by Simon Webb
When the WSPU was founded in 1903, Emmeline Pankhurst was a member of the Independent Labour Party. Her eldest daughter, 23-year-old Christabel, was taking an increasing interest in women’s suffrage and it was perhaps this that caused her mother to involve herself again in the question of female emancipation. Sylvia, another daughter, also became a member of the initially small group.
It is ironic to find an organisation campaigning for democracy that is, from the very outset, essentially undemocratic. All previous suffragist groups had both male and female members, but the WSPU forbade men to join from its beginning. The idea of a group formed to fight against discrimination on the grounds of gender instituting such discrimination itself is a fascinating one.
Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst were also in the habit of falling out with anyone who disagreed with them about either their political aims or the methods by which they chose to work towards those aims. From its very foundation, the WSPU was run by the Pankhursts and they made every decision. Any divergence from their views resulted in members being expelled from the union, so membership entailed not just devotion to a particular ideology, but also personal loyalty to Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. The Pankhurts were the WSPU.
For the first few years or so of its existence, the WSPU ran in a similar fashion to other suffragist groups. The chief difference between the Women’s Social and Political Union and similar groups was that the WSPU was entirely bound up in the personalities and characters of its two founders. Although the Pankhursts remained members of the Independent Labour Party during this time, there were those in the ILP who regarded them with a good deal of suspicion.
Philip Snowden, who went on to become the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the first Labour government, perceived that to extend the franchise on the terms suggested by the WSPU would mean more votes for the middle and upper classes. Giving women parliamentary votes on the same terms as those that existed for men would serve only to entrench the existing class divisions and do nothing whatever for the benefit of the working classes, either men or women. There were those who believed that the Pankhursts knew this very well and this was the reason why they fought for ‘equal’ franchise rather than ‘universal’ franchise. The Pankhursts had no objection to the continued running of the country by the middle and upper classes; they simply wanted women of those social strata to be able to have their share of power alongside well-to-do men. John Bruce Glasier, chairman of the ILP, observed shrewdly of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, ‘Really the pair are not seeking democratic freedom but self-importance’.
Quite a few left-wing women, particularly from the working class, also mistrusted the Pankhursts and their demand for ‘equal suffrage’. The daughter of a brick maker, Ada Nield Chew, who left school at the age of 11, wrote in 1904 of the idea of ‘equal franchise’: ‘The entire class of wealthy women would be enfranchised… the great body of working women, married or single, would be voteless still’.
From the point of view of socialists like this, the situation could hardly be simpler. Granting women the vote on the same terms as it was currently given to men would mean giving it to female employers and landowners, while at the same time denying it to those women who worked on their farms or laboured in their sweatshops. It would be an iniquitous move. It has to be said that the Pankhursts’ upper-middle-class lifestyle did not exactly endear them to many members of the Labour Party. Glasier said indignantly, when Emmeline Pankhurst was trying to represent herself as a champion of ordinary, working women, ‘She has other people’s daughters acting as her personal servants’. His wife, Katherine St John, a radical suffragist who had even less time for the pretensions of the WSPU, derided them as being composed almost entirely of upper- and middle-class women. She referred to them as the Society Women’s Political Union.
It was this difference of opinion that ultimately caused the Pankhursts not only to leave the ILP themselves, but also to require every member of their organisation to reject any further association with the party. At the Labour Party conference in early 1907, Keir Hardie, the first Labour MP and founder of the Labour Party, put a motion for women’s suffrage. This was framed in terms of ‘equal’ suffrage, in other words, extending the franchise to propertied women on the same terms that men then enjoyed. The conference rejected this and went on to pass by a huge majority a motion calling for universal suffrage, the right to vote in parliamentary elections for every man and woman in the country. Nothing fairer or more democratic could be imagined, but it was enough to cause Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst to leave the ILP.
The attitude of the WSPU towards democracy can be very clearly seen in their pamphlets, which stated unequivocally that, ‘The Women’s Social and Political Union are NOT asking for a vote for every woman, but simply that sex shall cease to be a disqualification for the franchise’. This was quite unambiguous. There was no desire to extend the franchise to working men and women. The sole, direct and immediate aim was to ensure that middle-class women who were householders should be able to vote. The WSPU were simply not interested in universal adult suffrage. Indeed, there is reason to suppose that Emmeline Pankhurst was actually opposed to the idea of working-class people being given the vote.
Later in 1907 another incident revealed Emmeline Pankhurst’s notion of democracy. The Women’s Social and Political Union had a thoroughly democratic constitution, which committed it to annual conferences in which members might vote for changes and select a new committee to run the organisation. A month before the conference was due to be held in October 1907 Emmeline Pankhurst caught wind of the fact that a challenge was planned to the direction in which the WSPU was moving, that is, towards increasing militancy. She regarded this as a personal affront and decided to spike the rebels’ guns.
All that those planning to query the running of the WSPU were really wanting was to draw attention to the increasingly autocratic way in which the Pankhursts were behaving. Their aim was to introduce a more democratic approach. These women, who included veteran women’s suffrage campaigners, such as 63-year-old Charlotte Despard, wished only to present their case to the annual conference and then accept the result of a vote on their own proposals, as opposed to those made by Emmeline Pankhurst. This attempt to use the democratic process irritated Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst enormously.
After requesting and receiving pledges of personal loyalty from various important members of the WSPU, Emmeline Pankhurst called an urgent meeting for 10 September, a month before the annual conference. Only members in London were invited to attend this meeting, in the course of which the old constitution was annulled and a list of names for a new committee were read out. All the members of the new committee had been hand-picked for their devotion to Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. Before the meeting in September, Emmeline Pankhurst had announced to one of her supporters that she was going to ‘tear up the constitution’, in order to prevent those with differing views from her own being able to address a large body of WSPU members. As one woman remarked wryly, ‘Mrs Pankhurst wants us to have votes, but she does not wish us to have opinions’.
As far as Emmeline Pankhurst was concerned, the situation could hardly have been more clear-cut and simple. She was the leader and her followers should simply obey her orders without question. Little wonder that one of the women ejected from the WSPU after the meeting on 10 September 1907, said that Mrs Pankhurst was behaving like a dictator. In fact, no bones were made about this being precisely what both Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst wanted – complete control of the members of their organisation. Loyalty towards them should be absolute and unconditional.
The best way to see how Emmeline Pankhurst saw the situation is to read what she herself wrote about the WSPU in My Own Life, which was published in 1914:
If at any time a member, or a group of members, loses faith in our policy, if any one begins to suggest, that some other policy ought to be substituted, or if she tries to confuse the issue by adding other policies, s
he ceases at once to be a member. Autocratic? Quite so. But, you may object, a suffrage organisation ought to be democratic. Well the members of the W. S. P. U. do not agree with you. We do not believe in the effectiveness of the ordinary suffrage organisation. The W. S. P. U. is not hampered by a complexity of rules. We have no constitution and by-laws, nothing to be amended or tinkered with or quarrelled over at an annual meeting. In fact, we have no annual meeting, no business sessions, no elections of officers. The W. S. P. U. is simply a suffrage army in the field. It is purely a volunteer army, and no one is obliged to remain in it. Indeed we don’t want anybody to remain in it who does not ardently believe in the policy of the army.
There is not even the pretence at the organisation being democratic and free admission is made that the WSPU is run in an autocratic fashion. Sylvia Pankhurst, still an ardent socialist, remonstrated with her mother after the attempts to bring democracy to the WSPU: ‘Do not fear the democratic constitution. You can carry the conference with you’. It was not a risk that Emmeline Pankhurst and her oldest daughter felt inclined to take.
Nine days after the special meeting in London, a letter sent to all branches of the WSPU explicitly stated that this was not in any way a democratic group: ‘We are not playing experiments with representative government. We are not a school for teaching women how to use the vote. We are a militant movement… It is after all a voluntary militant movement: those who cannot follow the general must drop out of the ranks’. This is quite unambiguous. Members must not expect to influence policy or question the leader, their role is limited to obeying orders.
There were two practical consequences of the events in 1907, one of which was particularly unfortunate. The leadership of the WSPU had always, with one or two exceptions, been thoroughly middle- and upper-class. There were, however, a number of working-class women in the rank and file, particularly in the north of England. Two of the women expelled from the WSPU, Charlotte Despard and Theresa Billington, formed their own group, calling it the Women’s Freedom League. Many northern branches of the WSPU went over to the new organisation, leaving the WSPU concentrated in the south of England. The effect was to increase the proportion of middle-class members, making the WSPU even less representative of ordinary working women.
The second effect of the shake-up was that members of the WSPU were required to sign a pledge, stating that they were loyal to the ideals of the WSPU and that they would not support any political party. This of course meant that no members of the Labour Party could remain. It also led to anybody who did not approve of the increasing militancy leaving the WSPU. Those who remained were likely to be middle-class firebrands.
The 1907 purge of what might be termed disloyal elements puts one rather in mind of a revolutionary movement determined to allow no divergent views. Combine this with the cult of personality which almost worshipped the Pankhursts and what emerges is less like a pressure group and more like a cadre of professional revolutionaries. Mrs Pankhurst’s followers treated her as an almost superhuman being. After Mary Richardson slashed ‘The Rokeby Venus’ in the National Gallery with a meat cleaver, she issued a statement saying, ‘I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history’.
The expulsion from the WSPU of those who disagreed with or even merely questioned the views of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst continued. One of their most devoted supporters was Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence who had supported Emmeline Pankhurst during the rebellion in 1907. Five years later, in 1912, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and her husband Fred were horrified to learn that the WSPU was going to be taking even more extreme actions than the window-smashing and other vandalism which was already alienating so many potential supporters. They voiced this fear to Emmeline and Christabel, with the result that they too were dropped from the WSPU. Inevitably, the time came when Mrs Pankhurst began to turn against even her own family for their supposed treachery.
Sylvia Pankhurst, one of Emmeline’s other daughters, was a socialist and had many dealings with people such as George Lansbury and Keir Hardie. She set up a branch of the WSPU called the East London Federation, which attracted working-class women to the cause of women’s suffrage. Sylvia Pankhurst was also in favour of universal adult suffrage, rather than the equal suffrage which had for years been the official policy of the WSPU. This, together with her belief in the practice of democracy in her own organisation, led to her falling out with her mother and sister. This schism was, disturbingly, caused because they felt that she had too strong a belief in democracy. There is a touch of Alice in Wonderland about an organisation such as the WSPU being alarmed about the spread of grass roots democracy.
By 1914, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst had had enough of Sylvia’s flirtation with democracy. She was summoned to a meeting with them both, a meeting at which her sister did most of the talking, with her mother’s approval. Their main objection to Sylvia’s activities was plain. Christabel told her, ‘You have a democratic constitution for your federation, we do not agree with that’. It further emerged that neither Emmeline nor Christabel Pankhurst approved of involving working-class women too much in the suffrage movement. Christabel said that their education was ‘too meagre to equip them for the struggle’. She went on, ‘Surely it is a mistake to use the weakest for the struggle? We want picked women, the very strongest and most intelligent’.
It is impossible to avoid the feeling that the real objection to what Sylvia Pankhurst was doing was a combination of distrust of democracy and dislike of the working classes being treated as equals. These people needed strong leaders who would tell them what to do, without any of this democratic nonsense. Christabel then said to her sister, ‘You have your own ideas. We do not want that, we want all our women to take their instructions and walk in step like an army’.
Interestingly enough, it was when Asquith met a delegation of working women belonging to the East London Federation in 1914 that he apparently began to change his view on women’s suffrage. Before that time, he had perhaps seen the suffragettes as middle-class cranks pursuing a fashionable craze. After listening to a group of female industrial workers, who explained their desperate need for the power to vote, Asquith told them that he accepted the logic of their point of view and that, ‘If the change has to come, then we must face it boldly and make it thoroughgoing and democratic in its basis’. Some believe that it was simply meeting and listening to these working-class women that helped to bring Asquith around to the view that the franchise should be extended in this way.
When reading what Christabel Pankhurst had to say about working-class people, one senses at best indifference and at worst something approaching contempt. It is interesting to jump ahead of ourselves a little and see how the suffragette activists, who were setting fire to the homes of wealthy and important people as well as planting bombs in public places and damaging the contents of pillar boxes, showed by their actions their own feelings towards the working classes.
It is a curious fact and one which is seldom remarked upon, that the great majority of the victims of suffragette violence were either women or working men who, like the women, did not have the parliamentary vote. To be fair to the suffragettes, this was probably a matter of pragmatism, rather than a conscious desire to harm working-class people. The MPs and Lords with whom the militants of the WSPU really had their quarrel were often too difficult to get close to and so it might have seemed easier to strike at workers than at their bosses or social superiors. Whatever the reason, it was working men and women who bore the brunt of the terrorism.
Supporters of women’s suffrage in the Liberal and Labour parties knew at the time that the WSPU were harming innocent people, most of them workers. The suspicion existed that the militants, most of whom belonged to the middle class, were careless about the victims of their attacks. In October 1913, after the bombing campaign had been running in e
arnest for six months or so, Lloyd George said, ‘It’s no good burning pavilions, churches and railway sidings and menacing the lives of poor workmen’. At about the same time, the wife of Labour MP Philip Snowden complained that the methods being used by the suffragettes were themselves unjust because they inflicted suffering upon innocent people.
How were the WSPU causing harm to innocent people and, as Lloyd George put it, ‘menacing the lives of poor workmen’? To answer this, we will look at the one type of arson which is mentioned in modern books on the suffragette movement: the burning and destruction of the contents of letter boxes. This is usually portrayed as a victimless crime, a protest against the ‘establishment’.
On 29 November 2012, the Emily Davison Memorial Campaign was launched in London. The aim of this campaign was to persuade those organising the Derby in 2013, on the hundredth anniversary of Davison’s death, to hold a minute’s silence in her memory. Mention was made at this event of Emily Davison’s pioneering role in setting fire to letter boxes. This was described as, ‘a bold, brave thing to do’ and as ‘attacking the establishment’. It might help to make things a little clearer if we look at one or two of the attacks on the postal system initiated by Emily Davison.
On 29 January 1913, a package addressed to Lloyd George burst into flames at a sorting office. There was also a fire in a sorting office in Croydon, while in York glass tubes containing chemicals started a fire when a postman was emptying a pillar box. These fires were caused by phosphorus, fumes from which filled the rooms where the fires broke out. The smoke from burning phosphorus can cause permanent lung damage and the men in the sorting offices were accordingly at risk of suffering serious and irreversible harm to their health. Less than a week later, on 5 February, five postal workers in Dundee were burned, four of them seriously, as they emptied mail bags at a sorting office. A number of letters addressed to Prime Minister Herbert Asquith proved to have in them phosphorous and other chemicals, which reacted when exposed to the air and caused a fire to start. On 22 February, another postman was burned at Lewisham branch post office in south London, when a letter he was handling suddenly caught fire.
