It is a little detail, but a very significant one in this connection, that the committee that organised the various great suffrage processions in London were torn by dispute about the dresses of the processionists.  It was urged that a “masculine style of costume” discredited the movement, and women were urged to dress with a maximum of feminine charm.  Many women obtained finery they could ill afford, to take part in these demonstrations, and minced their steps as womanly as possible to freedom....

It would be easy to overstate the efflorescence of distinctively feminine emotion, dressiness, mysticism, and vanity upon the suffrage movement.  Those things showed for anyone to see.  This was the froth of the whirlpool.  What did not show was the tremendous development of the sense of solidarity among women.  Everybody knew that women had been hitting policemen at Westminster; it was not nearly so showy a fact that women of title, working women, domestic servants, tradesmen’s wives, professional workers, had all been meeting together and working together in a common cause, working with an unprecedented capacity and an unprecedented disregard of social barriers.  One noted the nonsensical by-play of the movement; the way in which women were accustoming themselves to higher standards of achievement was not so immediately noticeable.  That a small number of women were apparently bent on rendering the Vote impossible by a campaign of violence and malicious mischief very completely masked the fact that a very great number of girls and young women no longer considered it seemly to hang about at home trying by a few crude inducements to tempt men to marry them, but were setting out very seriously and capably to master the young man’s way of finding a place for oneself in the world.  Beneath the dust and noise realities were coming about that the dust and noise entirely failed to represent.  We know that some women were shrieking for the Vote; we did not realise that a generation of women was qualifying for it.

The war came, the jolt of an earthquake, to throw things into their proper relationships.

The immediate result was the disappearance of the militant suffragists from public view for a time, into which the noisier section hastened to emerge in full scream upon the congenial topic of War Babies.  “Men,” those dreadful creatures, were being camped and quartered all over the country.  It followed, from all the social principles known to Mrs. and Miss Pankhurst, that it was necessary to provide for an enormous number of War Babies.  Subscriptions were invited.  Statisticians are still looking rather perplexedly for those War Babies; the illegitimate birth-rate has fallen, and what has become of the subscriptions I do not know. The Suffragette rechristened itself Britannia, dropped the War Baby agitation, and, after an interlude of self-control, broke out into denunciations, first of this public servant and then of that, as traitors