A Lady's Guide to Suffrage

I'm leafing through Lady Clodagh Anson's Another Book, and a charming read it is too. Here's the section on Votes for Women. You have to read it in a posh, slightly scatty English accent:

Susan and I were tremendously keen on women's suffrage at that time, and though we did not clamp ourselves to the railings in Downing Street or drop lighted matches into letter-boxes ourselves, we none the less realised that the brave women who did these things had grasped the great truth about the English character, in that if you behave well about anything and do not make a fuss, everybody thinks that you do not mind and will not to a hand's turn for you. But if you make yourself a nuisance and behave as badly as possible, the authorities will do anything to keep you quiet. However, in those days all really nice people looked with horror at these performances; so Susan's husband, Hugh Dawnay, used to take great delight in saying to respectable acquaintances of ours that we were suffragettes, just to see them shy away from us with panic-stricken faces.

What larks: the next paragraph is a series of anecdotes about 'a Yorkshire yokel'. No more to be said about the franchise.