Bernard Shaw by A. M. Gibbs

Author:A. M. Gibbs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 2014-05-05T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

* Shaw’s choice of this musical instrument for Undershaft is an amusing recollection of his Irish childhood. A fondness for brass instruments such as the trombone ran in the Shaw family (see chap. 1). Shaw himself took up the cornet briefly in 1873 while still a teenager in Dublin; see CL2:542.

17 Votes for Women

During the later Edwardian and early Georgian period in England agitation for woman suffrage had reached unprecedented levels of intensity and public attention. One of the characters in Elizabeth Robins’s topical play Votes for Women!—first presented at the Royal Court Theatre under the direction of Harley Granville-Barker on 9 April 1907*—says that the more militant suffragettes had “waked up interest in the Woman Question so that it’s advertised in every paper and discussed in every house from Land’s End to John O’Groats.”1

This was close to what was happening in the real world. Not only in London but throughout England the question of woman suffrage had become a burning political and social issue. The dialogue in the first act of Votes for Women! reflects the fact that there was a considerable split within the suffragette movement as a whole between the moderates, who wanted to pursue gentler strategies of reason and persuasion, and the more militant agitators, who were heckling politicians, staging mass demonstrations, chaining themselves to the railings outside public buildings, committing acts of civil disobedience, and getting themselves arrested and thrown into prison.

Living up to his self-description as being “up to the chin in the life of his own time,”2 Shaw was very much involved in this cause. In fact, as early as 26 April 1892 he had delivered a speech in favor of woman suffrage at a stormy meeting held in St. James’s Hall, London.3 The Quintessence of Ibsenism, published the previous year, contained a lively attack on the Victorian conception of the womanly woman. Shaw made a very strong statement about the subject of votes for women in March 1906 in an interview with Mrs. Maud Churton Braby, the popular novelist, writer on marriage, and suffragette, with whom he occasionally corresponded. (Some of Mrs. Braby’s rather unconventional and liberal views on marriage are paralleled in Shaw’s 1908 play Getting Married.) In the interview Shaw presented himself as being decidedly in favor of militant action, even to the point of violent revolution. Going well beyond the “sex strike” plan adopted by the women in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Shaw recommended that “if I were a woman, I’d simply refuse to speak to any man or do anything for men until I’d got the vote. I’d make my husband’s life a burden and everybody miserable generally. Women should have a revolution—they should shoot, kill, maim, destroy—until they are given a vote.”4

In March 1907—the same month in which he made the speech at Brighton that included his declaration about the “splendid torch” of life—Shaw spoke in favor of woman suffrage at a meeting in Queens Hall, London, under the auspices of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.

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