The question of votes for women is discussed and personified. Shaw is in favour of them getting the vote, and that because they really are no better than men. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2893624.html

Set in the near future with an envisioned political change - written in 1908 and set in 1911, in an England where the suffragette movement has become so disruptive that martial law is being implemented in London. It's not one of the great Shaw plays; the fact that we have moved on so decisively from this particular part of the wider gender and politics debate makes it very difficult to relate to his central characters, the general, the prime minister, and the anti-suffrage ladies who demand audience with them. However his shafts about class, and the dangers of putting the military in charge of a political project, remain well-aimed. And towards the end it gets really funny when the general claims to be fifty-two, only to be confronted with the fact that Who's Who says he's sixty-one.

The portrayal of General "Mitchener" and Prime Minister "Balsquith" was felt to be so close to the bone for Generals Milner and Kitchener, and PMs Balfour and Asquith, that the play was actually banned from public performance in England; an act of censorship which is almost incomprehensible to today's reader. ( )

Perhaps even 4½ stars! Read as part of the Kindle omnibus "The Plays of Shaw (26 Plays)".

I found this one-act play hilarious. Set in 1911, at the time of suffragettes trying to get votes for women, it uses reductio ad absurdum to show the logic of the government and military positions. Some of the military attitudes would be an appropriate commentary to today's military in my opinion. For example, this exchange between the Prime Minister Balsquith and the general Mitchener:

Mitchener: How do the inhabitants sleep with the possibility of invasion, of bombardment, continually present in their minds? Would you have our English slumbers broken in the same way? Are we also to live without security?
Balsquith (dogmatically): Yes. There's no such thing as security in the world; and there never can be as long as men are mortal. England will be secure when England is dead, just as the streets of London will be safe when there is no longer a man in her streets to be run over, or a vehicle to run over him. When you military chaps as for security, you are crying for the moon.

I can imagine this exchange as referring to the "war on terrorism". ( )