Good men are crucial for women’s rights
Why should suffragettes be pardoned? The 1,000 or so women who were arrested during the long battle for the vote were freedom fighters, not criminals. It was the Establishment that jailed and force-fed them that was in error, not they. To ask for a pardon from sentences passed by a system which, at this distance, looks backward and cruel, feels demeaning and irrelevant. Hell, a criminal record in that cause is a badge of honour, not a stain on the character.
Campaigners seem to think a pardon from the present Home Secretary (“a fitting tribute”) will somehow make it better. But we shouldn’t want to make it better. It was horrible and distressing and that should be recognised and remembered, not smoothed over to soothe Snowflake sensibilities. Having just read Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s Women’s Suffrage: A Short History of a
Great Movement, one image refuses to leave my mind. The attempt to break the spirit of a prisoner by “turning a hose on her in her cell in a midwinter night”. As Fawcett writes so piercingly: “The fiercest of the suffragettes have been far more ready to suffer pain than inflict it.”
History has exonerated the suffragettes a trillion times over. Every time a woman posts her slip in the ballot box, every time a girls’ school comes top of the league tables, each time a prime minister is accompanied by the delightful word “she”. Mrs Pankhurst and her soldiers in petticoats (WSPU) won the war with the alliance-building suffragist Millicent Fawcett and her pacifist NUWSS. Who now spares a thought for their deluded and forgotten enemies?
And who can possibly doubt the scope of what the suffragettes achieved exactly a century ago when, with exquisite timing, Doritos announces the launch of a “ladyfriendly” version of its tortilla chip? According to Pepsico’s chief executive, women don’t like to crunch too loudly in public or lick their fingers. So, Doritos-for-girls will be “low-crunch” and fit into a handbag. So thoughtful! Special Women’s Wotsits that don’t smell of ripe farts must surely be in the pipeline, although Skips may be fluffy and feminine enough as they are.
Yesterday, we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Representation of the People Act, which gave some women over 30 the right to vote, I found myself wondering what Fawcett would think of the society she helped to transform. And what she would feel there was left to do?
Alas, we cannot hear the great campaigner for equal rights’ take on the Lady Dorito on which furious young feminists have already imposed a fatwa. We do know that Fawcett believed it was “constitutional agitation” that would prove more effective in converting the general public and parliament. “We were going to show the world how to gain reforms without violence, without killing people and blowing up buildings, and doing the other silly things that men have done when they wanted the laws altered,” Fawcett wrote.
It’s striking how passionately she believed that good men were crucial to the women’s cause, even persuading Sir Hubert Parry to compose a nicer tune for the suffragists’ hymn, Jerusalem – an early example of gender diversity delivering harmonious results.
A similar sentiment runs through A Good Time to Be a Girl, Helena Morrissey’s memoir-cum-manifesto about her hugely successful career as a fund manager and her 30% Club campaign to get boards to take more female directors. Millicent Fawcett would adore this book, I think. Morrissey feels the time is right for a revolution in working practices, which acknowledges the fact that women are done with being “honorary men” and younger guys also seek a better work-life balance. Diversity, she argues, should be rebranded, losing its association with political correctness and, instead, making the strong business case for mixed teams.
Bravely and unfashionably, Morrissey argues that women are different from men. (Who knew?) Female leaders like her don’t feel comfortable with the “tough, formidable” ball-breaker template they inherited from the chaps. She makes the case for “a new feminine brand of power” that uses our gifts of empathy and consensus-building. We should, she says, “studiously avoid even the slightest implication that attaining gender equality involves pitting women against men – we are trying to move on from the past oppression of one sex, not repeat it”.
What a refreshing change from recent man-hating diatribes. If the #Metoo crowd are suffragettes committed to radical, occasionally reckless action, then Morrissey is a suffragist like Millicent Fawcett, convinced that patient social reform can be brought about by good women, and men. There will always be “retro” males, she concedes, “but there are many more who are concerned about backward steps, too, and we need to continue to work with our male allies.”
When so many women have so much opportunity, the mother-of-nine cautions us to be on our guard against “adopting a victimhood narrative. In many parts of society today, women are not victims unless we choose to be. That description should be reserved for those who are genuinely oppressed, disadvantaged or mistreated.”
I guess I must be more of a suffragist than a suffragette. I cheered when I read that. Morrissey – who not only voted for Brexit but believes the obstacles are exaggerated and the outcome can be hugely positive – should be put in charge of the negotiations forthwith. Hooray for Helena and less of the Naysaying Nellies. Meanwhile, I am buying both books, Fawcett’s and Morrissey’s, for my feminist daughter. I’d like her to know that what the former wrote a century ago, the latter still believes to be true. “What draws men and women together is stronger than that which drives them apart.”