EP 07 - The Secret History of the Suffragettes

The Secret History of the Suffragettes

- Episode 07 -

The Suffragettes did not win the vote

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The Secret History of the Suffragettes

Wednesday 6 April 2022

The Suffragettes did not win the vote LISTEN

Map of the 6 routes of the NUWSS Women's Suffrage Pilgrimage summer of 1913, converging in Hyde Park - click here to make this interactive! [The National Archives]

A peaceful Women's Suffrage Pilgrimage to counter Suffragette violence

By the middle of 1913 the constitutional suffragists or NUWSS – Millicent Fawcett’s lot - were working with the Labour Party. This was putting very significant pressure on the minority Liberal government to make concessions on women’s votes. Even the Tories – faced with the prospect that the Liberals might actually do something on the issue - now began proposing to offer at least a few wealthy women the vote.

But Mrs Pankhursts’ suffragettes threatened to scupper this whole emerging consensus by launching their worst tide of terrorism yet. Now the NUWSS – the women in berry red and leaf green as opposed to the purple, green and white we’re used to - skilfully undid at least some of the harm by organising a massive, six-week peaceful pilgrimage to London, converging from six points around the country.

The marchers were occasionally met with violence. At Thame, near Oxford, one of their caravans was set on fire by drunken men, nearly killing the three women asleep inside: a wealthy woman in her 20s who owned the caravan – or Ark as she called it - a brush-manufacturer’s wife with 5 kids, and a council-school headmistress. If a doctor hadn’t called the police they could have been burnt alive. Even so the police didn’t arrest the arsonists. They just told them to move on and leave the ladies alone.

‘Good night you suffragettes’ their would-be murderers called out beerily as they shuffled away. It tells you all you need to know. The suffragettes had played the violent card including arson and in many minds, their campaign seemed to justify a violent response. Except of course, the women in the caravan were constitutional, peaceful suffragists.

What the NUWSS pilgrimage of 1913 shrewdly achieved was to give the minority Liberal government the justification they needed to go for women’s votes. Conceding votes for women would not signify giving in to the out-of-control arsonists of the Pankhurst WSPU.

Episode 7 The Suffragettes did not win the vote on Apple podcast here

Episode 7 The Suffragettes did not win the vote on Spotify here

Statue in Parliament Square of NUWSS Millicent Fawcett who led the suffrage movement in Britain - to date the only woman in the square!

Why do we think the Suffragettes won the vote?

Why do so many people continue to imagine that it was Mrs Pankhurst, and not Millicent Fawcett and the NUWSS, who won women the vote?

[In our first episode in this series, we reveal how the parliamentary manoeuvring that finally led to women winning the vote in 1918 was brilliantly pushed along and co-ordinated my Millicent Fawcett and the NUWSS, picking up on the successes of 1913-14. Mrs Pankhurst contributed nothing. In the middle of it all, in fact, she disbanded the suffragettes altogether and seems to have pocketed whatever remained of their finances.]

In the summer of 1914 there was a mood of euphoria in Millicent Fawcett’s NUWSS. Everybody now agreed that votes for women would be a major issue at the 1915 election. The Labour Party would stand on a platform for women’s votes. The Tories were likely to propose their own measure. The Liberals would have no choice but to follow and come up with their own. There were even rumours that Lloyd George and other ministers would use women’s votes as a device to get rid of Asquith, whom they’d long mistrusted.
And then war broke out….

When war broke out, we’re told, the Pankhurst Suffragette WSPU immediately called off its campaign of violence in return for an amnesty for its prisoners. But, like everything else to do with the Pankursts, it was not what it seems. In the first place, they had no alternative. You couldn’t wage a terrorist campaign during a war without looking like traitors.

Secondly the offer of a truce in fact came from the government. And third, most suffragettes were extremely relieved. The war had saved the WSPU from fizzling out in an ignominious dead end. Elsie Bowerman, a member of the WSPU who survived the Titanic tells us how it was. She wrote ‘It was almost with a sense of relief that we heard of the declaration of war. We knew that our militancy, which had reached an acute stage, could cease.’

Episode 7 The Suffragettes did not win the vote on Soundcloud here

With photos & read more - all episodes on our website here

The truth behind the female munitions workers recruited by Emmeline Pankhurst

They were called the Canary Girls because the toxic TNT turned their skin and hair yellow. In some cases it destroyed the liver. No wonder the men wouldn't do the job with the current lack of safety procedures. There were 400 cases of the disease Toxic Jaundice - a quarter of which were fatal - historian Anne Spurgeon

Women risking their lives in the munitions factories did not win women the vote

In May 1915 The Times Military Correspondent broke the news that so few shells were being manufactured that the British big guns could only fire four a day. It was true. Asquith’s government had made absolutely no preparations for a major conflict. (As you’ll discover in our series The Somme. Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16 this is a ridiculous oversimplification, the British army was synonymous with incompetence)

The minister for munitions in the new coalition government was David Lloyd George. He disliked Asquith as much as the Tories did and he saw the so-called ‘munitions crisis’ as a perfect opportunity to get rid of him and put himself in charge. But of course, first he had to solve the shortage of shells. It was a tricky problem.

It was not until long after the war that ex-suffragettes created the myth that the WSPU munitions campaign was a major reason that women had won the vote. But as we have seen, women worked as paid employees in an enormous range of jobs during the First world War, and volunteered in far more, often at huge sacrifice and danger to themselves. The NUWSS and its affiliated societies were involved in vastly more of this than the WSPU.

Sergeant Major Flora Sandes the only recorded British woman to serve in the First World War. While serving in the Serbian Army she was decorated for bravery in the field in Salonika, January, 1917

The Great War changed society's view of the capability of women

Shell production was dangerous work and Lloyd George could only increase it dramatically by negotiation with the trades unions. The union men, however, would never accept longer hours or cuts to wages or shortcuts to health and safety. Increasing production would therefore be expensive. The NUWSS – busy being nurses and pioneering doctors, setting up hospitals for refugees, working as bus drivers, dealing with food shortages etc was never going to collaborate with Lloyd George’s cynical plan to exploit women in munitions factories.

So someone - it is in fact quietly said that it was the King, George V (he who recommended force-feeding) - suggested that Lloyd George therefore try what was left of the Pankhursts’ WSPU. Lloyd George paid Mrs P £200,000 in today’s money to organise a woman’s right to work march to recruit poor women for the munitions factories.

The ‘munitionettes’ had a terrible time. Their skin turned yellow from the phosphorous in the explosive. Their teeth fell out. The pay was poor and at the end of the war the jobs immediately vanished. Most were young and, when votes for women were at last agreed in 1918, they discovered there was a 30-year age threshold and they did not count. By then Emmeline Pankhurst, as we saw in our first discussion in this series, was not even campaigning for women’s votes any more.

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