A Suffragette Remembers

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 221, 17 September 1943, Page 16

A Suffragette Remembers

An Enlish suffragette who recently visited New Zealand described the English woman's "Fight for Freedom" in very vivid terms. "TT wasn’t that we liked violence or that we wanted it, but women had been trying to get the vote for 40 years by peaceful and reasonable persuasion, and they just hadn’t got anywhere. We didn’t like attacking policemen, or breaking windows or behaving like hooligans, but we found that this was News. Hooliganism made people’ read about and think about women’s franchise. A few peaceful meetings by a handful of educated university women didn’t. We got so excited, too, that we didn’t mind much what we did. I remember being dropped on the marble floor of the lobby and I didn’t feel a thing. I just got up and made a bolt for the door shouting ‘Votes for Women.’ We enjoyed holding up a debate in the House of Commons one day, too, when we chained and padlocked ourselves to the grille of the Ladies’ Gallery. Most of us would have been ashamed to behave like that in cold blood, but we just thought of ourselves as martyrs in "The C use,’ and we behaved as fanatically as martyrs. "You would have been surprised if you could have gone to the suffragette celebration that was held this year to commemorate the getting of the vote, to see in the group of mild-looking old ladies the termagents who struck fear into the hearts of politicians at Westminster."