Chapter 1.

EARLY DAYS

‘If a woman becomes weary, or at last dead, from childbearing, it

matters not; let her die from bearing, she is there to do it.’

Martin Luther.
.....

A raising of voices and sighs of indignation issuing from a group of

women over tea at the Grand Hotel, Copenhagen, in 1906, aroused the hopes of
an American free lance journalist in search of a story. She had attended the
second annual conference of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance
thinking that something might possibly occur worth writing about though she
was well aware that editors of magazines and daily papers regarded the issue
as dead as last week’s news. Even she herself had a little interest in the
subject. At one time, the mere mention of women’s suffrage could render
participants in the argument for and against apoplectic with rage. Thousands
turned out for suffrage meetings, as many as for Gladstone’s Mid-Lothian
campaign, if only to survey the extraordinary spectacle of a woman on a public
platform. But those days were over. It was no longer provocative to call
oneself a suffragist, only unfashionable and rather dreary.

Unhappily for the journalist the speeches in the hall had not provided
the kind of inspiration suggestive of an imminent revoval(Page 1, Paragraph 2)
of the cause. She found them dull though she admired the American president,
Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt for her stoicism in continuing to carry the banner of
forlorn hope. A small group of English women seemed to have a grievance
against their Government, one of whom kind Mrs. Catt permitted to speak, She
as Dora Montefiore zzzz(page 1 paragraph 2) and by Mary Wollstonecraft. While
she was writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, she
looked forward to winning Catharine Macaulay’s approbation until she learned
“with sickly qualm of disappointed hope... that she was no more.” (1) At least
three statues once stood on English soil in commemoration of Catharine
Macaulay, one depicting her as the Patroness of Liberty. Considering the
reluctance of Englishmen to honour any woman with statues apart from queens,
saints, goddesses, nymphs and mermaids,* Catharine must have been very
exceptional indeed. We need to know more about her if for no other reason than
to discover what it was she wrote which had so profound an effect on Mary
Wollstonecraft.

*Apart from statues commissioned for private and commercial reasons and those in the
above list of qualifications, out of several hundred monuments in London erected in
honour of men, only six stand in honour of women – of Florence Nightingale, Grace
Darling, Emmeline Pankhurst, Margaret Macdonald, Dame and Edith Cavell.

The failure to take account of what the women were doing robs history of
much of its life and colour. More seriously still it can lead to profound
misconceptions. How often had we heard the tale repeated that the women’s
suffrage campaign was an upper and middle class affair, unrepresentative of
the sex as a whole? Not until 1978, when Jill Liddington and Jill Morris
published One Hand Tied Behind Us was that particular lie exposed. There we
were given a moving account of the way the mill-girls of Lancashire, Cheshire
and Yorkshire worked for the vote. Sometimes they joined forces with the main
suffrage societies – the ones dismissed as middle class – sometimes they acted
on their own initiative. Occasionally, they sponsored their own parliamentary
candidate, paying his expenses out of their won earnings on condition that, if
he won the seat he would support women’s enfranchisement in the House of
Commons. Shamefully, once the successful candidates arrive in Westminster,
they broke their pledges. Bearing in mind that before the first world war it
was not unusual for women in paid employment to work a ten hour day, in shops
even longer, considering also how they had to do another day’s work in their
non-labour-saving homes, the wonder is, not how few but how many from the
working classes took part in the great agitation. So we shall see in some of
the chapters which follow.

It must be acknowledged, however, that if women’s history on the whole

has suffered from this neglect, the same cannot be said of the actual suffrage
campaign. The shelves of the Fawcett Library are laden from top to bottom with
material on this subject. A number of books covering some aspect of the
agitation have been published since Roger Fulford’s Votes for Women delighted
readers of the Evening Standard in 1956. Christabel Pankhurst’s largely unread
Unshackled followed in 1959, since when, coinciding with the resurgence of the
women’s movement, both here and in the United States, authors from both sides
of the Atlantic have delivered their own interpretations. Virago Publications
have also reissued editions written by suffragists, including the two
considered as the most comprehensive – The Cause by Ray Strachey and The
Suffragette Movement by Sylvia Pankhurst. By the time the B.B.C. released
Shoulder to Shoulder, a fictional series for T.V. loosely based on the
militants, those interested in women’s history might well have felt they had a
surfeit of the suffrage story.

It was a relief to consider some other campaigns, some other heroines in

Sheila Rowbotham’s Hidden from History, in Jean Donnison’s Midwives and
Medical Men, in other works making good some of the old glaring historical
omissions. At the same time, a massive volume of work poured out, and is still
pouring out, from the universities covering the woman-question from every
conceivable angle. Research, erudition, the whole new array of challenging
ideas mean that the debate about women’s rights will never revert to the old
levels of ignorance and neglect. Yet strangely, in their brief references to
women’s suffrage itself, many of these authors give the impression that they
have either been misinformed or have misunderstood the motives of the
suffragettes.

One reason for the continuing confusion arises from the number of myths
still surrounding the subject as propagated by older historians. Most of the
authorities on the pre-1914 Liberal administrations, to give one example, if
they deign to mention women at all, state emphatically that, in Parliament,
the question of women’s suffrage wa of mere academic interest before the
general election of 1905. Thus, even an authority as highly respected as
Sheila Rowbotham has been led to believe that, after John Stuart Mill moved
his amendment to include women in the Reform Act of 1867, they had to wait
until 1884, for the attempt to be made again, and then till the end of the
1880s for the question to be raised once more. In fact, after 1869, debates on
women’s enfranchisement took place in the Commons in 1870 (twice), 1871, 1872,
1873, 1875, 1876, 1877, 1879, 1884, 1892, 1897. A majority in the Commons
favoured votes for women from 1886 onwards. The women’s bills passed their
Second Readings three times, in 1870,1886, 1897. The list of dates is surely
remarkable; the reality behind them even more so. M.P.s do not allocate so
much precious parliamentary time to a measure of mere academic interest;
certainly government whips are not so spendthrift in their Second Readings,
three times over. One wonders how M.P.s could possibly have found anything
fresh to say on a subject debated year after year, even twice a year. Virginia
Woolf once suggested that the history of masculine opposition to women’s
emancipation might be more interesting than the story of emancipation itself.
It is certainly more amusing. Anyway, that aspect of the campaign has clearly
received too little attention; an oversight I hope to rectify.

Now take a glance at another myth; the strange idea that somehow the
fight for the vote was a distraction from the more pressing need for
emancipation. In her essay I Call Myself a Radical Feminist, Gail Chester
assumes that the women’s rights movement was radical in intent at the Seneca
Falls Convention of 1848 until “its energy was entirely spent on concentrating
on the single issue of winning the vote.” (6) The truth is the opposite.
Delegates at the convention concentrated primarily on isolated social, civil,
and religious disabilities suffered by women and on the need for changes in
the law affecting married women’s property and the guardianship of children.
The delegates considered the resolution calling for woman suffrage, proposed
by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and seconded by a man, as so revolutionary, so far
in advance of their time and so likely to bring ridicule on the movement that,
after a heated debate, the motion was passed with the smallest majority than
for any other measure. (7) Thereafter, in America and in many countries in
Europe, including Britain, and in what was then the British Empire, the
Electoral franchise for women was regarded as the one right by which all other
rights might be secured. So far from fighting for the vote for the vote’s sake
or for its symbolical value, suffragists drew up lists for reforms unlikely to
be carried into effect until M.P.s had to appeal to women for votes. These
included various proposals for the alleviation of poverty, for an improvement
in women’s wages, especially in the starvation wages earned by ‘sweated home-
workers’ and much else besides. Moreover, those who worked for reforms outside
the suffrage campaign, such as for the repeal of the hated Contagious Diseases
Acts or the compulsory training of midwives, often insisted how much easier
their task would be if only women could vote. If the electoral franchise were
considered to be so trifling a concession, tyrannical governments would not
resist its introduction with all the might at their command; witness South
Africa today. Over and over again feminists, and some male authors
unsympathetic to feminism, have criticised the suffragists for concentrating
on the single issue of the vote, the implication being that they were too
narrow-minded to envisage anything else.

Olive Banks, for instance, in Faces of Feminism, regards Charlotte

Gilman Perkins as “Far more radical than most feminists of her time who saw
the vote as the key issue” (8) because she believed that women’s economic
independence from men to be the way more truly fundamental for their
emancipation. Many suffragists thought the same, but saw no hope of arriving
at this happy state without legislation to secure equal pay for equal work,
equal opportunities in education and paid employment, a minimum wage amounting
to a living wage and the endowment of motherhood. Mrs. Pankhurst thought that
wives confined to the marital home for domestic duties should be entitled by
law to a proportion of their husbands incomes, and that the state should
support the mothers of illegitimate children.

As these were not the kind of fiscal measures male politicians would
leap to support, nor the kind which would endear them to a male electorate,
suffragists saw no hope of getting them through parliament unless they could
influence M.P.s through votes. So who were the realists or who were the real
radicals? Charlotte G. Perkins, by the way, was also a suffragist, a point
overlooked by Olive Banks.
 Now ponder the following pronouncement from Kate Millett in her highly
influential Sexual Politics:

“A reform movement, and especially, one which has fixed its

attention on so minimal an end as the ballot, the sort of
superficial changes which legislative reform represents and which,
when it has attained this, becomes incapable of putting it to use,
is hardly likely to propose sweeping radical changes in society
necessary to bring about the completion of a sexual revolution –
changes in social attitudes and social structure...” (9)

Germaine Greer in a similar vein in The Female Eunuch suggested that,

because the suffragettes offered no real threat to a belief in God, the
institution of marriage and the family and no long-term threat to private
property, “they betrayed their own cause and prepared the way for the failure
of emancipation.” She makes no allowance for the time they lived in; it was
not a permissive society. For expounding their views in public, even law-
abiding suffragists suffered vilification, misrepresentation, financial loss,
and at times, physical violence. Today the ethics are somewhat different;
anyone may say almost anything; the more outrageous the outburst is considered
to be, the more probably an invitation to appear on T.V. will follow – a
request rarely refused. Yet Germaine Greer still asserts, with evident pride:
“Then genteel middle-class ladies clamoured for reform, now ungenteel middle-
class women are calling for revolution. The difference is radical, for the
faith that the suffragettes had in the existing political systems and their
deep desire to participate in them have perished.” (10)

Though the Female Eunuch and Sexual Politics were published more than a
decade ago, they continue to be reprinted and indeed they perfectly express a
mood common to a considerable number of women engaged in the liberation
movement. This was evident when, I recall, in the summer of 1982, the Labour
Party held a mass rally for feminists. Women, mostly young but also of all
ages, swarmed round a platform occupied by a female orator. Every now and
again the audience burst into rapturous applause, but most especially when the
speaker thundered denunciations of previous labour governments. Those were the
governments which had introduced the Sex Discrimination Act, Child Benefits,
an Act protecting employment for mothers following the births of their
infants, extended leave of absence during and after pregnancy and, in
particular, among several other measures affecting women, was the major Act
introducing Equal Pay. On the special subject of equal pay, it seemed from the
audience’s reaction that the government had been more at fault for introducing
a measure which still required improvement than if it had not introduced any
Act at all. If the speaker had been foolhardy enough or courageous enough to
suggest that it is easier to amend legislation once introduced than to set the
precedent, she might have lost her audience.

Feminists who think and speak only in terms of revolution usually scorn
real revolutionary tactics. At the same time, they often refuse to engage in
normal political practices, in pursuits such as electioneering, for which they
express contempt. They urge women instead to liberate themselves by
questioning every assumption of normalcy in the relationship between the
sexes. This is achieved by questioning their own attitudes and conduct, by
analysing their own feelings, especially towards a man or men, with a view to
taking positive action to change their way of life. This may involve making
decisions, though not so painful if they cultivate the habit of discussing
their problems and experiences in groups with other women, from whom they
would draw and to whom they would give, encouragement and support. This
procedure, known by the clumsy term, ‘consciousness-raising’, CR for short,
has been defined by one writer as the trade mark for women’s liberation.

The movement has been widely publicised, primarily no doubt because of

the outstanding intellectual abilities of its exponents. But there is also the
less attractive aspect of the matter. Any suggestion of a sex war and all
controversies between the sexes have long been established, along with dog
stories and the doings of royalty, as so-called popular journalism. A feature
article which opens with the assertion that women eat more than men, or that
men talk more than women – as they do – commands an immediate audience.
In providing T.V. with just the kind of controversial, ready-made
entertainment on which the medium thrives, feminists were given plenty of
opportunity to air their views. They seized the chance to increase public
awareness of sex-discrimination. They drew attention to attitudes, opinions
and the use of language degrading to the female sex. They ridiculed the
presentation of female stereotypes in the media and by advertisers. Their
onslaught has been so effective that they have succeeded in making men much
more circumspect in the way they refer to women. The oft-quoted remark made by
Patrick Jenkin, as Secretary of State for Social Services that, “If God has
intended women to go out to work, he would not have created two sexes”, is so
untypical of the sentiments now expressed by politicians, whatever their
private complexes, so tactless in view of the sex of his boss, that it would
better be dismissed as a mere political gaffe instead of being cited by
defensive feminists as proof that nothing much has changed.

Attitudes have changed, markedly during the past few years. That the
terms ‘sexist’ and ‘male chauvinist’ have passed into daily parlance and, more
amusingly into the vernacular of abuse men now like to fling at each other, is
a true tribute to the success of feminist propagandists. They have set a
fashion, a fashion in which men make a special point of showing how
enlightened they are, in words if not in deeds, in public if not in private.
So far, so good, and I have little doubt that the fine momentum of change in
social attitude achieved over recent years will not evaporate; but if the test
is, as it should be, political change over the whole field, feminists must
think afresh. The Conservative Party, Conservatives with a large or small C,
have little to fear from the movement for women’s liberation. A movement
without leaders, without an organisation, without a coherent policy, without a
strategy, without allies and without an allegiance to any political party may
even serve the forces of reaction. Conservatism thrives on inertia. Even
socialist and Marxist feminists loosely associated with the far left may also
perform unwitting services for their opponents. By giving the impression that
they are more concerned with long-term ideology than immediate needs, they may
alienate women of the working classes; they may even tend to put them off both
feminism and socialism. A young mother trapped in a flat, struggling to cope
with a couple of toddlers, is more likely to respond to a policy devised to
give her a degree of control over the way she is housed and a chance to say
what she most needs in a way of amenities than the suggestion to liberate
herself which is, of course, or at least may be, a middle class idea.*
Moreover, feminists who sneer at reformist legislation or depreciate the value
of the vote are themselves inconsistent, for they soon protest if advantages
won by reformers, which seemed so inadequate at the time, begin to be whittled
away. Though legislation may fail to change attitudes, it is also true that a
change in attitudes may not lead to a corresponding reform in legislation.**
To bring about the kind of transformation in society which feminists just
demand, both processes must advance simultaneously. As we shall illustrate the
suffragists themselves made the painful discovery that sometimes nothing can
force a government to bow to popular demand short of a serious threat of
resignations from a cabinet, a massive revild on the back benches or a
national calamity.

*Having made a point of canvassing female factory workers and young mothers
living on council estates or in working class districts in a number of
general and by-elections, I have found total incomprehension as to what
feminism is about. The most amusing example came in a factory producing bras
and pantie-girdles. When I asked whether anyone was interested in Women’s
Lib, I met with a chorus of NOES. “They want to do us out of jobs”, they told
me. Feminism to them meant nothing more than burning bras. The chief
complaints to come from young mothers is about the design of their flats of
houses. Ill-fitting window-frames, expensive under-floor electric heating,
kitchens too small, insufficient cupboard space, condensation and so forth.
Loneliness also figures high on the list and lack of amenities. Town planning
and housing should be one of the great feminist issues of our time,
especially as the men themselves are not admitting that the building
programme of the past few decades, with few exceptions, is one of the great
blunders of the era. On the whole, women have been made the guinea-pigs for
men’s architectural experiments. Of all the ‘women’s studies’, no more than
two or three authors have tackled the housing problem from the feminist’
point of view.
** In Sweden, for instance, where the desirability of both parents sharing in the
nurture of their children is acknowledged, fathers have a statutory right of leave of
absence from employment on full pay if their children fall sick. The Swedish Secretary
of Defce said to me jokingly, “Don’t tell our enemies that our soldiers are baby-
sitters!”

Rather than give the impression inadvertently that most contemporary

feminists working outside the political parties are indifferent to reform, a
reminder should be added that various groups have organized demonstrations,
drawn public attention to their grievances and filled the Strangers’ gallery
in the House of Commons when feminist issues are under debate. But these are
not the only ways, certainly not the most effective, for enforcing the desired
result. One reason why they have failed to achieve abortion on demand is
because M.P.s, whose constituencies lie well beyond London, thought
sympathetic to the cause, had to admit that few if any positive requests for
freely available abortion had come from any of their own constituents. On the
other hand, they had been swamped by petitions from anti-abortionists. M.P.s
are responsible to voters, as suffragists themselves were fond of saying; that
is, to those who elected them to Parliament. After 1918, suffragists addressed
their adaptable minds to this very problem and, again as we will see, to some
effect.

When in her brilliant analysis of the roots of feminism Olive Banks

states in a concluding chapter: “...there is no doubt at all that women’s
suffrage failed to achieve the hoped of those who campaigned for it”, she
expresses her own opinion and that of most of her contemporaries, but
unwittingly she contradicts the claim made on the subject, both in their
writing and their speeches, by prominent suffragists. (soon after the vote was
won.) They considered that the result of the women’s vote had far exceeded
their expectations. They were not claiming, of course, that women had thereby
achieved their emancipation. Quite the contrary, those who had grown old in
the movement felt that it was the duty of the younger generation to carry on
with the work which their elders had merely begun. Unhappily, younger
feminists had to meet the full strength of an anti-feminist backlash, some of
the forces of which had their origins in the first world war, considered in
chapter 9.
 For all that has been written on this subject, most authors have
confined their attention to a brief period, mostly to that when the militants
were in the forefront, and the result is to present a most lop-sided picture,
often with extraordinary bias. One of the offenders was Roger Fulford in his
Votes for Women. It took Christabel Pankhurst, who was still alive in 1956, no
time to find confirmation of her suspicion that it must have been written by
an Asquithian liberal. (12) She also discovered that Roger Fulford himself had
thrice been defeated as a parliamentary candidate. She, then in California,
and her sister Sylvia in Ethiopia were both so distressed by his
interpretation so incensed by his inaccuracies and so hurt by the way he had
sought even to make their mother’s wedding a subject of mockery that,
unbeknown to him, he drew the two sisters together in a friendly
correspondence and healed a breach between them which had lasted ever since
1913. (11) They died in peace with each other. Yet Fulford's witty record,
which caused them so much pain, is less biased, less inaccurate, much less
hostile than much which came later.

Constance Rover's Women's Suffrage and Party Politics in Britain should

be mentioned for its impartiality and because it does direct its attention to
the political aspect. But she rarely quotes or presents directly the great
Gladstone, Lloyd George, Asquith, Winston Churchill, and other leading
politicians. As today’s feminists will eagerly appreciate, what those
Ministers of the Crown had to say about women in general and their demand for
the vote in particular was often so insulting that their remarks had swift
bearing on the dynamics of the agitation. At times, the attitude of
politicians, that of Asquith especially, so raised the fury even of the most
conservative, conventional and law-abiding of suffragists that they were
tempted to join the militants and throw stones at government buildings. But
militants and non-militants could console themselves with the thought that
they also had the best of men on their side, some of whom sacrificed as much
as the women themselves for the cause of suffrage.

It is a wonderful story – a story of the real struggle for human freedom

always is – worth the retelling and sure to be reinterpreted from age to age.
No one can hope to tell it in full, to pursue all its ramifications, all its
side-issues and to bring to life that great company of leading characters. I
have imposed a limitation on myself which I hope can make the record
manageable and to give it a particular shape. Two families and, especially,
the daughters of those families were brought up in the movement for women’s
rights, involved in it, in one way of another, from the very start to the end;
that is, from the time when women first began to organize in earnest, in 1865,
right up to 1928 when, at last, they lived to see the fulfilment of the
campaign’s original aim – suffrage for women on the same terms as it is, or
may be, granted to men, or put more simply, votes for women on equal terms
with men. I have thought about these two families, the Pankhursts and the
Fawcetts, so often throughout my adult political life that I feel I know them
almost as if they were close relations.

During the war, when I was in my twenties, I read somewhere that on July
14th, ex-suffragettes assembled in Westminster Gardens to lay flowers on Mrs
Pankhurst’s statue to commemorate her birthday. Partly out of curiosity,
partly because I thought that some day I might want to make a film about them,
and also to pay my tribute, I decided to join them. No one was interested in
the suffragettes in those days though many were still alive. They were so
astonished to find a young woman in their midst, who had also arrived with a
bouquet, that they were as curious about me as I was about them. Most of them
wore their prison badges and were proud to call themselves ex-gaol-birds,
though they looked to me more like little old maiden aunts up from the country
carrying their posies in their gloved hands and wearing hats with veils. When
I told them that I hoped one day to make a film about them, we arranged to
meet again. At subsequent meetings they gave me their correspondence, old
posters, newspaper cuttings and much else besides/ At my request, many of them
also wrote descriptions of some of their experiences during the campaign,
episodes which they considered would add to the drama or the humour of the
great film I would surely make, but alas, never did.

I had long conversations with Sylvia Pankhurst,Jessie Kenney, Charlotte

Marsh, whom I saw often, andwith Mrs Pankhurst's closest friends, Mrs Marshall
and Mrs Archdale. I also formed a lasting friendship with Emmeline Pethick
Lawrence and we talked about the campaign for hours on end. Later, I met a few
ex-constitutional suffragists and found their reminiscences no less
fascinating. From them I learnt that, in some respects the suffrage campaign
resembled the labour movement. Like the left and right of the Labour Party,
there were two main suffrage organisations, antagonistic yet interdependent.
There were also many subsidiary suffrage societies, including a few run
exclusively by men. Usually, all these different societies acted
independently, but sometimes they joined forces to form a whole and to present
a united front to their opponent - the Government. No suffragist that I met
ever looked back on the campaign with regret. When I was in my twenties, like
many contemporary feminists, I too felt sceptical about the value of the vote.
But when at one of my meetings with suffragettes I asked whether it had really
been worth all the sacrifices they had made, I was told politely to do my
home-work, to read Hansards and compare what happened in the House of Commons
before and after women could vote. The difference is staggering, not only in
the legislation enacted but in the tone of the debates. Yet, it is generally
accepted that nothing much came of the vote. Indeed, but for the myths and
misconceptions still surrounding the campaign, I would not have decided to
write this book.
 NOTES AND SOURCES

1. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own, Hogarth Press, 1946, p. 63. She also
thought it deplorable that nothing is known about women before the
eighteenth century, p. 69.

2. Marlow Joyce. The Peterloo Massacre, Prap and Whiting, 1969, p. 123. See
also full report in The Examiner, John Hunt, 1819, p. 539. Several more
reports of Female Reformers in this edition.

3. The William Cobbett Society, Vol. 2, No. 2, p.11.

4. Marlow Joyce. The Peterloo Massacre, p. 75. See also, Cole, G.D.H. and
Filson, A.W. British Working Class Movements, Macmillan, 1951, pp.
163/4. Also many addresses From Female Reform Societies in Cobbett’s
Political Register printed in 1820, 1821.

5. History of Woman Suffrage, Vol.1. Reissued Arno & The New York Times, 1969,
p. 82. See also Dictionary of National Biography.

6. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Johnson, 1792,

pp.235/6.

7. Evans, Mary. The Woman Question, Fontana Paperback, 1982, p.58.

8. Banks, Olive. Faces of Feminism, Martin Robertson, 1981, p.94.

9. Millet, Kate. Sexual Politics, Rupert Hart Davis, 1971, p. 84.

10. Greer, Germaine. The Female Eunuch, Granada Paperback, 1981, p.17.

11. Banks, Olive. Faces of Feminism, ibid. p.248.

12. Sylvia Pankhurst’s letters to Christabel in author’s possession, also

Christabel’s letters to friends on Fulford’s Votes for Women.