Page:The case for women's suffrage.djvu/71

 the first working women among whom an active suffrage movement began. Most of them were unmarried wage-earners, and their leaders, carrying on the traditions of the elder Suffragists, saw no reason for a change of policy. But when the new spirit touched the Women's Co-operative Guild, the demand had to take another shape. An organisation of married working women cannot so stifle its individuality as to abstain from asking the vote for its own members. A demand for liberty cannot be self-denying. Unless they want the vote themselves, co-operative housewives can only bring an academic support to the suffrage movement. Why should they stand back? Let them at least ask for what they want.

No women could be better prepared for enfranchisement than the Guild members. The cooperative movement, with two and a quarter millions of members and a yearly trade of sixty million pounds, has been called, after another select people, "a State within a State." In this State women have votes. Thousands of women hold shares in their own names, and before the passing of the Married Women's Property Act co-operators used honourably and illegally to let married women assert the right to their own investments and dividends. In some societies women outnumber men. They attend the quarterly business meeting, the legal governing body of the co-operative society, and vote there side by side with men, deciding questions of trade, employment, and the common use of funds. Women are elected occasionally as directors