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This is to introduce Lady Pethick Lawrence, the prominent leader of the suffragette movement from 1906 to 1912. She is going to speak to you about the bloodless revolution of that time which achieved the victory in gaining votes for women. The greatest revolution that has occurred in the history of the world is the political emancipation

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of one half of the human race, that has taken place in the present century. Speaking generally, women from immemorial time have occupied a subordinate position in the human family. Today in almost almost all civilised countries of the West and the East they enjoy equal political citizenship with men. This victory was not one without great effort and sacrifice.

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Our own country was the spearhead of the world movement. But although from the year 1905 to 1914 more than a thousand British women endured imprisonment and in the later years of the agitation adopted the hunger strike and suffered from forcible feeding. Yet no one single act of injury to life or limb of opponents was ever brought against them in the law

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courts. Care and concern for human life dominated this revolutionary agitation from start to finish. This is a unique record and highly significant. Significant because the woman half of the human race is and always was the special custodian of human life. Although the crux of the struggle for emancipation was the attainment of the parliamentary franchise,

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which we won in 1918, women have not yet attained full equality with men. Many issues are still to be fought for and won, for example equal economic conditions, equal nationality rights, equal representation in all councils of the nation based upon recognition of their equal value in the human family. All these reforms can be won by the education of public opinion

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implemented by the means of a vote which all adult men and women now exercise in this country. The most important issue at the present time is the security and safety of the human race from the peril of World War. That can only be achieved by the development of world welfare; and the balance of world welfare can be secured only by the full equality of men and women.

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For the two halves of the human race have each its special function to fulfil towards the whole. The brotherhood of man is a brilliant idea conceived by religion and philosophy, but as a truth of nature it is rooted in the fact that each man spends the first nine months of his existence in the womb of a woman. While it is the special function of men to develop material

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resources of the planet it is the special function of women to safeguard and nourish human life. When these two functions work in unity there will be more possibility and hope for the end of fratricidal warfare and for a new era of international cooperation and peace.