Suffragist Time-Travels to 2026, Returns to 1910, Personally Ends the Movement
She had been to 2026. She had notes.
MANCHESTER, 1910. Miss Prudence Whitcombe-Hale of the Lancashire Women's Franchise League vanished on a Tuesday after leaning on her brother-in-law's electrotherapy cabinet. She reappeared eleven days later wearing a fleece and holding a paper cup with a green fish on it.
She had been to 2026. She had notes.
At the emergency meeting of the League, she read them aloud.
"They have the vote. Fewer than half of them use it. One told me she does not follow politics because it is 'a lot.'"
"The public houses are open to us and the women have taken to it competitively. There is a class of matron who hangs a placard in her own kitchen advertising her drinking. The placard is meant to be funny."
"I asked after the eight-hour day. I was told the modern woman is 'always on.' She does the factory work and the house work. Both. They call this having it all."
"There is a word. The word is 'girlboss.' We spent thirty years prying 'lady' off the front of 'doctor' and they have welded 'girl' onto the front of 'boss' voluntarily."
"I attended a conference. Four hundred dollars a ticket. A woman was paid twelve thousand dollars to tell four hundred poorer women to ask for more money. There was a tote bag. The tote bag said THE FUTURE IS FEMALE. The tote bag was sewn by a fourteen-year-old girl in a shed."
"A razor is liberation. A yoghurt is liberation. A bank is liberation."
"I am on a mug. Nobody could pronounce my name."
The room was quiet. Mrs. Tunnicliffe asked whether there was anything good.
"There is a great deal of shampoo," said Miss Whitcombe-Hale.
She then moved that the League be dissolved, and seconded her own motion, which is not permitted, and did it anyway.
What followed is the least documented and most effective campaign in British political history. She toured the country for four years, appearing at rallies she had helped organise, holding up the paper cup with the green fish, and describing the tote bag until people cried. She burned the League's mailing lists. She talked Emmeline out of it in a tea room in Bolton in under an hour, a conversation neither woman ever described, though Emmeline afterward took up watercolours and never spoke publicly again.
By 1914 the franchise movement had collapsed. By 1919 the word "suffragist" was chiefly a crossword answer. Miss Whitcombe-Hale spent the remainder of her life in Lytham St Annes, where she kept the paper cup on the mantelpiece and, whenever a visitor asked about it, poured them a sherry and said, "you would not have liked it."
She died in 1961, moments before an advertisement came on the wireless offering the modern housewife a refrigerator and a new sense of freedom, which she therefore never had to hear.