| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Waterloo | |
| Posted by: | Michael Robinson | |
| Date/Time: | 17/04/19 16:08:00 |
| "I wonder if those objecting to these protesters would have had the same attitude to the steps women took at the beginning of the last century to get the vote? I expect so." Indeed. "The main group involved in this backlash against the suffragettes in the London area was the ‘National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage’, which appears to have been organised and sustained by some very middle-class women. In south-west London, a branch of this organisation was quite active in the leafy middle-class suburbs of Chiswick and the surrounding areas, with other groups at Kew and Richmond. The Chiswick branch of the National League started life in mid-1909 under the title of the ‘Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League’. In October, 1909, the League held its first general meeting Suffragette and reported a membership of 56. The following month, a public meeting was organised by the League at Chiswick Town Hall, where one of the women speakers, Miss Kathleen Howieson, warned gravely that the granting of suffrage to women would mean ‘class war’ and ‘Socialism’, and that – in turn – would mean ‘revolution and anarchy’. In 1912, a ‘well-attended’ social gathering of the League held in the Hogarth Room of Chiswick Town Hall saw a number of speeches being made, all expressing notably conservative and sceptical attitudes to the whole idea of giving women greater rights. Miss Norma Maunder, for example, in her speech, asserted that man ‘was the backbone of the country and women the backbone of the homes of the country’. She said that women were ‘absolutely unfitted’ for governing a nation." https://damesnet.com/?p=3275 |