Page:The case for women's suffrage.djvu/74

 Co-operative women did not first concern themselves about the suffrage. Their minds are not encouraged to reach out towards the vague, and abstract ideas are foreign to them. How could it be otherwise? Lady Bell says of the iron-workers' wives (who are Yorkshire women, too), that the majority have not the health and the capacity to bear successfully the immense burden laid on married working women by the conditions of their lives. Co-operative women belong to the number of wives who in thrift at least have not failed. They have worked and said nothing. Highly educated people sum up their class as having "no vocabulary." They have their own strong prepossessions, grown out of fundamental experience, and any new idea must suit itself with these, or be rejected. When such women desire the vote, it is not for nothing. The first sign of interest was in 1893, when Guild members obtained 2,200 signatures to a suffrage petition. In 1897 papers on "Why working women need the Vote" were written by four Guild members, and discussed at conferences throughout the country. One of these was written by a labourer's wife, a well-known official of the Guild, who, as she relates in the paper, "never attended a public school except for three or four months as a child," and has had to work to earn her living "ever since she was able."

In the same year the Annual Congress passed a resolution regretting that facilities were not given for the further progress of the Women's Enfranchisement Bill, which passed its second reading. Nothing further was done for some years. There was still