The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [175]
The hall was one of those wooden structures with windows too high to see out of. There was a platform, on which the speakers sat, and rows of wooden chairs, of which maybe the first six were taken, the heads of the women sitting there quite invisible under the great dishes and wheels of their hats, their shoulders a mixture of decorous spinsterly dove-colours and brighter greens and purples. There were six men, including Herbert Methley, who was on the platform next to his wife, Frank Mallett and Arthur Dobbin, and Leslie Skinner, who had come to support Etta, who was also speaking. There was one soldier, an explosives expert, who had come with his wife, who was a member of Mrs. Humphry Ward’s Anti-Suffrage League. There was one grocer, who was bookish, and went to the evening classes of Mrs. Marian Oakeshott, who was also on the platform.
Elsie and Pomona sat down two or three rows behind the last occupied row. From the platform, Herbert Methley smiled down on them, approving their presence. Elsie gave a tight little smile in return. Pomona folded her pale hands in her flowery lap, and turned her face to the light from the dusty window.
There were five speakers, three before lunch and two afterwards. Miss Dace spoke first. She was precisely eloquent about the injustice to women of being unrepresented in Parliament, unable to vote on matters which concerned their lives, their work, their health. She noted drily that when the words “Woman” or “Women” appeared in the names of laws, these were always laws which made the condition of women less free, more uncomfortable. Voters were householders and taxpayers, but women who were both must pay their taxes without any right to have their views, or needs, consulted or represented. Elsie tried hard to listen carefully. She liked Miss Dace’s dry, ironic, passionate tone. She managed to work out what “suffrage” meant, having always vaguely thought that it was to do with women suffering. It must be like that bit of the Bible “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not.” But Miss Dace wanted Parliament to suffer single householders and taxpayers like herself to vote in elections, and a kind of anger welled up in Elsie, for she was not sure how this helped a penniless young woman, camped in a house with a pantry full of beautiful, obscene female jars and vessels, who was full of bodily needs she could not describe, and was certainly suffering. But Miss Dace was a good woman, she put things straight, she was a reasonable woman, as far as she went.
When Patty Dace had come to her conclusion, the colonel’s wife rose to speak. The country was fighting a terrible war, in a distant country, she said, and the British Empire entailed military responsibility in far-flung places which British housewives could neither imagine nor understand. Let women guard the Home, and the values of the Home, and leave armies and economics to the men whose work they naturally were. Miss Dace replied that those intrepid women who had visited the concentration camps in which the Boer women and children were kept by the British army might be thought to have contributed to the moral well-being of the army and the well-being of the suffering Boers. There was rustling and tapping in the room. Elsie didn’t know what a “concentration” camp was. Miss Dace turned on the colonel’s wife and asked her, would she then remove women from the local government and Poor Law Boards to which they could now be elected and on which they worked efficaciously? No, said the colonel’s wife, she admitted they did competent work.
It is always so, said Miss Dace. So far, and no further. Your movement would be going against any such employment before it was tried, and now, like King Canute with the tide, you cry, so far, and no further. But the tide will flow in, it will rise, you will see.
The next speaker was not Herbert, but Phoebe Methley.
Elsie took a good long look at Herbert Methley’s