by Philipp Blom
Votes for women
This is my Protest against the Liberal Government for its treachery and torture of the Suffragettes of Great Britain who claim the right to have a Vote and become recognized Citizens.
Signed, Leonora Cohen
Leeds
As had been the case with other activists, Leonora Cohen was sentenced to prison, an experience that made her determined to take her protests further. Amid a climate of increasing radicalism, of arson attacks on empty buildings and letter boxes and even a letter bomb addressed to Prime Minister Asquith, Cohen had understood that this kind of warfare was symbolic and therefore had to be directed against symbols. ‘I went to London,’ she later recalled, ‘and bought a guide book. I searched through it looking at art galleries and goodness knows what. Then I got to the “T”s. The Tower of London. I thought, that’s the place. They’ve never had a woman there before causing trouble.’
And cause trouble she did. At ten thirty, 11 February 1911, armed with an iron bar, Leonora entered the Tower on a tourist ticket. Having waited for the patrolling Beefeaters to move away, she flung the bar at a display cabinet in the room containing the Crown Jewels. ‘What did you do that for?’ a guardsman demanded, after arresting her. ‘It is my protest against the treachery of the government against the working women of Great Britain,’ she answered. Again she appeared in court, though this time she had to be released on a technicality. Another time, after another window-smashing, things took a serious turn for her as she refused food and drink in prison and had to be released under the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ (which allowed the police to re-arrest hunger-striking women released for health reasons, after they had regained their strength). Her health was so badly damaged that for several days she was between life and death. She lived, and lived long: she died in 1978, aged 105.
My Protest: Leonora Cohen
symbolically attacked the Crown
Jewels.
During the last, desperate period of the suffragettes’ struggle, their cam-paign degenerated into a guerrilla war of arson, sporadic attacks on members of government (usually with umbrellas, not grenades as in Russia) and dramatic hunger strikes. The police retaliated with increasingly close supervision, even going so far as to take secret photographs of imprisoned suffragettes for police identification. On one of these stolen pictures one of the most radical activists, Lillian Lenton, can be seen walking through the prison yard, her hair falling over her shoulders (hairpins were forbidden in jail) and wearing a light jacket, her face gaunt and worn but quietly determined, an image all the more striking as her informal appearance makes her look like a woman of today.
The radical phase came to a sad climax when on 4 June 1913, Emily Wilding Davison attempted to stop the King’s horse during the Epsom Derby by running onto the racetrack. The animal collided with her and she died of her injuries three days later. Her funeral became one last occasion for the movement to display the pomp and circumstance, now draped in sumptuous black, that they had so memorably orchestrated five years earlier during the Hyde Park rally. War would soon overshadow all domestic concerns, and many of the suffragettes channelled their energies into war work. Emmeline Pankhurst, the leading figure of the British suffragette movement, even toured the country anew, this time to give flaming patriotic speeches. At the same time, however, the War would prove a mighty catalyst for change, here as elsewhere: a growing proportion of women replaced men in factories and mines, thus demonstrating in practice a competence denied to them in theory. This changed the balance of opinion, but still women had to wait until the hostilities were over to be acknowledged as full citizens. British women over thirty were given the franchise in 1918; equal and universal suffrage was introduced only in 1923, long after New Zealand (1893), Australia (1902), Finland and Norway (1908), and Canada (1917).
Dangerous women: suffragettes’ photos
were taken clandestinely by police
photographers, here the radical
campaigner Lillian Lenton.
Between Tolstoy and Autocracy
The lives of Mary Gawthorpe, Lavena Saltonstall and Leonora Cohen are exemplary for thousands of women who worked and campaigned tirelessly for the cause of women’s suffrage, which took on an air of high political drama in Great Britain far more than in other European countries. It is an historical orthodoxy that the women’s movements on the Continent failed to achieve their goals, but that would be taking a decidedly short-sighted view. The reality was, as it always is, a good deal more layered and complex.
Feminism in Russia before the October Revolution was certainly a clear and comprehensive failure. With only a small middle class and battling overwhelming chauvinism and male prejudice, women could do nothing more than make a few symbolic gestures, which was all the more tragic because Russian working women often lived under conditions of unspeakable hardship. In the cities, the only way to make ends meet for many of them was prostitution. There were between thirty and fifty thousand street girls and luxury whores in St Petersburg around the turn of the century (figures for Vienna and Paris were similar), a number that speaks volumes about the emotional and psychological conditioning of the society in a city of 1.4 million inhabitants: there was roughly one prostitute for every ten adult men in the city.
This legal prostitution, however, was only the tip of an iceberg of depravity and misery. A 1906 government report drew the authorities’ attention to the growing problem of child prostitution, in which children as young as five years old were offered to drunken men, for a few kopecks, often chloroformed before being handed over to their ‘clients’. There was also a trade in Russian child sex slaves that delivered to markets as remote as Istanbul and Argentina.
Russian girls had very few opportunities. As late as 1907 there were only 120,000 girls enrolled in Russian secondary schools and a year later the imperial education minister, A. M. Shwarts, attempted, and failed, to convert all girls’ schools into institutes of home economics training. Faced with solidly reactionary ideas about a woman’s role in life, ideas made more fashionable by Tolstoyan anti-feminism and its insistence on women’s total subservience, Russian feminists such as the formidable Anna Filosophova (1837-1912, the aunt of both the philosopher Dimitrii Filosovof and the entrepreneurial choreographic genius Sergei Diaghilev) and Anna Nikitichna Shabanova (1848-1932) could hardly do more than work locally and otherwise look on in impotent frustration as girls and women continued to be treated as second-class citizens.
The one breath of hope in this situation came with the events of Bloody Sunday 1905. In the chaotic and utopian aftermath of the massacre, the women’s movement gained new impetus, and various associations and clubs were formed. Following the English example, Russian suffragettes, too, attempted to enter their parliament, the newly constituted and short-lived Duma, only to be stared at by unsympathetic or outright hostile deputies who felt that they had other fish to fry. A bewildered Bernard Pares, a conservative member, described in his memoirs the Duma lobby ‘raided by suffragettes, short-haired young ladies in spectacles, most of them puny-looking’, and an older peasant deputy kindly took one of the women aside, telling her: ‘Look here, let me give you a piece of advice. You get married. Then you’ll have a husband and he’ll look after you altogether.’ Another peasant representative saw the intrusion as symptomatic of the ills of the city. ‘Our women are not concerned with universal suffrage,’ he exclaimed indignantly, ‘our women look after the household, the children, and the cooking.’
Despite having a declaration in favour of women’s suffrage signed by 111 deputies, feminist activists soon found that even the liberal Cadet Party was of the opinion that they should attend to a myriad other problems before they could make universal suffrage their priority. Worse was to come. As the state recovered from the chaos, and repression set in once again with renewed ferocity, the ‘newfangled’ ideas of the suffragists were among the first to be forgotten. In 1906, the largest feminist organization, the Women’s Union, counted 8,00
0 members. One year later, the membership had shrunk to one tenth of this, as meetings were prohibited and journals closed down. At the same time, the National Women’s Council in Denmark counted 80,000 members. As women elsewhere were getting organized, the Russian movement was all but stamped out.
One result of this impossibility of changing one’s lot, of improving a condition that was obviously intolerable, was what the historian Richard Stites called ‘Oblomovism’ on the part of Russia’s women - a deep indifference and resignation, even among those financially privileged enough not to have to work. Wondering what to do with her life, one young middle-class woman wrote in her diary:
I do not have the preparation, the zeal, or the perseverance for serious study. And now I am old it is too late. You do not begin studying at twenty-five. I have neither the talent nor the calling for independent artistic creation. I am unmusical and understand nothing about it. As for painting, I have done no more than study a few years as a schoolgirl. And literature? I have never written a thing except this diary. So only civic activity remains. But what kind? Fashionable philanthropy which is held up to ridicule in all the satirical journals? Establishing cheap dining rooms? That’s like trying to patch up a piece of crumbling, rotting flesh. Opening up literacy schools when it is universities that we need? I myself have jeered at these attempts to empty the sea with a teaspoon. Or perhaps I should turn to revolution? But to do that, one has to believe. I have no faith, no direction, no spiritual energy. What is left for me to do?
Some women, however, did believe, did have direction, and did turn towards the revolution. As a legitimate articulation of their grievances became all but impossible, a surprising number of young women joined the ranks of anarchist terrorists and socialist revolutionaries. In Odessa in 1905 a woman was hanged for her involvement in terrorism, while another threw a bomb at a government official and shot herself. Six further women were held on terrorism charges. Zina Konophyanikova, a village schoolteacher who had killed the brutal ‘pacifier’ of the Moscow insurrection of 1905, was hanged at the Schlüsselberg Fortress, as was Lidiya Struve, a Bolshevik student involved in the killing of Justice Minister Shcheglovitov. Before she went out to meet her death, she asked her father to contribute ten roubles to a fund for poor students. Her story was the inspiration for the figure of Musya in Leonid Andreyev’s harsh novel The Seven Who Were Hanged. The only encouraging example, amidst all these wasted and brutalized lives, was seen in the case of Mariya Spiridonova, who shot one of the butchers of the 1906 reprisal campaigns, General Luzhemovsky, directly in the face on a railway platform. The soldiers who arrested her beat her savagely, tore her hair out and stubbed out cigarettes on her breasts, a treatment so uncommonly despicable that it caused an international outcry when it was reported in foreign newspapers. Under the glare of European correspondents, the Spiridonova incident had an unusual outcome: Mariya was not executed but condemned to ten years of exile in Siberia, from which she would eventually return in triumph.
Outrageous Women
It is astonishing to see the differences in style and intensity of the various European feminist movements before 1914. Women in Finland and Norway won the vote early and participated actively in politics already. In France, the mother country of revolutions, there was a good deal of activism but little effective organization. Public opinion, it seemed, was still exhausted from the Dreyfus affair and split over the government’s radical division of Church and State, too preoccupied in any case to give much attention to women’s rights. There were some associations devoted to the cause, books being written both for and against it, there were large conferences and smallish suffrage marches and several journals. Marguerite Durand (1864-1936), an actor and journalist, was converted to the cause after she had been sent to a feminist congress to write a disparaging article for Le Figaro. Convinced by the arguments she heard, Durand founded La Fronde, a newspaper written, typeset and printed entirely by and for women, with the purpose of advocating feminist demands ranging from women’s admission to the Ecole des Beaux Arts to enlisting them into the regular army. As if to underscore her serious intent, Durand strolled on the streets of Paris accompanied by a pet lion.
Madeleine Pelletier (1847-1939) was far more extreme and uncompromising in her convictions than British activists. A psychiatrist by training and the first woman doctor to work in a state insane asylum, Pelletier wore her hair cropped short and dressed in men’s suits and bowler hats, the very image of female defiance of male con-vention. She claimed women’s political rights but also went into far more controversial territory by agitating for free abortions and radical changes in girls’ education, a catalogue of demands documented in the titles of her books: La femme en lutte pour ses droits (Woman Struggling for Her Rights, 1908), Idéologie d’hier: Dieu, la morale, la patrie (Yesterday’s Ideology: God, Morals, the Fatherland, 1910), L’émancipation sexuelle de la femme (The Sexual Emancipation of Women, 1911), Le Droit à l’avortement (The Right to Abortion, 1913), and L’éducation féministe des filles (The Feminist Education of Girls, 1914).
Striking an attitude:
Madeleine Pelletier, an early
French activist for abortion
and lesbian love.
Pelletier was at the 1908 Hyde Park women’s meeting as part of a French suffrage delegation. An inveterate campaigner, she was also active in the anarchist movement and a founding member of the unified French socialist movement (the Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière, 1905), as well as one of the country’s first female Freemasons. Her multiple enthusiasms ultimately made her a tragic figure, as her fellow travellers in the different movements had little understanding of her ideologically promiscuous tastes and distanced themselves from her. Ultimately, her political commitment became her downfall: insisting on openly practising abortion (still forbidden in France, as across Europe, except for medical emergencies), she was arrested in 1939 and sent to an asylum, this time forcibly and as an inmate. She died within a year.
Despite flamboyant advocacy, political feminism remained a marginal concern in France. Even the liberal President Georges Clemenceau, himself married to a decidedly progressive woman, was firmly opposed to it, for a reason entirely typical of the French debate: having fought for and finally won, in 1906, the elimination of the Church as a major power in education and in society, he was convinced that women, especially in rural areas, would vote overwhelmingly for clerical parties and so undo the achievement he regarded as among the most important of his career. This attitude was rooted in the robust misogyny of the Jacobins and remained entrenched in France: universal suffrage was introduced in 1944, while women in the French department of Algeria had to wait until 1956.
Another reason may have contributed to the weakness of French feminism in the public debate: the presence of independent and sometimes scandalous women in public life may have made it seem a less urgent concern. The great scientist Marie Curie had been awarded two Nobel Prizes; Sarah Bernhardt was an actress whose fame spanned the Atlantic; the sculptor Camille Claudel was considered an artist in her own right, second only to her long-time lover and mentor Auguste Rodin (who, however, always downplayed the importance of her hand in his own work). The novels of Colette were literary sensations. and other female writers also succeeded in making a name for themselves: Natalie Clifford Barney, Renée Vivien and, behind protective pseudonyms, Colette’s one-time lover, Missy (Mathilde de Morny), and the satirical novelist Gyp (Sibylle Gabrielle Marie Antoinette Riqueti de Mirabeau). In addition to these, there were wealthy women who very publicly lived according to moral ideas that owed nothing to patriarchal morals and everything to strong-willed independence: Winaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac (an American heiress), Hélène van Zuylen, the young Gertrude Stein (another transatlantic import), and the poet and society hostess Anna de Noailles, a centre of Proust’s social circle. No other country in Europe had so strong a female presence in public life, so many stars whose bohemian morals and personal scanda
ls became not the source of their downfall, but a part of the glory of the French capital itself, of its mythology and appeal.
Things went very differently in the two German-speaking empires. There were hardly any militant suffragists such as in Great Britain, no anarchist terrorists as in Russia, and precious few openly emancipated women such as those adorning Paris. Despite this appearance of passivity, however, German feminists were often so ambitious in their goals that the world had to wait another two generations until some of their ideas would resurface during the 1970s.
The English suffragettes were spectacular in their determined action, but their demands largely concerned becoming enfranchised Edwardian women who wanted access to society - without seeking to transform the basis on which this society was built. A good number of German-speaking feminists, however, wanted the vote only as a prelude to much more deep-seated changes, as Anita Augspurg (1857-1943) argued: ‘The question whether the fundamental relationship of men and women needs reforming must not only be answered in the affirmative, we can even say that it must be revolutionized in its very foundations.’ Marriage and sexuality, free love, homosexuality, family planning and abortion - everything was analysed in tracts, speeches and debates, up for grabs and awaiting a Nietzschean trans-valuation of all values. In Great Britain, such ideas were treated with scepticism or outright hostility, as they were thought to undermine the respectability of the suffrage movement. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, one of the main forces in the suffragist WSPU, was scathing of any attempt ‘to link together the claims of women to citizenship and social and industrial independence with attacks on marriage and the family’.
