Beside the sink there was a tiny sash window about the level of my head. When this was open I could catch sight of the yard where remand prisoners exercised. I was surprised to see that many of them wore prison dress. This meant either that they had been made to change their clothes, or that remand and convicted prisoners were exercising together. Seeing a great number of prisoners in a group was a most depressing sight. They were packed quite close, touching each other as they went round the narrow asphalt path in single file. They nearly all of them looked ill. Their faces wore an expression of extreme dejection; the lifeless, listless way they walked, enhanced the look of entire detachment of one from the other; in spite of being so closely herded, each seemed in a world of her own individual sorrow. Anxiety, suffering, bitterness, and a harrowing tale of want or degradation was told by the clothes of those not in prison dress. The procession was more heartrending than anything my imagination could have conceived; it took away my breath to look at them. Why are they there? What has driven these poor wrecks into this harbour? What is being done for them here to give them courage, self-reliance, hope, belief in better possibilities for themselves and their children, opportunity to mend their own lives, better conditions of work, fairer payment, and above all a more honourable recognition of their services as women, of their needs, and of their rights; the vitality to fight for their own welfare against unjust handicaps, prejudiced ignorance of their wants and tyrannous repression of their attempts to cry out for wider labour markets?
We of the remand hospital No. 2 most often exercised in this same yard in the afternoon. We were only about six in number, sometimes only two or three, but, since seeing the procession of the morning, their personalities seemed to haunt the yard. I thought of them as beads of a necklace, detached, helpless and useless, and wondered how long it would be before they were threaded together by means of the women’s movement into a great organised band, self-expressive yet co-ordinated, and ruled by the bond of mutual service. The test of a chain’s strength is in its weakest link. Where is our chain weakest? Not in the wretched victims who daily paced this yard, not in the debtor, the drunkard, the thief, the hooligan, the prostitute, the child murderer. These miseries were mostly the direct outcome of harmful and unjust laws. Amongst the few that remain of spontaneously criminal type, their number is insignificant, their influence negligible; they act as cautions rather than instigators, although they call for all the remedial forces which the State or individuals can devote to them. They themselves are diseased exceptions, but they belong to groups of women, home workers, wage earners, skilled craftswomen, who have kept alight the old traditions of serviceableness, utility, and the powers of women. They have already made many efforts to unite and to preserve their nobility of independence. They, moreover, are quick to respond and eager to serve the modern women’s movement. No, the weakest link in the chain of womanhood is the woman of the leisured class. Isolated and detached, she has but little sense of kinship with other women. For her there is no bond of labour, no ties of mutual service; her whole life is spent in the preservation of appearances, and she seems hardly ever to probe down to the bone of realities. Child-having remains her glory, the one bit of full-livedness in an otherwise most arid desert. This is the one basis on which she feels herself united to other women, and the wrongs and sufferings of child-bearers stand out as the exception on which you can sometimes get her to move on behalf of other women. Until these women can be educated as to the lives of the bulk of women, brought up against the laws with regard to them that now disgrace the statute book, made to feel the horror of custom which still undermines their own existence, and to burst through the gilded bars which hold their own lives in bondage, they act upon the social organism in a way that is almost wholly harmful. Only when their eyes have been opened will their “influence” and “example” bear out a reasonable meaning of those words and their position of privilege make them worthy to lead.