Speech on Women's Suffrage
Speech on Women's Suffrage
Footage of Woman's suffrage protests in England, woman jumping in front of king's horse & trampled (for the cause) & marches. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (archival suffragettes footage) VO Excerpts of "The Solitude of Self" speech (combination of 2 versions of the speech from 1892) TLS/MS woman being led to paddy wagon by London policemen in tall hats. Scroll text: "London Suffragette Pageant, 66,000 women take part in a procession through London, All the famous women...are represented." MS suffragette women in white w/banners marching. Text, "Suffragette killed in attempt to pull down the king's horse." MS horserace, woman in black steps in front of a charging horse, collision. MS men running onto track to check injured, dead. Text, (Emily Wilding Davison, 1913) "Miss Davison's Funeral, The Procession of the suffragette who was fatally injured at Epsom passing..." MS funeral procession, flanked by police officers. MS Marchers, some men & more women for suffrage, signs, "Fortune Favours the Brave," "National Women's Social and Political Union 1903, M Pankhurst Founder, Champion of Womanhood, Famed far for her deeds of Daring Rectitude," "Votes for women," "Votes Outlawed." MS more suffragettes marching, carrying staffs in white hats & all. Voice Over, "We ask no sympathy from others in the anxiety and agony of a broken friendship or shattered love. When death sunders our nearest ties, alone we sit in the shadow of our affliction. Alike amid the greatest triumphs and darkest tragedies of life we walk alone. On the divine heights of human attainments, eulogized and worshipped as a hero or saint, we stand alone. In ignorance, poverty, and vice, as a pauper or criminal, alone we starve or steal; alone we suffer the sneers and rebuffs of our fellows; alone we are hunted and hounded through dark courts and alleys, in by-ways and highways; alone we stand in the judgment seat; alone in the prison cell we lament our crimes and misfortunes; alone we expiate them on the gallows. In hours like these we realize the awful solitude of individual life, its pains, its penalties, its responsibilities: hours in which the youngest and most helpless are thrown on their own resources for guidance and consolation. Seeing then that life must ever be a march and a battle, that each soldier must be equipped for his own protection, it is the height of cruelty to rob the individual of a single natural right. To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes; to deny the rights of property, like cutting off the hands. To deny political equality is to rob the ostracised of all self-respect; of credit in the market place; of recompense in the world of work; of a voice in those who make and administer the law; a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment. Shakespeare's play of Titus and Andronicus contains a terrible satire on woman's position in the nineteenth century - Rude men seized the king's daughter, cut out her tongue, cut off her hands, and then bade her go call for water and wash her hands. What a picture of woman's position! Robbed of her natural rights, handicapped by law and custom at every turn, yet compelled to fight her own battles, and in the emergencies of life to fall back on herself for protection."