Bethlehem Road - Anne Perry [12]
“Men may go on all manner of adventures and brave the result, come what may, but most women will look to the outcome of a thing, knowing that their children must eat and be clothed, that there must be a safe home for them not only today and tomorrow, but next year and ten years from now! Women are less reckless.” She thought of all the wise and brave women she had known, discounting the idiotic things she had done herself, and the risks both she and Emily had taken. “When all the shouting and the heroics are over, who is it that will tend the sick, bury the dead and start over? Women! Our opinions should count, our judgment of a man’s honesty and worth to represent us should weigh in the balance too.”
“You’re right!” Miss Wutherspoon cried from the platform. “You’re absolutely right! And if Members of Parliament had to account to women as well as men to get elected, there wouldn’t be the injustices there are now!”
“What injustices?” someone demanded. “What does a good woman need that she does not have?”
“No natural woman wants to expose herself to ridicule,” the woman in the plum-colored hat said loudly, her voice rising with increasing indignation, “by parading for people to accept or reject her, pleading with them to listen to her, choose her, believe in her opinions or trust her judgment in affairs she knows nothing about! Miss Taylor is a laughingstock, and far from being a friend to women, she is our worst enemy. Not even Dr. Pankhurst would be seen in public with her! Standing for Parliament, indeed! Next thing you know we’ll become harridans, like that miserable Ivory woman, who has abandoned all semblance of decency and restraint which is essential to a woman and all that is precious to society—indeed to civilization!”
There were several cries of approval and even louder hisses and expostulations of outrage. Some even demanded that the traitors to the cause should leave and go back to their nurseries, or whatever other confining place they usually inhabited.
A stout woman in bombazine raised an umbrella, unfortunately catching the ferrule of it in an elderly housemaid’s skirts. There was a hiccup and a shriek of alarm. The housemaid, thinking she was being assaulted for her abuse of the lady in the plum hat, whisked her handbag round and landed it soundly on the head of the woman in bombazine, and the resulting melee had very little to do with the exercise of privilege or responsibility, and even less to do with Parliament.
Having no wish to become involved in a brawl, Charlotte withdrew. She was only a few yards outside the hall via the rear exit when she saw the woman whose face had drawn her attention. She was standing quite close, unaware of Charlotte, her attention caught by a hansom drawn up at the curb. The woman had her back to Charlotte and was arguing fiercely with a slim, elegantly dressed man whose fair hair shone almost white in the sun. He was obviously extremely annoyed.
“My dear Parthenope, this is both unseemly, and to be frank, a trifle ridiculous. You are letting me down by even being seen in such a place, and I am distressed that you should not have realized it!”
Charlotte could not see the woman’s face, but her voice was thick with a confusion of emotions.
“I am tempted to make the obvious answer to excuse myself, Cuthbert, and say that no one there knew who I was. But that is irrelevant.”
“Indeed it is! The risk—”
But she cut him short. “I am not talking about the risk! What if I am known to care that women should be represented in Parliament?”
“Women are