by the title of the Woman’s Century.

In spite of the terrible handicaps against which women have had to fight, England and

France can boast of women in the foremost ranks of scientific achievement, such as

Madame Curie and Mrs. Hertha Ayrton. Women doctors are winning golden laurels. In

France women lawyers constantly win cases by clever initiative. Women are winning

artistic triumphs. In spite of all that Mr. Barry Pain may say, suffragettes are showing

plenty of “cheek,” or initiative, in politics, in the ever-changing nature of their campaign,

which finds new manoeuvres to meet every contingency. Into the field of invention, so

long forbidden ground to women, women are entering more and more every year. Mr.

Barry Pain has only to consult the records of the Patent Office. The peculiarity of women’s

inventions is that they are also of a pre-eminently useful nature.

Mr. Barry Pain quotes the fact that men decree the absurdities of fashion which

women sheepishly follow, as an example of the lack of initiative in women. He forgets

entirely that dress and fashion is entirely due to the convention long-ingrained in women

that it is their duty to dress to please and attract men, and that as a result man has long

held the control of this in his own hands. He also forgets that there is evident a decided

tendency nowadays not to follow Fashion blindly. Originality of design in dress, and an

increasing refusal to follow the slavish dictates of fashion is a notable feature of the modern

elegante.

Mr. Barry Pain is pleased to remark that “domestic affairs have always been the

province of woman.” If he had said instead that woman has always been trained to be the

unpaid housekeeper of some male, whose likes and dislikes she had to carefully study

almost under pain of death. Mr. Barry Pain would have got a little nearer the mark. It is

partly because women have realized that they must be really rulers in the so-called sphere

of theirs, that they are asserting themselves in public life. Politics are every day entering

more and more into the home, therefore women must enter politics.

With regard to Mr. Barry Pain’s scathing little remarks that men are more in

demand than women even in the kitchen, may I be allowed to remind him that the domain

of “feeding the brute” has always been recognized as the most necessary and paying of

callings. It is therefore, one which in its highest branches commands very high plums, and

these branches have been appropriated, as in most cases, by the male sex. But nowadays,

by training and originality, women are beginning to show that the excellence of the man

chef is an expensive fiction.

Mr. Barry Pain says that women excel rather in observation than in

imagination. Yet it used to be an old tradition that women were too imaginative.

Finally, Mr. Barry Pain asserts that women are handicapped by the fact that they do

not expect to take up a profession permanently, as they expect to marry. That absurd

notion is fast ceasing to be a handicap in these days, when there are more women than

men, and women are sensibly brought up to recognize [the] fact that matrimony may not

come their way, and that even if it does (vide Mr. Lloyd George’s Insurance Scheme) they

may become widows and have once more to earn a livelihood.

What Mr. Barry Pain means by saying that “while woman has progressed, Nature

has stood still,” goodness only knows. If he means Human Nature, that certainly is not the

same as before in these days of Veto, the Advance of Labour, and the Advance of Women. If

he means the world of Nature, that too is changing—-witness the use of Wireless Telegraph,

Aerial Posts, conquests of the Channel by air and sea! Perhaps, however, it does not do to

insist upon too much terminological exactitude from so brilliant a wit as Mr. Barry Pain. –

Yours, etc.,

EMILY WILDING DAVISON

31. Coram Street, London, W.C.

The Black Peril in South Africa

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Written . 7th, 1911, published September 14, 1911, To the Editor of The New Age, “The

Black Peril in South Africa”

While this letter purports to be about the imminent enfranchisement of Black South Africans,

its sub-text is the history of the American suffrage and abolitionist movements which began

in partnership and subsequently split apart. Black men were granted the vote in the United

States nearly fifty years before women. In the American South this enfranchisement was

resisted until well into the twentieth century. Davison was wrong about the

political future of South Africans, and she reveals that she is a daughter of her time in her

coincidental disparagement of the “primitive and unreasoning mind” of the South African

male, as in her use of the phrase “Black Peril.”

Sir, –May I be allowed to contribute my quota to the correspondence on “The Black Peril in

South Africa”? It seems to me in their zeal to prove their own pet theories, some of your

correspondents are swallowing a camel in straining after a gnat. This Black Peril question

is not a mere race question, as several of them appear to think. It is far more than that: it is

a sex question, and, as such, a world question. The whole trend of civilization is reaching

up to a new plane. The Universal Races Congress proved conclusively, if proof were

needed, that colour-bars no longer exist, or if they do exist, they are only retained in more

humane fashion. Every man nowadays is recognized as having a right to his own

individuality, to his own soul, whether in matters religious, social or political. Thus in

South Africa, for example, it is only a question of a short time as to when the franchise will

be extended to the native population. In Cape Town this is already the case, and the other

States will inevitably follow suit soon. And this is where the short–sightedness of some

critics comes in. The black man knows that his enfranchisement is but a question of time,

but he hears very little word of the enfranchisement of the white woman. What is the

natural result? He believes that the white woman is inferior to the white man. The white

woman occupies in his mind the same subject and degraded position that his own black

woman does towards him. They are the white man’s goods and chattels, and for the

present the black man has no great love or respect for the white man. Perhaps he even has

in his primitive and unreasoning mind the example set by the way in which the white man

takes and despoils his black women. He may even remember the terrible lessons of the

concentration and other camps of the Boer War! And the natural result is that now and

again his furious passions break forth. But we ask, “à qui la faute?” Not on the black man,

but on the white man lies the blame, for he set the hideous example. But he adds to it the

further enormity of expecting to go scot-free himself for a parallel crime, whilst exacting a

fierce penalty from the black. Where is his sense of justice?

The remedy is plain, and indeed shrieks to the skies. Before South Africa takes the

black native into the franchise she is bound to enfranchise her white women. Mr. Smuts,

Oliver Schreiner, and other great South African minds already perceive it, and perceive it

clearly. The Women’s Enfranchisement League is straining every nerve to make this fact

plain. It is the white population’s only chance of peace and salvation. The way lies clear!

Will South Africa give the same wise lead to the Mother Country as has already been given

by Australia and New Zealand? The statesmanlike way to end the Black Peril is to give

votes to white women.

Emily Wilding Davison

Woman Suffrage

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September 13, 1911, To the Editor of The Croydon Times, “Woman Suffrage”

Beginning with an acknowledgment of the cultural and historical differences that separate

the United States and Great Britain in the matter of suffrage, Davison moves on to explicate

the rationales the WSPU offered for the nature of the compromises it made. Choosing to

focus on the matter of woman suffrage, the militant suffrage movement sought above all

to displace the notion that, as Davison writes elsewhere, women were regarded as not fully

male and therefore not fully citizens. The shibboleth of women’s demi-humanity, in a world

in which maleness was regarded by default as the normal state of humanity, had persisted

in western culture from the time of Aristotle. Davison regarded it as a more pernicious and

dangerous threat to women’s suffrage than class, and so she finds herself arguing for limited

suffrage, rather than universal suffrage, in order to break “down forever” the “iniquitous sex

bar.”

Sir, –In your issue of September 2nd there is an article headed ‘Woman Suffrage—Limited

or Adult?’ by W.N.E. wherein some American opinions are quoted to show that in America

it is held by Suffragists that ‘limited suffrage’ for women is no good. This fact W.N.E. no

doubt intends to quote, to show that in England also ‘limited suffrage’ (as he, in ignorance,

calls it), is no good. But in pressing this argument W.N.E. is forgetful of one or two

important considerations.

(a) England and America are totally differently situations. England is a very old

country whose constitution is the result of centuries of slow construction and much

tradition. She is only now breaking away from feudalism into democracy. America is a

young country, and started with no traditions and conventions right away upon a

democratic foundation.

(b) The only reasonable principle to be insisted upon in both the old and new

country for the admission of women is that of equality with men. That is the demand upon

which it is made by all Suffrage Societies in Great Britain, which means that so long as the

franchise is a limited one for men, it must also be a limited one for women. The question

for Suffragists is not the franchise qualification, but the removal of the sex bar. Once that

bar is removed, then any further extension of the franchise cannot exclude women. If Adult

Suffrage were introduced before Woman Suffrage it would mean ‘Votes for all men’ and ‘no

votes for women’ and the last state would be worse than the first. With regard to America,

of course the only decent basis on which to give the franchise to women is to give it to all

women, seeing that all men have the vote there.

May I also criticise one or two special points in W.N.E.’s article? He declares

that ‘The claim for Woman Suffrage must rest upon the principles of democracy. There is

no other possible basis.’ I, of course, agree with him that on the two basic Liberal

principles of Government—‘Government of the people, by the people, and for the people, ‘

and that ‘those who obey the laws should have a voice in the laws,’ women should be

enfranchised; but he is wrong in asserting that these are the only possible principles of

democracy, and is once more forgetting that he must face facts and not merely air theories.

In Old England there is an other democratic principle which is so incontrovertible that it

led Democratic America to her independence. It is that ‘there must be no taxation without

representation.’ This is the principle which W.N.E. appears to ignore, and it is important

because it is, at any rate for the present, and for many a long day probably, the basis of the

English franchise. It is also the principle which justifies the present Conciliation Bill.

I really must protest at W.N.E.’s unwarranted assertion that Suffragists deny the

right of any woman to the vote, and that logically they therefore deny the right of every

woman to the vote. As a matter of plain fact Suffragists do not make any specification of a

franchise qualification at all. On nearly every publication issued by the W.S.P.U. runs the

motto—‘We demand the vote on the same terms as it is, or may be, granted to men.’ There

is no word in the demand of denying the vote to any woman or women. The number of

women to be enfranchised varies in proportion relatively to the men’s number. It is true

that the Conciliation Bill does not fully grant this demand. But then, the men did not win

their demand in one bound, and, in fact, have not yet won it. But the conciliation Bill effects

the most important desideratum of all: it breaks down forever the iniquitous sex bar,

which is far more iniquitous than any class bar.

Yours, etc.,

EMILY WILDING DAVISON

31, Coram street,

W.C.

Women on Juries

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Monday, September 11, 1911, To the Editor of The Standard. “Women on Juries”

This letter shows how, in the absence of facts, Davison is always ready with a logical

explanation for a perceived failure of women’s sense of responsibility. The reason she gives is

not a trivial one. Many suffragettes discovered in prison that facilities adequate to women’s

needs were not routinely provided. She is delicate in her assertion, but nonetheless touches

on a major hindrance to women as public citizens, the lack of adequate toilet facilities in

public spaces.

Sir, in your issue of Saturday, you give an account of the difficulties which appear to be

arising in Washington State, owing to the fact that women will not serve on juries, a civic

responsibility which comes upon them as a result of their enfranchisement. One is tempted

to point out, however, that there are probably special circumstances, which have forced

the women who were put down for duty to protest and to reject the duty. One seems to

be that they had not proper accommodation provided for them in their deliberations. It is

quite evident that where juries may have to discuss a case for some hours, where there is

a mixed jury, special arrangements may be necessary. Such facts as these must be made

clear before the charge is hurled against the women of Washington of wanting full civic

privileges without full civic responsibilities.

There is another thought to be put forward—that owing to the far better

consideration given to women in the United States women do not feel the same need for a

fairer chance before the law as is felt by English women, who would fain serve on juries.

I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

EMILY WILDING DAVISON

31, Coram-Street, W.C.

September 7, 1911, To the Editor of The Morning Post

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September 7, 1911, To the Editor of The Morning Post

This brief letter, with its sarcasm and energy, touches on several major themes Davison

frequently addresses in her public letters. Chief among these is the question of who the

English woman is. Invariably Davison answers this question by asserting that the true

Englishwoman cannot be known, because she has been so constructed by social expectations

and norms that her true nature, capacity, and potential are virtually hidden. Davison lays

the fault of this problem directly at the door of men. Yet she is hopeful, because her dismay

is over-matched by an absolute confidence that human culture is progressive. The signature

rhetoric she uses in her letters to convey this implicit faith comprises terms such as “Now,”

“Nowadays,” “no longer,” and “evolution.” Her vision of marriage as a mutual compact of

respect and compromise was a suffragist goal.

Sir,– Your correspondent who signs himself ‘One Who Knows,” has, probably unwittingly,

given in his letter one of the strongest arguments for Woman Suffrage. He asserts that

the modern English woman makes it her business to inveigle some man into marrying

her, and that once accomplished she proceeds to give herself up to selfish enjoyment

and shirks her duties. Although personally I should feel inclined to remark that your

correspondent must be unfortunate in the circle of his acquaintances, and that his remarks

apply rather to an age which is rapidly passing into Limbo with women’s increasing powers

and opportunities, yet, accepting his criterion for the sake of argument, I then throw down

to him the challenge: ‘If women act in this irresponsible, selfish way “a qui la faut”?’ The

fault lies with the men who trained up women in the idea that they were either to be over-

dressed, unintellectual dolls, or miserably underpaid and ill-treated drudges. Women were

either on a pedestal or in the mire. But this artificial absurdity is rapidly passing away.

Nowadays women are learning that they have a responsibility in life, a mission which they

must be free to discharge. They have a right to their own souls, and they have earned

economic independence. As a result, when they marry they do so more and more for love.

Marriage is no longer a soul-market. As women win more and more political and social

independence the standard of marriage will be inevitably raised. It will be entered into

as a solemn and holy contract, which entails self-sacrifice and self-respect on both sides,

and not on one side alone. In short, women’s direct entrance into the State and politics

means that the whole home-life of the nation will be raised and ennobled. This is the law of

evolution, –Yours, &c.,

EMILY WILDING DAVISON

31, Coram-street, Sept. 6