EP 06 - The Secret History of the Suffragettes

The Secret History of the Suffragettes

- Episode 06 -

The violence backfired

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The Secret History of the Suffragettes

Wednesday 30 March 2022

Suffragette violence backfired LISTEN

Cartoon 'Her Mothers Voice', 1911. Young girl and her father view Mother with alarm as she races past the window wielding a hammer.

Why did the Suffragettes resort to serious violence from 1911?

We’ve always been told that the Suffragettes won votes for women in Britain. But the closer we look, the less true that seems. Using mainly the work of women historians, we’ve seen how the campaign of Emmeline Pankhurst, and the Women’s Social and Political Union she set up, looks more like a catalogue of blunders. Each of them made votes for women less likely.

Escalating the campaign of violence in 1911, right in the middle of serious Parliamentary discussions over a bill to give women the vote, was another major miscalculation. Or was it? Historian Martin Pugh shows why the campaign of violence was not about winning votes but about making money.

1910 had been a financial disaster for the WSPU. Historian Anita Sama has shown that, without the usual high-profile militant stunts, coverage in the press had dried up and WSPU income plummeted in 1910-11. For an organisation that was extremely expensive to run – and several members of the Pankhurst family to support – losing a large percentage of its income was a serious problem.

November 1912 sees the first defeat for women’s votes since 1891.

Far from being intimidated by the new WSPU violence, support in Parliament for giving women the vote now dwindled fast. A suffrage bill in 1911 was defeated by 14 votes. It was the first defeat in a women’s suffrage vote since 1891.

By November 1912 an attempt to slip women’s votes into another bill was defeated in the Commons this time by 173. And that was the worst result ever recorded for a women’s franchise measure.

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Liverpool strikes of 1911

The violence of the suffragettes is barely noticed

There had long been the possibility that the question of Irish Home Rule could descend into violence from the Ulster Protestants who objected to the possibility of rule from Dublin. So for any government to be seen to reward violence in any way – like making any concessions to the Suffragettes – was a complete non-starter.

At home the government was struggling with law and order after two years of mass strikes punctuated by violent acts of sabotage at collieries, docks and railway yards. In Liverpool, workers’ barricades sprang up across the streets. The disorder was so bad by August 1911 that two Royal Naval warships steamed up the Mersey and trained their guns on the town.

In 1912 troops were called out to keep order across the country. In the course of these strikes and confrontations, at least 5 workers were killed.

In September 1911 school children went on strike probably in imitation. Education wasn’t free for children over 14 until 1944. Working-class children had to go out to work before and after the school day. They were striking for paid attendance, and an end to corporal punishment.

'The school strikes soon spread to 62 towns around Britain. The Llanelli Mercury reported on 7 September that the “strike epidemic has infected the rising generation [who] in order to be ‘in the fashion’ [have] decided upon a ‘down tool’ policy”.

The schoolchildren marched through the town “singing and booing”. They also formed committees, painted banners, organised mass meetings and picketed and attacked ‘scabs’ who entered the school gates.’ Clive Bloom, author of Restless Revolutionaries (2010)

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International Suffrage Associations condemned the Pankhurst WSPU violence. 🪓 It was damaging their campaigns which were going swimmingly and peacefully 🕊

Constance Tite of South Kensington fills in the census form for her home: 'No persons here only women!'

Suffragettes boycotted the 1911 census? another myth exposed

As part of their campaign of militancy the Pankhurst WSPU proposed boycotting the census and thousands of its followers did so. Or so it later claimed. Neither of these claims is true.

It was Laurence Housman, a male writer and long-time supporter of women’s votes, who first proposed the boycott and it was taken up first by the Women’s Freedom League (founded by disillusioned ex-WSPU women like Theresa Billington in 1907.)

Just how many women actually refused to fill their census forms in 1911 remained a mystery until 2009 when the original individual forms were released and historians Jill Liddington and Elizabeth Crawford analysed them. They show that Laurence Housman’s house was full of objectors that night and that he wrote on the form that there had been ‘a quantity of females, names, numbers and ages unknown.’

The managers of the Aldwych Ice Rink noted that 500 women and 70 men spent the night there in an all-night skate-in. Other objectors spent the night in caravans on Putney Heath.

Elizabeth Wilding Davies – the suffragette who would later throw herself at the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby - sneaked into the Houses of Parliament and hid in a broom cupboard – where she was discovered and duly recorded on a census form by the Clerk of Works.

Mrs P went home from Aldwych Ice Rink and boldly wrote ‘No vote, no census’ on her form. Or so she said. The forms released almost 100 years later show that she had been duly recorded in her room at the plush Inns of Court Hotel, along with all the other guests. Living in a hotel, she had, of course, never had a form, either to fill in or to deface. She simply lied about it.

The 7th International Women's Suffrage Association, in Budapest, 1913, roundly condemns the Pankhurst WSPU violence

Setting the cause back internationally

On 1 March 1912, with tangible evidence of dropping support in Parliament, falling interest in the press and ‘negligible’ backing in the general public, the Suffragette WSPU launched another big wave of window smashing.

The police arrested Frederick and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, the wealthy socialist couple (introduced to the Pankhursts by Keir Hardie, Labour leader) who had been the movement’s backers since it had set up in London in 1906.

The Pethick-Lawrences were given nine months but were released in July 1912 after a campaign led, among others, by Marie Curie. Both had been cruelly force-fed – Mrs Pethick-Lawrence only once, her husband repeatedly until he was deemed too weak to remain in prison.

The couple’s possessions worth over £5000 – over half a million pounds today – were forfeited. When they returned from convalescence in Canada they found that Emmeline Pankhurst (who was never force-fed) had kicked them out of the WSPU for 'strategic differences' (ie being anti-violence and socialist).

Millicent Fawcett - president of the law-abiding NUWSS - had, up till now, supported the WSPU campaign. But in December 1911 she was writing that it was ruining any chance of getting the vote.

The conference of the International Women’s Suffrage Association meeting in Budapest in 1913 (Fawcett was its first and presiding president) complained that violence in one country was setting back the cause throughout the world.

Across Europe and round the world it was clear that votes for women was an idea whose time had come. But in Britain progress had been halted by the suffragettes’ campaign.

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