The Women’s Rebellion

The majority of pre-war women lived, clung to their respectable and moribund security, and dreaded even the limited independence which the Vote would assure them. For the Women’s Rebellion–the outrageous Suffragette Movement of 1910-1914–was above all a thing a movement from darkness into light, and from death into life; and, like the Tory Rebellion, its unconscious motive was the rejection of a moribund, a respectable, and a smothering security. Woman, through her new awareness of the possibilities of an abstract goal in life, was, in effect, suddenly aware of her long-neglected masculinity. The Victorian woman was the angel in the house, the Griselda of her pompous day, the helpmeet who conceived children in submission and without desire, the eternal inferior. The Victorian woman’s sense of an impersonal goal–her masculinity–had, on the face of it, been ruined by nearly a century of humility and dependence; yet, in a thousand repressions and resentments and dreams and desires laid the means to restore it again.