Page:Fraud of Feminism.djvu/161

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PSYCHOLOGY OF THE MOVEMENT
157

The reasons for answering this question in the negative we have already briefly indicated in the course of our investigations. This renders it unnecessary to discuss the matter any further here.

In dealing with the psychological aspects of the Feminist Movement, the intellectual conditions which paved the way for its acceptance, it is worth while recalling two or three typical instances of the class of "argument" to be heard on occasion from the female advocates for the suffrage. Thus, when the census was taken in 1911 and the Women's Political and Social Union conceived, as they thought, the brilliant idea of annoying the authorities and vitiating the results of the census by refusing to allow themselves to be enrolled, one of the leaders, when interviewed on the point, gave her reason for her refusal to be included, in the following terms:—"I am not a citizen" (meaning that she did not possess the franchise) "and I am not going to pretend to be one." The silliness of this observation is, of course, obvious, seeing that the franchise or even citizenship has nothing whatever to do with the census, which includes infants, besides criminals, lunatics, imbeciles, etc. Again, in a manifesto of the Women's Political and Social Union defending window-smashing and other "militant" outrages, it was pointed out that the coal strike had caused more injury than the window-smashing and yet the