‘the picked class of women who would be admitted by Mr Bright’s Bill to the franchise are needed to restore the just balance in favour of an educated constituency against the weight of the illiterate male voters now entrusted with the suffrage’.
To some extent it was this fuzzy focus that led to the slow progress of the women’s suffrage campaign in the 1870s and 1880s. In addition the early suffrage movements actively avoided becoming mass campaigning movements (in contrast with the sexual purity movements) and therefore remained low-key lobbying organisations. The early movement was also essentially a middle-class intellectual movement rather than a mass action campaign. Jane Rendall has analysed the varying language of the early suffragists and concluded that they drew upon a complex range of perspectives including liberal political language,the ideal of individuality, the science of society, and the history of civilisation. Suffragism she noted was ‘limited, less by questions of property or marital status, than by a nervousness, shared with male liberals, about democracy’
It was in the 1890s that the question of women’s rights finally became a matter of intense public and political debate. The suffrage movement in the words of Barbara Caine went ‘from a period of torpor and exhaustion to one of extraordinary energy and activity’. This was largely due to the militant campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union which adopted more radical strategies with an emphasis on getting the suffrage question onto the public agenda. Their tactics resulted in an increase in membership of all suffrage organisations and therefore the movement became more diverse incorporating broad national societies alongside a host of smaller associations based around specific localities, institutions, professions or religious beliefs. There was an increase in the theatricality of the movement with suffrage ideals dramatised in demonstrations and meeting, songs, plays, poems, novels, pageants, banners and paintings. The suffrage movement was a large-scale propaganda campaign that relied heavily on processions and printed material to convey its message. Banners were used extensively. Unlike the traditional trade union banners, suffrage banners were embroidered, stencilled or appliquéd and were created from within the movement. Women's traditional needlework skills were employed in a collective and creative endeavour. Some 150 banners for example, were produced between 1908 and 1913, many by the Artists' Suffrage League. The designs were heavily influenced by the arts and crafts movement and were much smaller and simpler than trade union banners.
The WSPU was established in Manchester in 1903, the inspiration of the Pankhurst family. Its name was suggested by Christabel Pankhurst who was working closely with Eva Gore-Booth and the radical working-class suffragists in Lancashire. It was intended to combine suffrage work with the social goals of Labour and Socialist women activists, including such things as improved maternity provision. described the formation of the Women's Social and Political Union in her book In My Own Words:
It was on October 10, 1903 that I invited a number of women to my house in Nelson Street, Manchester, for purposes of organisation. We voted to call our new society the Women's Social and Political Union, partly to emphasize its democracy, and partly to define its object as political rather than propagandist. We resolved to limit our membership exclusively to women, to keep ourselves absolutely free from party affiliation, and to be satisfied with nothing but action on our question. "Deeds, not Words" was to be our permanent motto.
The WSPU was catapulted to national prominence when Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney initiated the militant phase of the suffrage movement by interrupting an election meeting addressed by the Liberal Home Secretary, Sir Edward Grey to ask whether the Liberals would grant votes for women. To ensure that they were arrested they spat at the policemen who escorted them from the building. The resulting court appearance and imprisonment of both women for 7 days ensured they were given widespread press coverage. This first, relatively mild militant action set the pattern for WSPU tactics for the next few years. The sensational tactics adopted by the suffragettes attracted huge attention both at home and internationally. Frustrated by the failure of moderate suffragists to make any impression on British governments, from 1906 the suffragettes resorted to 'unladylike' methods designed to grab the headlines and to promote the issue of women's suffrage to the top of the political agenda. From heckling politicians in the election campaigns of 1906 to disrupting the business of the House of Commons and staging huge public rallies like the one held in Hyde Park in 1908, the suffragettes graduated to physical violence - including sabotage, vandalism, looting and arson. They burned down churches as the Church of England was against what they wanted; they vandalised Oxford Street, apparently breaking all the windows in this famous street; they chained themselves to Buckingham Palace as the Royal Family were seen to be against women having the right to vote; they hired out boats, sailed up the Thames and shouted abuse through loud hailers at Parliament as it sat; others refused to pay their tax. Politicians were attacked as they went to work. They homes were fire bombed. Golf courses were vandalised. The cause was given its first martyr in 1913 when Emily Wilding Davidson threw herself under the King's horse on Derby Day, 1913. She was born in 1872 and was one of the first women graduates graduating with a BA at London University and after this gaining a first class honours degree at Oxford University. She joined the WSPU in 1906 and took part in attacks on property. She became a leading member of the Suffragettes and was imprisoned and force-fed.
Emily Davison died from the injuries she sustained at the Derby. Ironically, her self-sacrifice may well have made the position of women worse in Britain. Some historians argue that Emily’s act so horrified those in charge that they were even more against the right to vote for women. They argued that Emily was a highly educated person. If a highly educated woman was willing to do what she did, what could society expect of less educated women?
The militant suffragettes developed a critique of male-centred society which formed the basis for their famous slogan ‘Deeds, not words.’ As the government refused to yield on the issue of women’s enfranchisement, they became more daring in their exploits. They insisted on the unity of theory and practice, on words and action, since they believed that this was the most effective political strategy to win not just the enfranchisement of women but also an improvement generally in the social position of women in society. "We were willing to break laws," explained Mrs. Pankhurst, "that we might force men to give us the right to make laws". The daily lives of the militants were different from that large number of non-militant WSPU members but they brought attention to the suffrage cause and helped to increase membership of all suffrage organisations. More than 1.000 women were imprisoned and some, having gone on hunger-strike, were subjected to the indignities of forced-feeding. In response to public protest, the Liberal government persisted in treating suffragettes as criminals rather than as political prisoners. The 'Cat and Mouse Act' of 1913 allowed prisoners to be released from gaol but rearrested and returned to prison once their health had improved.
Not all British feminists were willing to follow where the Pankhursts led. Within the WSPU itself critical voices were raised against a Pankhurst dictatorship, though the penalty for dissent was expulsion. In 1907 Teresa Billington-Greig and Charlotte Despard headed a group of militants who broke away from the WSPU to found the Women's Freedom League (WFL) which had links to the world of socialism and the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London Federation of Suffragettes also aligned itself with leading figures of the Labour Left, such as George Lansbury. Likewise Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, founders of the United Suffragists in 1914 after their expulsion from the WSPU.
A more radical fringe, disillusioned with the failure of parliament to respond to the militancy of the WSPU, turned to anarchism, syndicalism and the politics of sexual liberation. The Freewoman, founded by two former WSPU organisers, Dora Marsden and Mary Gawthorpe, was their principal forum
The radicals may have received the most publicity but by far the largest body of pro-suffrage women continued to look to Mrs Millicent Garrett Fawcett and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (founded in 1897) as the true representatives of the British movement for women’s suffrage. Descended from Lydia Becker’s society of the 1860s the NUWSS persevered with the traditional tactics of lobbying parliament and publicising its case through its journal The Common Cause. Ironically the NUWSS was the greatest beneficiary of the publicity brought about by members of the WSPU in terms of vitality, membership and money. Between 1907 and 1910 the number of societies affiliated with the NUWSS increased by more than 400, while its total membership increased by more than 50,000 and its income quadrupled.
The vitality of the suffrage movement was demonstrated by the emergence of an organised movement to oppose women’s suffrage. In 1908 a Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League came into existence, followed shortly by its male counterpart, the Men’s Committee for Opposing Female Suffrage. The Anti-Suffrage Review and their frequent public meetings served both to mobilise opposition to women’s suffrage and to demonstrate its significance on the national political agenda.
However, in spite of this extra-parliamentary vitality it was blindingly obvious that the suffrage organisations need to gain support from within Parliament in order to achieve success. Matters came to a head in the 1909-10 session of Parliament. A ‘Conciliation Bill’ giving the vote to women on the same basis as in municipal elections was put forward. H N Brailsford the originator of the bill went to great lengths to impress on Millicent Fawcett and others the importance that the women suffrage organisations showed unity in support of the measure. The WSPU refused to participate and continued to engage in violent action. Ultimately the bill failed and brought both increased bitterness between the suffrage organisations as some blamed the WSPU for the failure; and demonstrated that the Liberal Government were unlikely to support women’s suffrage enabling an alliance between the NUWSS and the Labour Party. Fawcett made alliances with working-class women like Selina Cooper, who had experience of organising a pro-suffrage movement among working-class women in Lancashire, and preferred to work through the labour movement. She sided with the non-violent approach of the NUWSS rather than the militancy of the WSPU. It may be, however, as some historians think, that the divisions between 'militants' and 'constitutionalists' can be exaggerated. For example, Sandra Stanley Holton argues that there should be a modification of the existing historical convention which emphasises a division of the British suffrage movement into two distinct wings, the ‘militants’, whose best-known organisation was the Women's Social and Political Union, and the lesser known ‘constitutionalists’, most of whom were organised within the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. These organisations' differences are generally taken to centre on the question of the use of violence in demonstrations. Yet if ‘militancy’ involved a willingness to resort to extreme forms of violence, few ‘militants’ were ‘militant’ and then only from 1912 onwards. More important was the issue of political strategy. Once this dimension to the constitutional/militant division is acknowledged the imprecision of the two terms becomes even more evident.
By the summer of 1914 over 1,000 suffragettes had been imprisoned for destroying public property. All the leading members of the WSPU were in prison, in very poor health or were living in exile. The number of active members of the organisation in a position to commit acts of violence was now very small.
On 4th August, 1914, England declared war on Germany. Two days later the NUWSS announced that it was suspending all political activity until the war was over. The leadership of the WSPU began negotiating with the British government. On the 10th August the government announced it was releasing all suffragettes from prison. In return, the WSPU agreed to end their militant activities and help the war effort.
After receiving a £2,000 grant from the government, the WSPU organised a demonstration in London. Members carried banners with slogans such as 'We Demand the Right to Serve', 'For Men Must Fight and Women Must work' and 'Let None Be Kaiser's Cat's Paws'. At the meeting, attended by 30,000 people, Emmeline Pankhurst called on Trade Unions to allow women to work in traditionally male sectors. In October 1915, The WSPU changed its newspaper's name from The Suffragette to Britannia. Emmeline's patriotic view of the war was reflected in the paper's new slogan: "For King, For Country, for Freedom'. In the newspaper anti-war activists such as Ramsay MacDonald were attacked as being "more German than the Germans". Mary Macarthur and Margaret Bondfield were described as "Bolshevik women trade union leaders". The Britannia also attacked politicians and military leaders for not doing enough to win the war. In one article, Christabel Pankhurst accused the Chief of Imperial General Staff, of being "the tool and accomplice of the traitors, Grey, Asquith and Cecil".
Limited women’s suffrage was eventually obtained with the 1917 Representaton of the People Act. What brought about the enfranchisement of women in Britain was neither a compelling urge to reward them for their contribution to the war effort nor a renewal of suffragist militancy but the pressure on politicians to introduce genuine manhood suffrage to ensure that fighting men who had risked their lives for their country would not be disfranchised under Britain’s antiquated residential and property qualifications on their return from the front.
From 1916, it became clear that a new Representation of the People Act would be necessary to prepare the ground for the first elections to be held in the post-war period. In this context, suffragists lobbied successfully for women’s right to the suffrage to be recognised also, but crucially they decided to settle for something which they had consistently rejected in the pre-war period: the enfranchisement of women on different terms from those applicable to men. In the event, only women over the age of thirty were given the vote, which enfranchised some 7 million British women but left another 5 million still without the suffrage.
It is hard to argue that women received the vote in return for their contribution to the war effort when young female workers, who had contributed significantly to the war effort through their work in munitions factories and other sectors, remained disfranchised. The main reason for the restriction of the female electorate was simple: to ensure that men remained in a majority in the electorate as a whole, which they would be unable to do in an equal franchise situation because of the inherent demographic imbalance, further exacerbated by the losses in the trenches.
In Britain, few women were elected to parliament: only one in 1918, eight in 1923 and fourteen in 1929. Women cabinet ministers were even rarer (the first being Margaret Bondfield who held office in the Labour government of 1924). By the end of the decade British Conservatives could be confident that neither society nor their own party interest would be damaged by the introduction of full suffrage equality.
It was Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative Prime Minister who two years earlier had crushed the General Strike, who was responsible for the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act which gave women aged twenty-one and above the vote on the same terms as men.
Prior to gaining the suffrage there had been a sense that the vote would in some way transform the situation of women but once it was gained it was clear that large numbers of women had very little interest in it. There was a sudden change of focus away from women and citizenship and towards the social and even domestic position of women. We will discuss the implications of this for feminism in the next two lectures.
International Women’s Suffrage