pression of a great mass and
mingling of convergent feelings, of a widespread, confused persuasion
among modern educated women that the conditions of their relations with
men were oppressive, ugly, dishonouring, and had to be altered. They
had not merely adopted the Vote as a symbol of equality; it was fairly
manifest to me that, given it, they meant to use it, and to use it
perhaps even vindictively and blindly, as a weapon against many things
they had every reason to hate....

I remember, with exceptional vividness, that great night early in the
session of 1909, when--I think it was--fifty or sixty women went to
prison. I had been dining at the Barham's, and Lord Barham and I came
down from the direction of St. James's Park into a crowd and a confusion
outside the Caxton Hall. We found ourselves drifting with an immense
multitude towards Parliament Square and parallel with a silent,
close-packed column of girls and women, for the most part white-faced
and intent. I still remember the effect of their faces upon me. It was
quite different from the general effect of staring about and divided
attention one gets in a political procession of men. There was an
expression of heroic tension.

There had been a pretty deliberate appeal on the part of the women's
organisers to the Unemployed, who had been demonstrating throughout that
winter, to join forces with the movement, and the result was shown
in the quality of the crowd upon the pavement. It was an ugly,
dangerous-looking crowd, but as yet good-tempered and sympathetic. When
at last we got within sight of the House the square was a seething seat
of excited people, and the array of police on horse and on foot might
have been assembled for a revolutionary outbreak. There were dense
masses of people up Whitehall, and right on to Westminster Bridge. The
scuffle that ended in the arrests was the poorest explosion to follow
such stupendous preparations....

3

Later on in that year the women began a new attack. Day and night, and
all through the long nights of the Budget sittings, at all the piers
of the gates of New Palace Yard and at St. Stephen's Porch, stood women
pickets, and watched us silently and reproachfully as we went to and
fro. They were women of all sorts, though, of course, the independent
worker-class predominated. There were grey-headed old ladies standing
there, sturdily charming in the rain; battered-looking, ambiguous women,
with something of the