To An Anti-Suffragist

I've been tidying my desk - an incredibly rare occurrence - and going through my various research notebooks, rediscovering. This poem was amongst the rediscoveries. I love the passion of the voice in it as well as the challenge and anger and was curious to find out more about the writer. But first, the poem itself!

It was published in the WSPU's paper, Votes for Women, on 13th June 1913.

To An Anti-Suffragist
by Almon Hensley

You ask me to listen to the noise of shattered glass and to condemn the breakers.

Ah, friend, I cannot hear it for the sound of the wailing of outraged children;

You point me to the ruins of burnt houses, but I cannot see them,

For my eyes are running over with tears for my sweated sister, half-starved, bending over her work.

You show me a few blackened letters, and I ask you for an accounting of the little human messages lost every year to protected vice.

You talk of wire-cutting and spoiled turf, and I ask you this question:

“Why is a child’s lost innocence, a child’s marred body of less importance to a judge in a Christian land than damaged property?”

I see everywhere about me wretchedness, unnecessary poverty, misrule, tyranny, lust, and dishonour,

And I know that had women a voice much of this evil might be overcome;

Yet you ask me to blame violent protest on the part of the women of England.

I say to you, O blind one, O weak one, O cowardly one,

I say it not only to you, but I shout it to the world,

I shout it to the great Heaven where God watches:

“Is there no wilder cry, no fiercer fight? Is there no stronger weapon?

Give it into our hand, O God of battles!”

Sophia Margaretta Almon Hensley. Image from the website of the Simon Fraser University Library.

I haven't done a lot of research into 'Almon Hensley' but here's what a bit of research has turned up. 

Born in Nova Scotia on 31st May 1866, Sophia Margaretta Almon Hensley studied in both England and Paris and was a protégée of Charles G.D. Roberts (1860-1943) the "Father of Canadian Poetry". She contributed poems to many Canadian literary magazines and in 1889, aged 23, her first collection of poetry, Poems, was published. A year later she moved to New York with her barrister husband where she became a member of the Society for Political Study, was secretary of the New York State Assembly of Mothers, co-founded the New York City Mother's Club and was the founding president of the Society for the Study of Life. 

She was heavily involved in child welfare and feminist causes and wrote and spoke frequently for both, using not only her own name - and the shortened version 'Almon Hensley' - but also under the pseudonyms 'Gordon Hart', 'John Wernberny', Mary Woolston', 'Sophie M. Almon' and 'J. Try-Davies'. A prolific writer, Hensley became a member of the New York Press Club, had three children and published a book of essays about feminism and unmarried mothers, Love and the Woman of Tomorrow, in 1913. Her listing in The Feminine Gaze: A Canadian Compendium of Non-Fiction Women Authors and Their Books, 1836-1945 says that she "became acquainted with Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst while in England".
She died in Nova Scotia in 1946.

No Females In Heaven?

A newspaper report from April 1902 recounts the speech of a Mr. Kinsman to Mrs. Almon Hensley. Kinsman, a Bible student, based his argument that there would be no "females in heaven" on evidence in the Old and New Testaments - for example that "in all the named heavenly host there appears not one feminine name". He went on to conclude that there were only three possiblities: "First, that no women reach heaven and are, therefore annihilated... second, that women reach heaven but...become sexless... third, that women reach heaven and become males."

Mrs. Almon Hensley's robust reposte to Kinsman's ideas concludes with the following, which made me smile. 

"Mr. Kinsman is, doubtless, satisfied as to the comfort and coolness of his own future condition. I should like to suggest that he will, however, in all probability find himself somewhat lonely. From my experience of his sex I should judge that if women are to be excluded from heaven there will be no undue crowding in the celestial corridors."

You can read the full article 
"A NAUGHTY MAN Says That Females are Not Found in Heaven" 
by clicking here.