chapter 3

, "The Emancipation of Domesticity."]

While he was writing these pages and after their appearance in print, G.K. was constantly asked to debate the question of Women's Suffrage. He was an anti-suffragist, partly because he was a democrat. The suffrage agitation in England was conducted by a handful of women, mainly of the upper classes; and it gave Cecil Chesterton immense pleasure to head articles on the movement with the words, "Votes for Ladies." G.K. too felt that the suffrage agitation was really doing harm by dragging a red herring across the path of necessary social reform. If the vast majority of women did not want votes it was undemocratic to force votes upon them. Also, if rich men had oppressed poor men all through the course of history, it was exceedingly probable that rich women would also oppress poor women. Both in _What's Wrong With the World_ and in debating on the subject, Chesterton brushed aside as absurd and irrelevant the suggestion that women were inferior to men and what was called the physical force argument. But he did maintain that if the vote meant anything at all (which it probably did not in the England he was living in), it meant that side of life which belongs to masculinity and which the normal woman dislikes and rather despises.

All we men had grown used to our wives and mothers, and grandmothers, and great aunts all pouring a chorus of contempt upon our hobbies of sport, drink and party politics. And now comes Miss Pankhurst with tears in her eyes, owning that all the women were wrong and all the men were right. . . . We told our wives that Parliament had sat late on most essential business; but it never crossed our minds that our wives would believe it. We said that everyone must have a vote in the country; similarly our wives said that no one must have a pipe in the drawing-room. In both cases the idea was the same. "It does not matter much, but if you let those things slide there is chaos." We said that Lord Huggins or Mr. Buggins was absolutely necessary to the country. We knew quite well that nothing is necessary to the country except that the men should be men and the women women. We knew this; we thought the women knew it even more clearly; and we thought the women would say it. Suddenly, without warning, the women have begun to say all the nonsense that we ourselves hardly believed when we said it. . . .*

[* From