Votes For Women and White Feathers

We live in Progressive times. The past is denigrated, the future, exalted. Our Progressive ideology assures us that we are ever more civilized than our stupid, brutish ancestors.
Our superiority is obvious. Not only are we more tolerant, more diverse, more free, but we are also more prosperous than those who have grunted and hunted before us.
We worship at the altar of Democracy and Equality and we are prepared to sacrifice no end of Others to satisfy the hunger of our gods. 
The Narrative tells us that, a hundred years or so back, women had no Rights, no Opportunities, were Powerless, the Slaves of exploiting Man. And Woman did not have the Vote.
Yet, most women were either unconcerned by votes for women or were actively opposed!
Many women did not want to be equal.
One of the great fears of the women who opposed female suffrage was conscription.  
The problem arose in the eighteenth century, and particularly with the French Republic.
Before the French Revolution, Europe was governed by Monarchs. Each kingdom contained peoples of many different cultures and languages. But the French Republic replaced the Monarch with the concepts of the People and the Nation.
From then on when the government went to war, the whole Nation went to war. Now we had Total War.
Total War for the French Republic and some other European countries meant the conscription of men.
Along with conscription, and the reach of the state into many aspects of an ordinary person's life, came the not unreasonable demand for democracy.
However, women did not want to be conscripted.
Neither did many want to be 'independent'. For many working class women the Great War was a disaster, as the family breadwinner went off to fight the enemy. Being independent meant hardship.
The Great War of 1914 to 1918 was mostly a war between armies of men. Ten million men and a few women died.
Most women did not want to be part of such butchery.
But the spoilt little rich girls, the suffragettes of the overseer class, were all for the war. These daughters of privilege, such as Christabel  Pankhurst, raised by servants and governesses, turned the Women's Social and Political  Union, into a  pro war movement. In an early example of an NGO/Charity being co-opted by the state, the WSPU accepted a £2000 grant from the English government and arranged a pro war rally in London.
Pankhurst toured England making speeches, encouraging recruitment, giving out white feathers to the sons of servant women, men who had no wish to die on the barbed wire.
In 1916 conscription for men was introduced.
In 1918 women got the vote.