Editorials & Other Articles

in both senses.

That is, the link you provide won't load.

And also, co-incidence is not necessarily causation. That is to say, the fact that this or other acts of cultural vandalism occurred before women's voting rights were secured isn't proof that the one led directly to the other.

The vandalism you cite happened in 1914. The first suffrage act wasn't passed until 1918, but only for women over 30 who owned property. Voting rights for British women equal to those for British men didn't happen for another ten years after that.

What happened in the meantime of course was the Great War, when millions of women contributed to the war effort, including risking their lives in munitions factories and as nurses close to the front. Not only did these contributions argue for the justice of suffrage equality, but more importantly it also emboldened an entire generation of younger women. For the first time in British history masses of women earned their own money, lived apart from their families and made decisions about their lives with far less male oversight and control. They proved to society and to themselves that they could make their own way in the world without male supervision, undermining the central justification for denying them the vote.

It's difficult to tell someone who has spent time assembling artillery shells, to mention just one example, that she is too "emotional" or otherwise limited by her gender to make rational decisions about voting. It's also hard to say that mixing in politics will sully their "feminine innocence" when they've spent time with men coughing their lungs out after being gassed, bandaging wounds, or otherwise dealing face to face with the more horrid aspects of industrialized warfare and its aftermath.

I suspect that all this was far more important than individual acts of vandalism at the National Gallery, which may have helped the effort, or may have even hindered it.