British Columbia needs more suffragettes

Dear editor: The world would be a different place today if World War I hadn’t interrupted the suffragette crusade.

Although Millicent Fawcett was the intellectual founder of equal rights for women in the U.K. and a believer in non-violence, the quiet movement she led from 1890-1919 went barely noticed until Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, took off the kid gloves, injected enthusiastic aggression, and made it a women’s crusade.

Christabel led the charge in 1905 by accosting Winston Churchill in Parliament with the demand he answer her question, “Do you believe women should get the vote?”

Arrested and imprisoned, she set the pattern for her steely mother who was imprisoned 12 times in one year. Hunger strikes; forced feedings; beatings in the street; sexual assault; the death of their first martyr, Emily Davison, run down by a horse in the 1913 Derby at Epsom deterred them not a whit.

It took another five years before they were able to convince parliamentarians of their cause; but not until 1928 did a different government grant them voting equality.

Helen Pankhurst (Emmeline’s great-granddaughter and Sylvia’s granddaughter), described all the parliaments up to 1928 as “male, pale and stale.”

She probably meant the jest to be true of the 1928 Parliament as well, but that Parliament finally passed the bill giving equality of voting to both genders. Although Emmeline had finally won the battle, she died several weeks later.

As Pankhurst writes in her book Deeds Not Words, the Story of Women’s Rights, Then and Now, the struggle for women’s rights, as well as the gender gap, are still as much alive, but unwell today as they were almost 100 years ago.

Her suffragette forebears in the U.K. who had won the vote had felt fulfilled because they had finally been included in the first-past-the-post system.

But during the intervening 90 years, almost all developed western democracies have switched to proportional representation, yet the U.K., Canada, and the U.S. still use the old system.

Data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union of 2014 show Canada’s House of Commons is made up of 75 per cent men, 25 per cent women under first-pastthe-post. That places us 59th in the world.

Major western democracies using proportional representation boast an average approaching 60 per cent men, 40 per cent women. Those countries that elect the most women use proportional representation. Such fairer proportions produces more respectful working assemblies and much more diverse representation.

Today’s “suffragette” issues of sexual harassment, equal pay and fairer democracy now display the same gender inequality as in pre-1928.

Women have been held down for far too long from forming an equal force in our governments.

The phenomena of unequal pay and promotion, the #MeToo movement, and the need to make every vote equal are just a few of the issues demanding the re-emergence of the suffragette movement. The world needs massive change. Ian MacKenzie,

Kamloops