The First Book of Suffrage deals with the final hours in the struggle. The Second Book of Suffrage represents those who brought the issue forward in the nineteenth century outside of NWSA.

Chapter XX
THE WOMEN WRITERS by Elizabeth Robins
Most of what I have to say will be addressed to my fellow Women Writers. But I should like, in passing, to put before the gentlemen present a point of view too often obscured in this controversy of ours. There are people under the impression that Anti-Suffragists have a better opinion of men that Suffragists have. I want to say that the very reverse of that is true. I might go farther, and say that only Suffragists really have faith in men. Only Suffragists really respect them. You cannot respect men if you do not respect human nature. There is such a very great deal of human nature in men. I was reminded afresh a day or two ago of the way in which Anti-Suffragists (all unconsciously) betray their poor opinion of men. This one of many instances occurs in the speech a woman writer made, a little while ago, at a dinner of the Hardwick Society--a speech against the resolution in favour of women as jury members. What this lady said may be supposed to have had some weight, for she was chosen as a brilliant and distinguished (deservedly distinguished) representative of our profession--not the founder and leader of the Anti-Suffragist party, but a woman well-accustomed to the success that crowned her efforts on the occasion to which I refer. For the resolution she spoke against was defeated by a large majority. In the course of her speech this Woman Writer said she was opposed to the participation of her own sex in the administration of justice. She declared that woman's nature did not contain "a proper element of justice" . . . . that women were by nature unfair, though (notice this), though their unfairness, in some instances, was a source of fascination. "Where," she asked, "would men get sympathy if women were impartial?"

The report does not say how the great legal lights and other learned gentlemen met that shock--but it is the kind of back-handed compliment the Anti-Suffragist will often pay.

Only the Suffragists appreciate you, gentlemen! If we criticize you from time to time, what does that show but our own good faith, and our confidence in yours. We will criticize you to your faces, and give you a chance to set us right! Now, to my fellow Women Writers I have something to say about our work--about the field for the exercise of literary talent, and for service to our Cause.

We have agreed before today as to the practically limitless power of Suggestion. When we talk about Suggestion we know we are dealing with forces beyond any reach of science as yet to gauge. Still we notice how, for ages, this great factor of Suggestion has been pressed into the service of the education of men. From the time a boy is old enough to follow a fairy tale, he is told how Jack killed the Giant. Jack always kills the Giant, just as David always slays Goliath. When the boy is older he begins to take from history, from the classics, and from literature in general, the incentive and the cue for action.

The Philosophy of History is new in education. Until yesterday history was little more than the record of the deeds of heroes--of men who fought against great obstacles and overcame them.

Now what impression is the eager girl-mind given of the world? That is the place not only where all the great deeds are done by men--but a place where all the great qualities are said to be masculine. The world will never know how much power to serve it has been killed in women's hearts by that old phrase, "Only a girl." The pages of the past are strewn with such records as that which says: "A daughter was born this day to Duke Ercole, and received the name of Beatrice, being the child of Madonna Leonora, his wife. And there were no rejoicings--because everyone wished for a son." Yet what boy of that noble house made so great a figure in fifteenth-century Italy--what Prince of D'Este exercised such influence upon art and politics as this same Beatrice? And in whom of all her house is the general reader (as well as the student of the Renaissance) so ready to take an interest in to-day?

My complaint is that enough has not been made of such traces as history preserves of significant lives lived by women. When biographies are attempted, too often they fall into feeble hands. Or worse--into the hands of those literary scavengers who search women's lives in the spirit of Peeping Tom. Some of the greatest women of the past have suffered most from this sort of posthumous dishonor. When we read the pages of such chroniclers as I have in mind, we see again and yet again that the fine work the woman did was an offense--for which she is made to pay by gross intrusion into her private life, and by misleading accounts of some detail which the intrusion revealed. What is there in such biographies to inspire and lead you on? Everything rather to lame the spirit, and drive you back into obscurity. Yet these literary outrages should rather call upon women to take possession of this field themselves.

As an illustration of what a woman can do here, let us take that fine example of art, which was also a fine example of literary friendship, Mrs. Gaskell's "Life of Charlotte Brontë." Very gifted men have tried their hands at that story. Oblivion is their portion.

Would that George Eliot had found a Mrs. Gaskell too! George Eliot's life fell into the hands of a man whom every lover of literature must honour on other grounds. His failure over George Eliot's life was the reward of his secret contempt for greatness when it appeared in the guise of a woman. I think few well-intentioned men can enjoy writing about a woman's life. They do it with so embarrassed an air. Perhaps they feel like a man asked to do housework when he longs to follow the fortunes of soldiers, kings, conquistadores.

But the distaste for recording the domestic life of woman is as nothing compared to the distaste for contemplating her in any other relation. Before that dilemma you will notice how the less irate man will take refuge in facetiousness. When the diplomatists of Great Catherine's day were routed by the Empress, they salved their feelings by calling her "Kitty of Russia"--well behind her back, as has been said. Some of the most distinguished men of the last century, who went to see George Eliot, were disturbed at finding her an object of general homage. They came away joking nervously about the High Priestess, the Oracle, the Sibyl. No such need to ridicule a great influence afflicted these gentlemen at the spectacle of reverence shown George Meredith--reverence so gladly paid by women as well as men. But we must forgive those gentlemen. Shakespeare himself could not resist belittling Joan of Arc.

Men have one excuse for this sort of blindness which women have not. Women know that, advantageous as it may be to be born a man, it is a tremendously fine thing to be born a woman. This is the knowledge we must pass on to girls. I hear there are girls who hate so-called girls' books. They cannot have been given Miss Evelyn Sharp's. But why do they hate the ordinary girls' book? Because many a girl resents being put off with mere goody-goody, and variants of the Patient-Griselda theme. They like to hear about girls who feel as they themselves feel, and who do some of the things they long to do.

The average woman, too, takes an interest in other women, and in other women's achievements--an interest which, in the average man, seems largely confined to the love story. The woman likes the love story too. But she knows very well that isn't all there is to be said about a woman's life.

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