discredited the
movement, and women were urged to dress with a maximum of feminine
charm. Many women obtained finery they could ill afford, to take part in
these demonstrations, and minced their steps as womanly as possible to
freedom....

It would be easy to overstate the efflorescence of distinctively
feminine emotion, dressiness, mysticism, and vanity upon the suffrage
movement. Those things showed for anyone to see. This was the froth of
the whirlpool. What did not show was the tremendous development of the
sense of solidarity among women. Everybody knew that women had been
hitting policemen at Westminster; it was not nearly so showy a fact that
women of title, working women, domestic servants, tradesmen's wives,
professional workers, had all been meeting together and working together
in a common cause, working with an unprecedented capacity and an
unprecedented disregard of social barriers. One noted the nonsensical
by-play of the movement; the way in which women were accustoming
themselves to higher standards of achievement was not so immediately
noticeable. That a small number of women were apparently bent on
rendering the Vote impossible by a campaign of violence and malicious
mischief very completely masked the fact that a very great number of
girls and young women no longer considered it seemly to hang about at
home trying by a few crude inducements to tempt men to marry them, but
were setting out very seriously and capably to master the young man's
way of finding a place for oneself in the world. Beneath the dust and
noise realities were coming about that the dust and noise entirely
failed to represent. We know that some women were shrieking for the
Vote; we did not realise that a generation of women was qualifying for
it.

The war came, the jolt of an earthquake, to throw things into their
proper relationships.

The immediate result was the disappearance of the militant suffragists
from public view for a time, into which the noisier section hastened to
emerge in full scream upon the congenial topic of War Babies. "Men,"
those dreadful creatures, were being camped and quartered all over the
country. It followed, from all the social principles known to Mrs. and
Miss Pankhurst, that it was necessary to provide for an enormous number
of War Babies. Subscriptions were invited. Statisticians are still
looking rather perplexedly for those War Babies; the illegitimate
birth-rate has fallen, and what has become