THE SUFFRAGETTES.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXV, Issue 48, 25 February 1913, Page 3

THE SUFFRAGETTES.

DELEGATES AT AUCKLAND. JUSTIFY MILITANT TACTICS. A well attended meeting in the Auckland Chamber of Commerce was addressed on Thursday evening by Miss Margaret Hodge and Miss Harriet Newcomb, two delegates from the Australian and New Zealand Women Voters’ Association, London, upon the subject of woman’s suffrage in the Old Country. Mrs Blundell presided. The Star report states that Miss Hodge began by remarking that since her arrival in the dominion it had been obvious to her that the woman’s influence was being increasingly felt in public matters. She had read the remarks of Mr Justice Edwards at the Supreme Court regarding criminal assaults of a certain character, and that, she felt, was as clear a sign of the female voters’ influence as could be desired. With this she contrasted, at a later stage, the English law which

gave a man six months’ for stealing a coat, but for cruelly boating his wife, one month, with the option oi a fine. The speaker proceeded to trace the growth of the suffrage movement in Great Britain from its beginning in 1832, when the Reform Bill was passed. She pointed out that prior to 1832 women had voids equally with men, though the privilege was possessed by a very small proportion of either sex, on account of the high property qualification. The Reform Bill, however, took away the vote from Women, and it had never been restored. The speaker’s contention was that the effort to obtain redress of the many wrongs suffered by women at Home was vain unless women were given vote. Experience had shown that members of Parliament were so occupied with trying to please their male constituents that measures urged by women in the interests of their sex never had a chance of becoming law. The industrial revolution, she said, had taken away much of the work which formerly had been done by women in their homes—spinning and weaving, for example—and women were given in its place work which was paid for at starvation wages. There were other urgent matters — the white slave traffic, the burden of intemperance and immorality upon yet unborn infants, the needlessly high infantile death rate. For the abatement of all these the woman’s vote was needed. There was no fear of a “sox war” or of the rise of the “new woman”—human nature and experience made such things impossible. The speaker justified the militant tactics of English suffragettes on the ground that by no other means could the country he roused to the need for a change. The suffragettes, she said, took no pleasure in destruction—theirs was indeed a “militancy of martyrdom.” Miss Newcomb dealt at some length with the progress of woman suffrage outside England, and the part played by Now Zealand in the movement.

At the close the following resolution was carried unanimously: “That the enfranchised women of Auckland, assembled at this meeting, desire to record their deep sympathy with their sisters in Great Britain and Ireland who are fighting for the vote, and respecfully urge Mr Asquith and his Cabinet to bring forward without delay a measure of enfranchisement for British women, and by this act of jusdice to put an end to a struggle fraught with much bitterness and involving cruel suffering to their sex.”