The following resolution was put to the meeting and carried with acclamation: “That this Parliament of women expresses its indignation that while every measure in the King’s Speech vitally affects the interests of their sex, and while heavier financial burdens are to be laid upon woman tax-payers, the Government have not included in the programme for the session a measure to confer the Parliamentary vote upon duly qualified women. The women here assembled call upon the Government to introduce and carry into law this session a measure giving votes to women on the same terms as to men.
“A Deputation is hereby appointed, to whom is entrusted the duty of forthwith conveying this resolution to the Prime Minister at the House of Commons and eliciting his reply.”
A copy was then handed to each member of the Deputation.
Of all the undesirable possibilities before me, I dreaded most lest by some horrible twist of fate the leaders of the Deputation should be refused admittance, and I, if recognised, should have the lonely privilege thrust upon me of being received. I had never made a regular speech, and two attempts I had made at narrating my experiences of the previous October to a village audience had not been reassuring. My own point of view was definite enough, but I did not feel equipped to speak for others. When deciding to go on the Deputation I had, however, taken stock of my representative character and asked myself for which group of women I should stand, what was my atom’s share in this movement if I did not strain after any vicarious office but merely added my own personal weight to the scale? Without doubt I myself was one of that numerous gang of upper class leisured class spinsters, unemployed, unpropertied, unendowed, uneducated, without equipment or training for public service, economically dependent entirely upon others, not masters of their own leisure, however oppressively abundant that might seem to the onlooker. In a class where property runs with primogeniture, the first-born, if a female, is overlooked. In a class the whole status of which is based on property, on wealth to live at ease and in luxury, property is only dealt out to women, if at all, after male relatives have been served first, and then, as a rule, in much less proportion. Posts of honour and remuneration are barred to them in nearly all professions, in even those few they are allowed to enter. They remain almost invariably without honour of titles or lands or wealth, even where their services have been sought. Posts of Government are exclusively for men, with the sole exception of the Sovereign. Trained to luxury and untrained to remunerative work, they are for the most part dependents from childhood to the grave. A maiming subserviency is so conditional to their very existence that it becomes an aim in itself, an ideal. Driven through life with blinkers on, they are unresentful of the bridle, the rein and the whip, uncritical of the direction in which they are driven, unmindful of the result to others as well as to themselves of their maintainer’s beliefs and policy, whatever they may be. The bride at the sacred ritual of her marriage festival hears from her husband the words, “With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, with all my worldly goods I thee endow.” She knows at the time and she learns yet more intimately as life goes on that those words have no practical bearing, and that at her husband’s death the greater part of even that property which had been seemingly made over to her during his lifetime will pass from her hands at the wane of her lonely existence, when she needs it most, into those of her son or some more distant relative. The literal, practical, interpretation of that husband’s vow--yes, of the vow even of good and well-intentioned husbands--most usually is: “With this ring I thee bind, with my body I thee control, with none of my worldly goods I thee endow.” As a widow more often than not she sinks, because of her financial position, to a social state out of touch with all her past life. But at least the wives, the widows, generally have children through whom their powers of service to their families and to the community in general are to a certain extent developed and recognised, and which give them a certain insight into the realities of existence. They also have known well-being and vicarious honour through their husbands. But to the single woman, the old maid of later years, the paralysing worship of incapacity dominates life, the chain of limitations and restrictions is but seldom broken, and never overcome save by exceptional force of character or ability.