EP 08 - The Secret History of the Suffragettes

The Secret History of the Suffragettes

- Episode 08 -

After 1918 the secrets are out

DOWNLOAD

LISTEN

The Secret History of the Suffragettes

Wednesday 13 April 2022

After 1918 - the Secrets are Out LISTEN

Eleanor Rathbone - the 'whirlwind' - who took up the reins of women's suffrage in the UK from 1918

What ought to be done, can be done

After 1918, when the vote was given to women but NOT on the same basis as men, all the campaigners for women’s suffrage (with the exception of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst) dusted themselves down and got ready to start the fight all over again.

The 1918 Act only gave the vote to women over 30 who were householders, married to householders, graduates or occupiers of property worth over £5 a year. None of the young women who’d risked their lives in the munitions factories got the vote. Most of the Suffragettes who had gone to prison would have been too poor or too young.

Millicent Fawcett the Suffragist who had actually succeeded in winning the vote for some women, was now 72 and handed the presidency of her renamed National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, NUSEC, to the whirlwind Eleanor Rathbone. Rathbone’s family motto was ‘what ought to be done, can be done’.

NUSEC campaigned not only for equal votes, but also for the equal right to work and help for married, working class women. It proclaimed a doctrine of ‘new feminism’, which included birth control, and family allowances to be paid to poor mothers. Rathbone’s Personal Services Society in Liverpool is still going today [http://psspeople.com/whats-happening/news/our-centenary-year]. She campaigned for the end to violence in Ireland and women’s rights in India. But she did this all BEHIND THE SCENES, as Millicent Fawcett had done, with the MPs.

The 2nd suffrage Bill was passed in the Commons in March 1928 and at last gave women the same voting rights as men. Women were now 52.7% of the electorate. Rathbone became an MP in 1929 and campaigned against female genital mutilation under British rule in Kenya

And there’s more! Listen to the podcast!

Episode 8 After 1918 - the Secrets are out on Apple podcast here

Christabel Pankhurst, voting in 1918. Only comparatively wealthy women over 30 could vote.

Don’t be envious of the boss’s wife in her silk dress. You go and buy one too

Christabel Pankhurst’s election campaign in 1918 in Smethwick was anti foreign immigrants. In 1918 Christabel had published a book called Industrial Salvation. Britain could have a world-beating economy, she claimed, if it got rid of all foreign immigrants, the Labour Party and the trades unions. And then, what you did was … well… um … well … you allowed women to buy whatever they wanted.

Sorry?

No seriously. In Industrial Salvation she wrote, ‘the working woman who spends her earnings on silk dresses, silk stockings, shapely shoes, ﬁne underwear, fur coats, pretty hats, and all the rest of it is a far better social reformer than all the men’s Socialist or Labour organizations rolled into one.’ If women were simply allowed to buy whatever they wanted, the proletariat would disappear and, well, everyone would be comfortably middle class. And Britain would be great again.

Everyone should trust in ‘the insatiable feminine desire for consumer goods…Don’t be envious of the boss’s wife in her silk dress’, she told her readers. ‘You go and buy one too.’

The constituents of Smethwick, a Midlands iron town, where Christabel was standing for election in 1918 didn’t vote for her!

Christabel tried again. This time at a Westminster Abbey by-election in June 1919. Her slogans, which now included ‘hang the Kaiser’ didn’t strike much of a chord in the months after the armistice and she withdrew before the poll. And with that, the political activity of mother and eldest daughter ended.

There’s more! Listen to the podcast!

Episode 8 After 1918 - the Secrets are out on Soundcloud here

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

Emmeline Pankhurst's racist eugenics and Suffragette myth-making from 1928

Logo from the Second International Eugenics Conference in 1921, depicting eugenics as a tree which unites a variety of different fields

So what happened to Emmeline Pankhurst? She campaigned against trades unions, and for racial purity! What?

Eugenics were very popular in the 1920s. Marie Stopes was a Eugenicist. But unlike most other feminists who were interested in choosing when to have children and how many, Pankhurst connected her eugenics to a shrill belief in the British Empire. It led her, to put it bluntly, to the same conclusions as Adolf Hitler. Treat your population as a breeding farm. Exclude anyone who came from anywhere else.

From 1917 Mrs P’s Women’s Party said it would campaign for equal pay and opportunity for women, but like Christabel it was against the trade unions, arguing that bosses should decide workers’ pay. It also campaigned to throw anyone out of British public service who could not prove they had ‘long British descent.’ It was wound up in 1918.

From 1920-24 Emmeline got a job in Canada, supposedly lecturing on Combating Venereal Diseases. Historian Sarah Carter has discovered that Mrs Pankhurst’s actual theme was the supremacy of the British Empire, and of British women as guardians of the British race.VD, you see, in Mrs Pankhurst’s view, was an affliction of the feeble-minded. And especially, therefore, of immigrants. Above all of Russians, who were heading for Canada by the boat load and had to be kept out at all costs. She also denounced the Indigenous Peoples, and the Chinese. Oh, and the French. Are you following her logic here?

She teamed up with Emily Murphy, today much lauded in Canada, like Emmeline, as a campaigner for women’s rights, but actually also a vicious racist who was campaigning not only for forcible sterilisation of the above feeble-minded, but also for the supremacy of the ‘Nordic Races’.

And there’s more! Listen to the podcast!

Episode 8 After 1918 - the Secrets are out on Spotify here

Mary Poppins' satirical treatment of its rights-oriented mother (Glynis Johns) managed to ridicule the Suffrage movement. Released in 1964 some say it was a deliberate attack on feminists.

How on earth did the Suffragettes persuade pretty much everyone that they had won the women’s vote in 1918 when it wasn’t true?

After Emmeline Pankhurst died in June 1928 the myth-making seriously began.

There was at first little interest in putting up a statue to her. However it suited the Tory leader Stanley Baldwin very well indeed to make a heroine out of Mrs P. But only because he wanted to persuade as many as possible of the poorer women enfranchised in 1928 not to vote for Labour. So with his backing in 1930 the statue appeared near Parliament, although not in Parliament Square.

Historian Laura Nym Mayhall has shown how in 1929 former suffragettes organised as the Suffrage Fellowship sent out a questionnaire so that they could produce a ‘Roll of Honour … of Suffragette Prisoners.’ Well, the clue is in the title. The questionnaire asked when you were imprisoned, how many times, and for how long. It asked about hunger strikes and forcible feeding. The Fellowship had money it could loan to former suffragettes - but it would only make a loan on condition that you had been imprisoned.

So whether intentionally or not, the 1929 Suffragette Fellowship began to create the impression that it was only the women who had been imprisoned and been forcibly fed, (Mrs P never was) who had campaigned for women’s suffrage. The rest didn’t count. And once begun, the myth grew and grew. The Fellowship only wanted to know about attacks on property. Violence towards people was whitewashed.

Nym Mayhall has shown how the Suffrage Fellowship now came to control what the public remembered. In the 1930s it made itself the go-to organisation for reporters who wanted a quick bit of background on the suffrage movement. Worse, in the 1960s, Mrs Banks in Mary Poppins allowed the suffrage movement to be further sanitised and domesticated.

'Perhaps the most pernicious’ result of the Suffragette Fellowship’s myth-making, says Nym Mayhall, was the transformation of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst into radical feminist heroines.

View All Episodes