Thousands, and tens of thousands of women who pass through the Eighth Year, not unscathed, find another way out. They are finding it now through this new femininist movement which is linked up with the cause of Women’s Suffrage. The Eighth Year produces many suffragettes, militant and otherwise. At first, in the first years of their married life, they scoffed at the idea of Votes for Women. They could not see the sense of it. They hated the vulgarities of the business, the shamelessness of it, the ugly squalor of these scuffles with the police, these fights with the crowds, these raids on the House of Commons. It was opposed to all their ideals of femininity and to all their traditions of girlhood. “The hussies ought to be whipped,” is the verdict of the young wife in the first stage of her romantic affection. But, later on, when romance has worn very threadbare in the little home, when reality is beginning to poke its head through the drawing-room windows, she finds herself taking an interest in this strange manifestation which seems to be inspired by some kind of madness. She is silent now when some new phase in the conflict is being discussed in her presence. She listens and ponders. Presently she goes out of her way to get introduced to some suffrage woman on the outskirts of her acquaintance. She is surprised to find her a wonderfully cheerful, and apparently sane, woman, very keen, very alert, and with a great sense of humor—utterly unlike her tired, bored and melancholy self. Perhaps she is quite a young woman, a bachelor girl, earning her own living, down in Chelsea, or as a typist secretary in the City. But young as she is she has dived into all sorts of queer studies—the relations between men and women, the divorce laws, the science of eugenics—and she discusses them with an amazing frankness, and in a most revolutionary spirit, startling, and a little appalling, at first to this wife in her Eighth Year. She has made up her mind conclusively on all the great questions of life. She pooh-poohs romantic love. “There is too much fuss made about it,” she says. “It is a mere episode, like influenza. There are bigger things.” She holds herself perfectly free to choose her mate, and to remedy any little mistake which she may make in her choice. At present she prefers her independence and her own job, which she likes, thank you very much. She is tremendously enthusiastic about the work which women have got to do in the world, and there is nothing they cannot do, in her opinion. She claims an absolute equality with men. In fact, she is inclined to claim a superiority. After all, men are poor things.... Altogether she is a most remarkable young woman, and she seems to get tremendous fun out of life—and this wife in her Eighth Year, without agreeing with her yet envies her!

Or perhaps the wife meets a suffrage woman of middle-age. She, too, is a cheerful, keen, alert, bustling woman with cut-and-dried opinions on subjects about which the wife in the Eighth Year is full of doubt and perplexity. She has a certain hardness of character. She is intellectually hard, and without an atom of old-fashioned sentiment. She calls a spade a spade, in a rather embarrassing way, and prefers her facts to be naked. She is the mother of two children, whom she is bringing up on strictly eugenic principles, whatever those may be, and she is the wife of a husband whom she keeps in the background and treats as a negligible quantity. “We wives, my dear,” she says, “have been too long kept prisoners in upholstered cages. It is time we broke our prison windows. I am breaking other people’s windows as well. It lets in a lot of fresh air.”

She talks a great deal about sweated labor, about the white-slave traffic, about women’s work and wages. She talks still more about the treachery of the Government, the lies of politicians, the cowardice of men. “Oh, we are going to make them sit up. We shall stop at nothing. It is a revolution.”

She is amazed at the ignorance of the young wife. “Good heavens, your education has been neglected!” she cries. “You are like all these stuffy suburban women, who are as ignorant of life as bunny-rabbits. Haven’t you even read John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women? Good gracious! Well, I will send you round some literature. It will open your eyes, my dear.”

She sends round a lot of little pamphlets, full of dangerous ideas, ideas that sting like bees, ideas that are rather frightening to the wife in her Eighth Year. They refer to other books, which she gets out of the lending library. She reads Ibsen, and recognizes herself in many of those forlorn women in the plays. She reads small booklets on the Rights of Wives, on the Problems of Motherhood, on the Justice of the Vote. And suddenly, after a period of intellectual apathy, she is set on fire by all these burning sparks. She is caught up in a great flame of enthusiasm. It is like strong drink to her. It is like religious mania. She wakens out of her lethargy. Her feeling of boredom vanishes, gives way to a great excitement, a great exhilaration. She startles her husband, who thinks she has gone mad. She argues with him, laughs at his old-fashioned opinions, scoffs at him, pities him for his blindness. She goes out to suffrage meetings, starts to her feet one day and falters out a few excited words. She sits down with burning cheeks, with the sound of applause in her ears, like the roar of the sea. She learns to speak, to express herself coherently. She offers herself to “the cause.” She sells her trinkets and gives the money to the funds. She is out for any kind of adventure, however perilous. She is one of the Hot Young Bloods, or if she has not the pluck for that, or the strength, one of the intellectual firebrands who are really more dangerous.

It is a queer business, this suffrage movement, which sets these women aflame. There are a few women in it who have the cold intellectual logic of John Stuart Mill himself. They have thought the thing out on scientific lines, in its economic, political, and social aspects. They want the vote honestly, as a weapon to give their sex greater power, greater independence, better conditions of life in the labor market. But the rank and file have no such intellectual purpose, though they make use of the same arguments and believe that these are the mainsprings of their actions. In reality they are Eighth Year women. That is to say, they seize upon the movement with a feverish desire to find in it some new motive in life, some tremendous excitement, some ideals greater and more thrilling than the little ideals of their home life. In this movement, in this great battle, they see many things which they keep secret. They go into it with blind impulses, which they do not understand, except vaguely. It is a movement of revolt against all the trammels of sex relationship which have come down through savagery to civilization; laws evolved out of the inherited experience of tribes and races for the protection of womanhood and the functions of womanhood, laws of repression, of restraint, for the sake of the children of the race; duties exacted by the social code again for the sake of the next generation. Having revolted against the duties of motherhood, all these laws, these trammels, these fetters, become to them intolerable, meaningless, exasperating. The scheme of monogamy breaks down. It has no deep moral purpose behind it, because the family is not complete. The scheme has been frustrated by the childlessness of the wife. Again, this movement is a revolt against the whole structure of modern society as it affects the woman—against the very architecture of the home; against all those tiny flats, those small suburban houses, in which women are cramped and confined, and cut off from the large world. It did not matter so long as there was a large world within the four walls. Their space was big enough to hold the big ideals of old-fashioned womanhood, in which the upbringing of children was foremost and all-absorbing. But for a woman who has lost these ideals and the duties that result from them, these little places are too narrow for their restless hearts; they become like prison cells, in which their spirits go pacing up and down, up and down, to come up against the walls, to heat their hands against them. They believe that they may find in this suffrage movement the key to the riddle of the mysteries in their souls, world-old mysteries, of yearnings for the Unknown Good, of cravings for the Eternal Satisfaction, for the perfect fulfilment of their beings. Their poor husband, a dear good fellow, after all, now that they look at him without hysteria, has not provided this Eternal Satisfaction. He has only provided pretty frocks, tickets for matinÉes, foolish little luxuries. He does not stand for them as the Unknown Good. After the first year or two of marriage they know him with all his faults and flaws, and familiarity breeds contempt. But here, in this struggle for the Vote, in these window-breakings and house-burnings, in imprisonments and forcible feedings, in this solidarity of women inspired by a fierce fanaticism—there is, they think, the answer to all their unsolved questions, the splendor and the glory of their sex, the possibility of magnificent promises and gifts, in which the soul of woman may at last find peace, and her body its liberty. She is to have the supreme mastery over her own spirit and flesh.

It is a fine promise. But as yet it is unfulfilled. It is not to be denied that for a time at least some of these women do gain a cheerfulness, a keenness, a vitality, which seem to be a great recompense for their struggles and strivings. But they are the younger women, and especially the young unmarried women, who get a good deal of fun out of all this excitement, all this adventure, all the dangerous defiance of law and convention. The older women—many of them—are already suffering a sad disillusionment. They have not yet found those splendid things which seemed at last within their grasp. They are desperate to get them, fierce in their desire for them, but the cup of wine is withheld from their lips. They find themselves growing old and still unsatisfied, growing hard, and’ bitter, and revengeful against those who thwart them. The problems of their sex still remain with them. They may break all the laws, but get no nearer to liberty. They are still prisoners of fate, bond-slaves to a nature which they do not understand. The femininist movement is only a temporary way of escape for the wife who has reached her crisis in the Eighth Year.