As it happens I have read GKC's "What's wrong with the world", because I make it my business to read everything he wrote. Usually I agree with him, but not this time. This time he's just being stupid. When the men have pinched all the good jobs for themselves and have all the fun, it's not "surrender" to fight to get them for yourself. He might as well have said that the British and the French "surrendered" to the Prussians in 1914 by going to war with them. After all, they both fought with bayonets and dug trenches.
And now I come to think of it, that probably was what the Pacifists did say. But it would have been quite irrelevant to the real issue of the war, just as Chesterton's remarks in that book were quite irrelevant to the real issue of the struggle for the vote, which was this:
However nice the individual men I know may be, I really, really do not want to live in a country where I can't go to university, can't practice a profession, can't get a decently paid job, where the age of consent is thirteen, where married women can be sacked with impunity, where male adultery is not held to be grounds for divorce but female is, where women can be forced to undergo VD tests, and where marital rape is legal.
That was the situation in 19th century England when the feminist movement started. Some reforms did happen, but the pace of chance was excruciatingly slow.
The suffragettes thought rightly or wrongly (and many of them had years of experience in activism) that they had little chance of stopping most of these abuses without the vote. They knew well enough that the vote would not be enough by itself. And I might add that I myself was an adult before that last one on my list of injustices was outlawed in my own country.
The trouble is that whenever people start preaching the difference between the sexes and recommending different roles for men and women, they always must do it by placing restrictions on you. These restrictions may be relatively wide and generous, but they are always felt as an intolerable burden if they stop you doing what you really want to do; that is, if they are preventing you from being yourself.