Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 6.djvu/757

 munition work and all kinds of manufacturing activity they crowded in their thousands. They worked on the land and undertook many kinds of labour that had hitherto been supposed to be beyond their strength and capacity. By what was called the Treasury agreement of 1915 the Trade Unions were induced to suspend the operation of their rules excluding the employment of female labour. They bargained that women should be paid the same as men for the same output and the Government agreed not to use the women as a reservoir of cheap labour. Thus industrial liberty was ensured for women at least so long as the war should last. All these things combined to produce an enormous effect on public opinion. Newspapers were full of the praises of women; financiers, statesmen, economists and politicians declared that without the aid of women it would be impossible to win the war. The anti-suffragism of Mr. Asquith even was beginning to crumble. In speaking of the heroic death of Edith Cavell in Belgium in October, 1915, he said: "She has taught the bravest men among us a supreme lesson of courage; yes and there are thousands of such women and a year ago we did not know it." Almost the whole of the press was on our side. The general tone was that it would be difficult to refuse woman a voice in the control of affairs after the splendid way in which she had justified her claim to it. We old suffragists felt that we were living in a new world where everyone agreed with us. Nevertheless, I do not believe we should have won the vote just when we did if it had not been that, through the action of the Government itself, it was absolutely necessary to introduce legislation in order to prevent the almost total disfranchisement of many millions of men who had been serving their country abroad in the Navy and Army, or in munition or other work which had withdrawn them from the places where they usually resided. It may be necessary to explain to non-British readers that by far the most important qualification for the Parliamentary franchise in this country before 1918 was the occupation of premises, re a man could he put on the register of voters it was necessary for its owner to prove "occupation" of these premises