For those who still are in the Stone Age

Emmeline Pankhurst was a well-known British reformer who fought for women’s rights at home and abroad. She was particularly determined to gain the right to vote, or suffrage, for women. To gain publicity for her cause and to protest the treatment of women, she and her supporters staged hunger strikes and even destroyed private property. In 1913 she gave a speech titled “Why We Are Militant” to the Women’s Political and Social Union in New York City. At that time women were still not allowed to vote in either the United States or Great Britain. The following is an excerpt from the speech.

“All my life I have tried to understand why it is that men who value their citizenship as their dearest (most valued) possession seem to think citizenship ridiculous when it is to be applied to the women of their race. And I find an explanation, and it is the only one I can think of. . . . A thought came to me in my prison cell, and it was this: that to men women are not human beings like themselves. Some men think we are superhuman; they put us on pedestals; they revere (worship) us; they think we are too fine and too delicate to come down into the hurly-burly (rough) conditions of life. Other men think us sub-human (less than human); they think we are a strange species unfortunately having to exist for the perpetuation (continued existence of) of the race. They think that we are fit for drudgery (boring and unpleasant work), but that in some strange way our minds are not like theirs, our love for great things is not like theirs, and so we are a sort of sub-human species.

We are neither superhuman nor are we sub-human. We are just human beings like yourselves.
When we were patient, when we believed in argument and persuasion, they said, “You don’t really want it [equality] because, if you did, you would do something unmistakable to show you were determined to have it.” And then when we did something unmistakable they said, “You are behaving so badly that you show you are not fit for it.”

Now, gentlemen, in your heart of hearts you do not believe that. You know perfectly well that there never was a thing worth having that was not worth fighting for. You know perfectly well that if the situation were reversed, if you had no constitutional rights and we had all of them, if you had the duty of paying and obeying and trying to look as pleasant, and we were the proud citizens who could decide our fate and yours, because we knew what was good for you better than you knew yourselves, you know perfectly well that you wouldn’t stand for it a single day, and you would be perfectly justified in rebelling against such intolerable (unacceptable) conditions.”

=D