The Secret History of the Suffragettes
We explore the fascinating women and men who mobilised public opinion to get women the vote. And we peel away the Pankhurst monopoly to reveal something much uglier – a gender war, a class war and terrorism. And also an unexpected preoccupation with shopping.
Mrs Pankhurst claims she won women the vote through ‘marvellous leadership.’ An all-male conference of MPs counters that it gifted women the vote. We reveal that neither is true. The door to women’s suffrage is finally opened in January 1917 through brilliant negotiations behind the scenes by Millicent Fawcett, the president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage, her female colleagues and the enlightened MPs who work with her. [Please note on our logo the NUWSS colours of berry red and leaf green - not often seen today]
We go back to the great number of unsung women and men who made great strides towards women’s votes and female emancipation by 1900. Emmeline Pankhurst sets up her Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903 as a pressure group for votes for poor working-women in the cotton mills. By then a majority of MPs is already consistently in favour. But the public are uninterested and no government will therefore act. The question is whether the WSPU can find a formula for making ministers give votes to women.
The WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes - begin in the Manchester Labour Party in the 1890s and learn their publicity-grabbing tactics from Labour. But these tactics turn out to have the worst possible effect – making women’s votes even less likely than before. They are so bad, in fact, it makes you wonder whether the Suffragette leadership had some other agenda.
The militant strategy of the WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes - is delivering them headlines. It gets them nowhere with the government but it makes enormous sums of advertising revenue from fancy retailers, and funds Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst’s society lifestyle. Rich London ladies in silks and satins pour in the money, while working-class activists take all the risks. WSPU officer Theresa Billington drafts a constitution to give everyone a say but Emmeline Pankhurst tears it up and manoeuvres anyone with a socialist agenda out. Who exactly is this organisation for?
From 1912 the WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes – are out of control and dangerous. But that is not how they're remembered. Anyone who disagrees with the violence either leaves or is thrown out. Whatever they later claim about their ‘wonderful leadership’, it is their young, poor members who are inventing new and increasingly dangerous ways of intimidating the government. The WSPU leadership claims it never threatened life, only property, but this is manifestly not true. Axes are thrown, full theatres set on fire, bombs put on trains, acid poured into mail-boxes and the leaders do nothing to contain this ‘terrorism’ with deadly intent.
November 1912 sees the first defeat for women’s votes since 1891. The government has been struggling with law and order after two years of mass strikes. That year even school children go on strike. The violence of the suffragettes is barely noticed and can definitely not be rewarded. For the first time in a generation, Parliament turns against women’s votes. What little sympathy there was for women’s suffrage among the wider public ebbs away. But Christabel Pankhurst, from her cosy Paris apartment, is enjoying the fight.
Suddenly, after 1913 votes for women looks inevitable. Not through the chaotic, dying campaign of the suffragettes. But through the political brilliance of Millicent Fawcett and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Their 1913 alliance with the Labour Party changes the whole political balance. Now Liberal Prime Minister HH Asquith’s blockheaded intransigence over women’s votes is costing his party dearly and letting the Tories in. At the 1915 election all three parties will be vying to give women the vote. But then… war breaks out.
The reason we all believe Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst achieved women’s votes in Britain is because that’s the narrative created in the 20s and 30s by former suffragettes. The reality of what Emmeline and Christabel got up to post 1918 is shocking. Suffice it to say it involves racial purity and telling working women they can buy silk underwear, shapely shoes and fur hats, not by improving their working conditions but by giving into the feminine desire for shopping. What?
Millicent Fawcett’s legacy is The Fawcett Society - still campaigning for equality.
As we emphasise in our podcasts, this subject is a battleground. But to dodge at least one accusation of prejudice, we have confined ourselves as far as possible to the work of female historians.
As an introduction you could start by reading anything by Sandra Holton. Her Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain 1800-1918 (1986) has stood up well. Suffrage Days (1996) brilliantly draws up more chairs to the table by examining the life and work of key suffrage figures now usually overlooked – Elizabeth Wolsenholme Elmy, Mary Gawthorpe, Alice Clarke and Laurence Housman.
Then read anything by Laura E. Nym Mayhall. ‘Creating the “Suffragette Spirit”: British feminism and the historical imagination’, Women’s History Review 4 (1995) and ‘Domesticating Emmeline: Representing the Suffragette, 1930-1993’, NWSA Journal 11 (1999) explore the deliberate creation of the Suffragette myth from the twenties and thirties. Her ‘Defining Militancy’ Journal of British Studies 39 (2000) explodes the myth that the Suffragette WSPU was the dominant force in the suffrage campaign. Her Militant Suffrage Movement (with Amy Johnson Frykholm 2003) includes an important section on the impact of the Boer War, which we gloss over in our podcasts.
Krista Cowman, Women of the Right Spirit (2007) is a brilliant and generally more sympathetic insight into the WSPU, examined through its paid organisers. Her ‘“Incipient Toryism”? The WSPU and the Independent Labour Party 1903-14,’ History Workshop Journal 53 (2002) shows local connections between the Suffragettes and working-class socialism that continued locally, mostly outside London and against official WSPU policy.
Julia Bush’s Women Against the Vote (2007) is an excellent, essential corrective to the misconception that most – or indeed many – Edwardian women were interested in voting. Read it to begin understanding this period from within its own discourses.
If by now you feel a need for the political background, Constance Rover’s antique Women’s Suffrage and Party Politics in Britain 1866-1914 (1967) is still, extraordinarily, the go-to reference for the various suffrage bills. Her analysis remains useful, though obviously showing its age. For more you probably have to turn to male historians (and we promise to get this over quickly.) Harold Smith’s The British Women’s Suffrage Campaign 1866-1928 (2nd ed 2007) is a superb introduction, both readable and your go-to book for reference. Sean Lang’s old Parliamentary Reform 1785-1928 (1999) is still a workmanlike, matter-of-fact text for the longer background.
Martin Pugh has written a great deal on the subject, all of it enjoyable and full of excellent detail. Although some of his work has been contested by women historians, nobody would suggest it isn’t nevertheless important. The March of the Women (2000) pours a good deal of cold water on the traditional Suffragette story. Read Sandra Holton’s review in the American Historical Review 2001 for some caveats. Pugh’s The Pankhursts (2001) is a good read and struggles valiantly not to be too critical.
June Purvis’s various publications on the Pankhursts are, by contrast, uncomfortably uncritical and need to be treated with much more caution. Among many biographies of Emmeline Pankhurst, you could try Paula Bartley’s (2002). Millicent Fawcett sadly still lacks a good biography. David Rubenstein’s A Different World for Women (1991) is heavyweight but oddly bloodless and unsympathetic. Fawcett deserves something couched in a better understanding of the period. Come on sisters!
Guy Routh’s Occupation and Pay in Great Britain 1906-79 (1980) is one of those forgotten tomes that turns out to be full of little gems. It has nothing to do with suffrage, but (in the context of the rest of the reading) dramatically resets the argument about the status of the WSPU’s paid staff (whom we can work out were among the best paid women in the country), and who exactly the ‘tax-paying women’ might have been they intended to win the vote for. A reminder never to neglect the economics. Ok. That’s the last of the men. Breathe.
There have been many excellent studies of specific episodes. Jill Liddington and Elizabeth Crawford’s ‘Women do not count, neither shall they be counted’: Suffrage, Citizenship and the Battle for the 1911 Census,’ in History Workshop Journal (2011) exposes the real story behind one of the persistent myths created by the Pankhursts. Jane Robinson, Hearts and Minds (2018) is a colourful account of the little-known great pilgrimage for peace in 1913. Nicoletta F Gullace, ‘Christabel Pankhurst and the Smethwick Election’, Women’s History Review 23 (2014) examines the Pankhursts’ one and only (disastrous) attempt to contest an election (though note our reservations about this account in our podcast). Florence Binard, ‘“The injustice of the Woman’s Vote”’ Women’s History Review 23 (2014) is among the few studies of the continued struggle for women’s votes in the 1920s. Véronique Molinari, ‘Educating and Mobilizing the New Voter,’ Journal of International Women’s Studies (2014) is another, examining the campaign to get women actually voting.
Sarah Carter’s ‘“Develop a Great Imperial Race”: Emmeline Pankhurst, Emily Murphy, and Their Promotion of “Race Betterment” in Western Canada in the 1920s’, in George Colpitts and Heather Devine Finding Directions West (2017) carefully exposes Emmeline Pankhurst’s naked and little-known racism, egregious even for its day.
Katarzyna Kociołek’s ‘London’s Suffragettes, Votes for Women, and Fashion’, Anglia 27 (2018) brings a very telling sideways look at the suffragettes, highlighting the relationship they developed with outfitters for the wealthy in the capital. It’s a theme taken up also in Jane Chapman’s excellent ‘The Argument of the Broken Pane: Suffragette consumerism and newspapers’, Media History 21 (2015) and Sarah Pedersen’s broader ‘Press response to women politicians,’ in Journalism Studies 19 (2018).
Mitzi Auchterlonie’s Conservative Suffragists. The Women’s vote and the Tory Party (2007) considers an important and neglected element in the struggle. Anita Sama’s unpublished St Andrews thesis The Times and the Women’s Suffrage Movement 1900-1918 (1975) is full of telling insights and has been too long neglected. You can find it here.
Iris Dove’s Yours in the Cause. Suffragettes in Lewisham, Greenwich and Woolwich (1988) shows the rich insights local history always brings. Fern Riddell’s biography of Kitty Marion, Death in Ten Minutes (2019) is an easy read, reviving a little-known suffragette. It helpfully draws attention to the scale of suffragette violence even if Kitty Marion is not quite as important a figure, nor the interpretation as new, as the book claims.
There are useful collections of documents on-line at the British Library and the National Archives. Joyce Marlow, Votes for Women (2000) calls itself the Virago Book of Suffragettes but is a better and wider collection of documents than that suggests. For well-chosen and informative primary material it’s your best starting place. Join the excellent British Newspaper Archive and read on-line all the editions of Suffragette – besides many other contemporary publications.
You can find various pieces by WSPU staff member and journalist Theresa Billington-Grieg in The Non-violent Militant (1987) edited by Carol McPhee and Ann FitzGerald. Billington-Grieg split with the WSPU in 1907 and was a trenchant and well-informed critic of the Pankhursts. Pro-Pankhurst historians have tried to write her off as untrustworthy, jealous of Christabel Pankhurst. But her critique is all the more telling for being the considered and intelligent analysis of a woman as passionate for the cause as any and willing to use whatever tactics she believed effective. Much of the same could be said of Sylvia Pankhurst’s The Suffragette (1911) and The Women’s Suffrage Movement (1931). You could balance both with Emmeline Pankhurst’s My Own Story (1914), although it is the origin of a string of tales we show to be unreliable.
The feature film Suffragette (2015) is well researched and in some ways a refreshing view on the WSPU. But don’t be beguiled by its focus on a London working-class heroine and her relationship with Emily Davison. This would not have been typical of the WSPU. As we explain, a great deal of research has shown that there were working-class Suffragettes, but they were mostly in the North. And the Pankhursts regarded Davison as among the most unreliable of ‘free-lancers’. Their real-life attempt to discredit her after her tragic death was a disgrace.