Glimpses of Britain. Reader - стр. 13
Britain had never seen anything quite like it. And the most shocking thing of all was that every one of these outrages was perpetrated by women.
They were the suffragettes – a term first coined by the Daily Mail to describe the militant activists who crusaded for female suffrage, or the right to vote, in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Today, these women are widely regarded with uncritical veneration; their cause so manifestly just, and their one-time opponents so manifestly wrong, that their status as modern heroines goes unchallenged.
Last year, Emmeline Pankhurst, their radical leader, was put by BBC viewers near the top of a list of the 100 Greatest Britons of all time. Her statue stands outside the Houses of Parliament.
But the story of the suffragettes – or at least, the most militant among them – is much stranger than most people realise. Far from being a simple battle for equality at the ballot box, their campaign was driven by a deep-rooted distaste for male sexuality.
Quite simply, the more extreme suffragettes were man-haters, waging what amounted to a sex war. They regarded men as a lower form of life, whose untrammelled sexual appetites were the root of all evil – from physical disease to every kind of moral degeneracy.
For these women, winning the vote was merely a means to an end: the reining in of male lust, which they thought would raise the whole of society to a higher spiritual plane.
What is more, they were prepared to adopt virtually any tactics to achieve it – even those we would now call terrorism.
The explanation for this sexual fervour lies in the squalid world of Victorian vice, with its huge and highly visible trade in prostitution. In 1841 the Chief Commissioner of Police estimated there were 3,325 brothels in Central London alone.
Thirty years later, a French visitor to the East End reported that “all the houses, except one or two, are evidently inhabited by harlots”. According to Scotland Yard’s director of CID, it was impossible for a respectable woman to walk through the West End in mid-afternoon because of the number of prostitutes openly soliciting.
Droves of girls were seen huddling along Regent Street, Piccadilly and Haymarket, urinating and defecating in public. For men of such tastes, children were easily procured: the age of consent was just 12.
Domestic servants joined the trade at night, desperate to supplement their meagre wages. Shop assistants did the same, with the encouragement of West End dress-shop managers who hired out clothes to them by way of advertising.