The women’s suffrage movement and arguably the most successful mass mobilisation in history writes Gareth Beynon.
The call for female suffrage had been raised several times prior to the suffragette movement, most notably by Mary Wollstonecraft in the context of the French Revolution, but the issue remained largely a discussion point amongst radical intellectual circles.
Female radicals had played important roles in earlier democratic movements. Women petitioners were significantly involved in campaigns to free the Leveller leader John Lilburne during the English Revolution, at one point even attempting to storm the Tower of London. Similarly there were some women involved with the Chartist movement. In neither case though was a serious campaign for women’s equality launched. By 1884 around 60% of British men could vote but not a single woman could.
This began to change in the second half of the Nineteenth Century. John Stuart Mill, the liberal political philosopher and MP, introduced a bill to give the vote to some wealthy women which was the subject of much ridicule from the great and good of British society. Many MPs raised fears of husbands losing control of their wives’ property – God forbid! – demonstrating that even at this early stage it was widely accepted to be an issue of the wider role of women in society rather than just one of suffrage. While this bill and those in a similar vein which were mooted in the following decades never had a serious chance of success, they did raise the issue as a point for debate more widely. Petitions for women’s votes collected some three million signatures between 1877-9. However many of the bills put to parliament contained bizarre compromises, for example excluding married women on the grounds that their husbands would vote for them. The nascent women’s movement did relatively little to combat these reactionary arguments which held it back significantly. In the words of Sylvia Pankhurst ‘the women’s movement, in short, passed from timidity to timidity’.
Meanwhile attempts to raise the campaign through the trade union movement were facing serious challenges. With an increasing number of women entering the workplaces and organisations like the Women’s Protective and Provident League, established 1874, campaigning for their involvement in the Unions one could be forgiven for assuming that the unions would jump at the opportunity to endorse a campaign of interest to so many working class women. Alas no. At the TUC congress in 1874 the National Union of Working Women had to be represented by a man. Even this was considered to be scandalous with one delegate horrified that ‘the next thing they’ll want to represent themselves’.
Following this the recession which began in 1879, causing significant unemployment, weakened the Unions position and made them more timid politically. The TUC repeatedly voted down motions to back universal male suffrage in this period. Largely hostile to political work and firmly of the opinion that women belonged in the home, the unions did not act as a friend of the movement. Many campaigners came to view them as an obstacle akin to the civil society organisations of the right.
Female involvement in Trade Unionism was most prevalent in Cheshire and Lancashire in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth century. It was there, Blackburn specifically, that mass petitioning in favour of women’s suffrage took off in 1900, quickly spreading throughout the cotton towns of North Western England. This was the basis for a motion to the TUC congress in 1901, which was disappointingly vague, calling for women to be given the vote. Frustration with such watered down arguments and a strategy of appealing to a patently uninterested establishment led to the formation of the Women’s Social Political Union (WSPU) in Manchester. Cristabel, Emmeline and Sylvia Pankhurst, the key figures in the organisation, were all members of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and envisaged a close working relationship with that party.
With the failure of a 1905 bill to give women the vote the WSPU, or suffragettes as they became known, decided upon a new strategy based on attacking whichever political party was in power if it didn’t support their demands. The disruption of a Liberal Party meeting by Cristabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney, a young Trade Unionist, and their subsequent imprisonment after refusing to pay their fines brought greater publicity and sparked a series of demonstrations. The WSPU grew from six branches in October 1906 to 58 in the space of a year. Stunts and small scale demonstrations were used effectively to build the movement. When three leading suffragettes were put on trial for breach of the peace they called two government ministers as witnesses, mocking them repeatedly in the court room.
More than 100,000 public meetings were organised by the WSPU between 1903 and 1909. The force-feeding of suffragette prisoners, compared by some to the conditions in the jails of Tsarist Russia, garnered a significant amount of publicity and sympathy for the movement. The highpoint of the WSPU came in June of 1908 when some 300,000 attended a ‘Votes for Women’ rally in London’s Hyde Park.
The response of the left to this astonishing movement was appalling. The Social Democratic Federation (SDF), the largest revolutionary socialist organisation in Britain, argued that the campaign would end up with upper class women getting the vote, thus strengthening the right at the ballot box, and so vehemently opposed it. Lenin’s formulation of revolutionaries as tribunes of the oppressed was yet to be forced upon the British left. Emmeline Pankhurst resigned from the ILP over its reluctance to discuss female suffrage.
The newly formed Labour Party quickly retreated into workerism. With a handful of exceptions its leadership wanted nothing to do with the suffragettes. At several conferences an unholy alliance between the sectarians of the SDF and the rightwing leadership of the Labour Party united to crush pro-WSPU motions.
The sectarianism of most of the left towards the suffragettes had a significant effect on the politics of the WSPU. The misogyny experienced at Labour conferences caused a lot of demoralisation which weakened the organisation. A significant number of suffragettes, including Emmeline and Cristabel Pankhurst, became increasingly hostile to the labour movement. When the militant strikes of the Great Unrest broke out in 1911 many suffragettes viewed them as a distraction from their cause, although there was a great deal of division on the question. The WSPU also relapsed into some of the worst politics of the old suffrage movement. Negotiating a truce with the Liberal government, while it drafted a bill on increasing the number of voters, lasting for over two years was a massive error. At the time when pressure needed to be kept up more than ever the movement was put on hold. When the bill petered out in 1912 the WSPU was left almost starting from scratch again.
The great unrest had changed the political terrain markedly. The Labour Party was forced to accept a pro-female suffrage policy at its 1912 policy with many constituency party organisations passionate about the issue. Many working class suffragettes had taken the case for women’s votes to radicalised striking workers, open to new ideas, who were often convinced.
With the breakdown of the truce between the WSPU and the government a new strategy was needed. The leadership decided not to focus on building a mass movement but on an elitist strategy based on extreme militancy and direct action. This raised a lot of publicity but participation was not particularly encouraged. The Labour party was on the receiving end of a number of vicious polemics from the WSPU leadership and there was no real attempt to link up with the wider left. Hostility towards the strikes from the WSPU leadership increased – the argument seemed to be that as many male workers had the vote they should use that tool to win concessions from the government. Sylvia Pankhurst disagreed, stating that many WSPU members supported the strikes and often were involved in collections and over solidarity actions. She founded the East London Federation of Suffragettes to put her perspectives into practice and was expelled from the WSPU as a result.
What was left of the WSPU was highly committed but relatively small hardcore. The WSPU eventually suspended all activity indefinitely with the outbreak of the First World War, capitulating to militaristic jingoism as all the Labour leadership, bar Keir Hardie, and top Union bureaucrats did.
Women were eventually granted the vote in May 1917. Partly this was in response to events overseas: the Easter Rising in Dublin and the early stages of the Russian Revolution. Women were increasingly involved in the workplace; there were three times as many female trade unionists in 1918 as in 1914. The National Federation of Working Women was involved with the Red Clydeside movement in Glasgow. With discontent with the war beginning to grow it was seen by the establishment as a way to diffuse political tension.
It would be wrong, however, to be pulled into a narrative whereby the suffragette movement was a premature precursor to the radicalisation which took place during World War I. Had it not been for the WSPU burning female suffrage into the public psyche, its granting would never have been considered by the government. Had it not been for the tireless efforts of working class suffragettes, it is doubtful that the Labour movement would ever have accepted and taken up the cause. What was probably the largest anti-discrimination movement in British history did get results, even if they became truly apparent almost a decade after the highpoint of the political campaign.
From International Socialist Group site.
