At last the time came when they gave me back all my things, and let me go free. At the door the Governor spoke to me, and asked me if I had any complaints to make. ‘Not of you,’ I replied, ‘nor of any of the wardresses. Only of this prison, and all of men’s prisons. We shall raze them to the ground.’
Back in my comfortable home, surrounded by loving friends, I would have rested quietly for a few days, but there was a great meeting that night at Albert Hall, to mark the close of a week of self-denial to raise money for the year’s campaign. Women had sold papers, flowers, toys, swept crossings, and sung in the streets for the cause. Many women, well known in the world of art and letters, did these things. I felt that I should be doing little if I merely attended the meeting. So I went. My release was not expected until the following morning, and no one thought of my appearing at the meeting. My chairman’s seat was decorated with a large placard with the inscription, ‘Mrs Pankhurst’s Chair’. After all the others were seated, the speakers, and hundreds of ex-prisoners, I walked quietly onto the stage, took the placard out of the chair and sat down. A great cry went up from the women as they sprang from their seats and stretched their hands towards me. It was some time before I could see them for my tears, or speak to them for the emotion that shook me like a storm.
The next morning I, with the other released prisoners, drove off to Peckham, a constituency of London, where the W.S.P.U. members were fighting a vigorous by-election. In open brakes we paraded the streets, dressed in our prison clothes, or exact reproductions of them. Naturally, we attracted a great deal of attention and sympathy, and our daily meetings on Peckham Rye, as their common is known, drew enormous crowds. When polling day came our members were stationed at every polling booth, and many men as they came to the booths told us that they were, for the first time, voting ‘for the women’, by which they meant against the Government. That night, amid great excitement, it was made known that the Liberal majority of 2,339 at the last general election had been turned into a Conservative majority of 2,494. Letters poured into the newspapers, declaring that the loss of this important Liberal seat was due almost entirely to the work of the Suffragettes, and many prominent Liberals called upon party leaders to start doing something for women before the next general election. The Liberal leaders, with the usual perspicacity of politicians, responded not at all. Instead they beheld with approval the rise to highest power of the arch-enemy of the suffragists, Mr Asquith.
Mr Asquith became prime minister about Easter time, 1908, on the resignation, on account of ill health, of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Mr Asquith was chosen, not because of any remarkable record of statesmanship, nor yet because of great personal popularity – for he possessed neither – but simply because no better man seemed available just then. He was known as a clever, astute, and somewhat unscrupulous lawyer. He had filled several high offices to the satisfaction of his party, and under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had been Chancellor of the Exchequer, a post which is generally regarded as a stepping-stone to the Premiership. The best thing the Liberal press found to say of the new Premier was that he was a ‘strong’ man. Generally in politics this term is used to describe an obstinate man, and this we already knew Mr Asquith to be. He was a bluntly outspoken opponent of woman suffrage, and it was sufficiently plain to us that no methods of education or persuasion would ever prove successful where he was concerned. Therefore the necessity of action on our part was greater than ever.
Such an opportunity presented itself at once through changes that took place in the new Cabinet. According to English law, all newcomers into the Cabinet are obliged to resign their seats in Parliament and offer themselves to their constituencies for re-election. Besides these vacancies there were several others, on account of death or elevations to the peerage. This made necessary a number of by-elections, and the Women’s Social and Political Union once more went into the field against the Liberal candidates. I shall deal no further with these by-elections than is necessary to show the effect of our work on the Government, and its subsequent effect on our movement – which was to force us into more and more militancy. I shall leave it to the honest judgement of my readers to place where it ought rightly to be placed the responsibility for those first broken windows.
We selected as our first candidate for defeat Mr Winston Churchill, who was about to appeal to his constituency of North West Manchester to sanction his appointment as president of the Board of Trade. My daughter Christabel took charge of this election, and the work of herself and her forces was so successful that Mr Churchill lost his seat by 420 votes. All the newspapers acknowledged that it was the Suffragettes who had defeated Mr Churchill, and one Liberal newspaper, the London Daily News, called upon the party to put a stop to an intolerable state of affairs by granting the women’s demand for votes.
Another seat was immediately secured for Mr Churchill, that of Dundee, then strongly – in the merely party sense – Liberal, and therefore safe. Nevertheless, we determined to fight Mr Churchill there, to defeat him if possible, and to bring down the Liberal majority in any case. I took personal charge of the campaign, holding a very large meeting in Kinnaird Hall on the evening before Mr Churchill’s arrival. Although he felt absolutely sure of election in this Scottish constituency, Mr Churchill dreaded the effect of our presence on the Liberal women. The second meeting he addressed in Dundee was held for women only, and instead of asking for support of the various measures actually on the government’s programme, the politician’s usual method, he talked about the certainty of securing, within a short time, the Parliamentary franchise for women. ‘No one,’ he declared, ‘can be blind to the fact that at the next general election woman suffrage will be a real, practical issue; and the next Parliament, I think, ought to see the gratification of the women’s claims. I do not exclude the possibility of the suffrage being dealt with in this Parliament.’ Mr Churchill earnestly reiterated his claim to be considered a true friend of the women’s cause; but when pressed for a pledge that his Government would take action, he urged his inability to speak for his colleagues.
This specious promise, or rather, prophecy of woman suffrage at some indefinite time, won over a great many of the Liberal women, who forthwith went staunchly to work for Mr Churchill’s election. Dundee has a large population of extremely poor people, workers in the jute mills and the marmalade factories. Some concessions in the matter of the sugar tax, timely made, and the announcement that the new Government meant to establish old age pensions, created an immense wave of Liberal enthusiasm that swept Mr Churchill into office in spite of our work, which was untiring. We held something like 200 meetings, and on election eve, five huge demonstrations – four of them in the open air and one which filled a large drill hall. Polling day, 9th May, was very exciting. For every Suffragette at the polling booths there were half a dozen Liberal men and women, handing out bills with such legends as ‘Vote for Churchill, and never mind the women’, and ‘Put Churchill in and keep the women out.’ Yet for all their efforts, Mr Churchill polled 2,200 votes less than his Liberal predecessor had polled at the general election.
In the first seven by-elections following Mr Asquith’s elevation to the premiership, we succeeded in pulling down the Liberal vote by 6,663. Then something happened to check our progress. Mr Asquith received a deputation of Liberal members of Parliament, who urged him to allow the Stanger suffrage bill, which had passed its second reading by a large majority, to be carried into law. Mr Asquith replied that he himself did not wish to see women enfranchised, and that it would not be possible for the Government to give the required facilities to Mr Stanger’s bill. He added that he was fully alive to the many defects of the electoral system, and that the Government intended, ‘barring accidents’, to bring in a reform bill before the close of that Parliament. Woman suffrage would have no place in it, but it would be so worded that a woman-suffrage amendment might be added if any member chose to move one. In that case, said Mr Asquith, he should not consider it the duty
of the Government to oppose the amendment if it were approved by a majority of the House of Commons – provided that the amendment was on democratic lines, and that it had back of it the support, the strong and undoubted support, of the women of the country as well as the present electorate.
One would not suppose that such an evasive utterance as this would be regarded in any quarter as a promise that woman suffrage would be given any real chances of success under the Asquith Government. That it was, by many, taken quite seriously is but another proof of the gullibility of the party-blinded public. The Liberal press lauded Mr Asquith’s ‘promise’, and called for a truce of militancy in order that the Government might have every opportunity to act. Said the Star, in a leader typical of many others: ‘The meaning of Mr Asquith’s pledge is plain. Woman’s suffrage will be passed through the House of Commons before the present Government goes to the country.’
As for the women’s Liberal Associations, they were quite delirious with joy. In a conference called for the purpose of passing resolutions of gratitude, Lady Carlisle said: ‘This is a glorious day of rejoicing. Our great Prime Minister, all honour to him, has opened a way to us by which we can enter into that inheritance from which we have been too long debarred.’
At the two following by-elections, the last of the series, enormous posters were exhibited, ‘Premier’s Great Reform Bill: Votes for Women.’ We tried to tell the electors that the pledge was false on the face of it; that the specious proviso that the amendment be ‘democratic’ left no doubt that the Government would cause the rejection of any practical amendment that might be moved. Our words fell on deaf ears, and the Liberal majorities soared.
Just a week later Mr Asquith was questioned in the House of Commons by a slightly alarmed anti-suffragist member. The member asked Mr Asquith whether he considered himself pledged to introduce the reform hill during that Parliament, whether he meant to allow such a bill to carry a woman-suffrage amendment, if such were moved, and whether, in that case, the suffrage amendment would become part of the Government policy. Evasive as ever, the Prime Minister, after some sparring, replied, ‘My honourable friend has asked me a question with regard to a remote and speculative future.’ Thus was our interpretation of Mr Asquith’s ‘promise’ justified from his own lips. Yet the Liberal women still clung to the hope of Government action, and the Liberal press pretended to cling to it. As for the Women’s Social and Political Union, we prepared for more work. We had to strike out along a new line, since it was evident that the Government could, for a time at least, neutralise our by-election work by more false promises. Consistent with our policy of never going further than the Government compelled us to go, we made our first action a perfectly peaceable one.
On the day when the Stanger bill had reached its second reading in the House, and several days after I had gone to Holloway for the first time, Mr Herbert Gladstone, the Home Secretary, made a speech which greatly interested the Suffragettes. He professed himself a suffragist, and declared that he intended to vote for the bill. Nevertheless, he was confident that it could not pass, because of the division in the Cabinet, and because it had no political party united either for or against it. Woman suffrage, said Mr Gladstone, must advance to victory through all the stages that are required for great reforms to mature. First academic discussion, then effective action, was the history of men’s suffrage; it must be the same with women’s suffrage. ‘Men,’ declared Mr Gladstone, ‘have learned this lesson and know the necessity for demonstrating the greatness of their movement, and for establishing that force majeure which actuates and arms a Government for effective work. That is the task before the supporters of this great movement. Looking back at the great political crises in the thirties, the sixties and the eighties, it will be found that the people did not go about in small crowds, nor were they content with enthusiastic meetings in large halls; they assembled in their tens of thousands all over the country.
‘Of course,’ added Mr Gladstone, ‘it is not to be expected that women can assemble in such masses, but power belongs to masses, and through this power a Government can be influenced into more effective action than a Government will be likely to take under present conditions.’
The Women’s Social and Political Union determined to answer this challenge. If assembling in great masses was all that was necessary to convince the Government that woman suffrage had passed the academic stage and now demanded political action, we thought we could undertake to satisfy the most sceptical member of the Cabinet. We knew that we could organise a demonstration that would out-rival any of the great franchise demonstrations held by men in the thirties, sixties and eighties. The largest number of people ever gathered in Hyde Park was said to have approximated 72,000. We determined to organise a Hyde Park demonstration of at least 250,000 people. Sunday, 21st June 1908, was fixed for the date of this demonstration, and for many months we worked to make it a day notable in the history of the movement. Our example was emulated by the non-militant suffragists, who organised a fine procession of their own, about a week before our demonstration. Thirteen thousand women, it was said, marched in that procession.
On our demonstration we spent, for advertising alone, over a thousand pounds, or five thousand dollars. We covered the hoardings of London and of all the principal provincial cities with great posters bearing portraits of the women who were to preside at the twenty platforms from which speeches were to be made; a map of London, showing the routes by which the seven processions were to advance, and a plan of the Hyde Park meeting place were also shown. London, of course, was thoroughly organised. For weeks a small army of women was busy chalking announcements on sidewalks, distributing handbills, canvassing from house to house, advertising the demonstration by posters and sandwich boards carried through the streets. We invited everybody to be present, including both Houses of Parliament. A few days before the demonstration Mrs Drummond and a number of other women hired and decorated a launch and sailed up the Thames to the Houses of Parliament, arriving at the hour when members entertain their women friends at tea on the terrace. Everyone left the tables and crowded to the water’s edge as the boat stopped, and Mrs Drummond’s strong, clear voice pealed out her invitation to the Cabinet and the members of Parliament to join the women’s demonstration in Hyde Park. ‘Come to the park on Sunday,’ she cried. ‘You shall have police protection, and there will be no arrests, we promise you.’ An alarmed someone telephoned for the police boats, but as they appeared, the women’s boat steamed away.
What a day was Sunday, 21st June – clear, radiant, filled with golden sunshine! As I advanced, leading, with the venerable Mrs Wolstenholm-Elmy, the first of the seven processions, it seemed to me that all London had turned out to witness our demonstration. And a goodly part of London followed the processions. When I mounted my platform in Hyde Park, and surveyed the mighty throngs that waited there and the endless crowds that were still pouring into the park from all directions, I was filled with amazement not unmixed with awe. Never had I imagined that so many people could be gathered together to share in a political demonstration. It was a gay and beautiful as well as an awe-inspiring spectacle, for the white gowns and flower-trimmed hats of the women, against the background of ancient trees, gave the park the appearance of a vast garden in full bloom.
The bugles sounded, and the speakers at each of the twenty platforms began their addresses, which could not have been heard by more than half or a third of the vast audience. Notwithstanding this, they remained to the end. At five o’clock the bugles sounded again, the speaking ceased, and the resolution calling upon the Government to bring in an official woman-suffrage bill without delay was carried at every platform, often without a dissenting vote. Then, with a three-times-repeated cry of ‘Votes for Women!’ from the assembled multitude, the great meeting dispersed.
The London Times said next day: ‘Its organisers had counted on an audience of 250,000. That expectation was certainly fulfilled, and probably it was doubled, and it would
be difficult to contradict anyone who asserted that it was trebled. Like the distances and the number of the stars, the facts were beyond the threshold of perception.’
The Daily Express said: ‘It is probable that so many people never before stood in one square mass anywhere in England. Men who saw the great Gladstone meeting years ago said that compared with yesterday’s multitude it was as nothing.’
We felt that we had answered the challenge in Mr Gladstone’s declaration that ‘power belongs to the masses’, and that through this power the Government could be influenced; so it was with real hope that we despatched a copy of the resolution to the Prime Minister, asking him what answer the Government would make to that unparalleled gathering of men and women. Mr Asquith replied formally that he had nothing to add to his previous statement – that the Government intended, at some indefinite time, to bring in a general reform bill which might be amended to include woman suffrage. Our wonderful demonstration, it appeared, had made no impression whatever upon him.
CHAPTER III
Now we had reached a point where we had to choose between two alternatives. We had exhausted argument. Therefore either we had to give up our agitation altogether, as the suffragists of the eighties virtually had done, or else we must act, and go on acting, until the selfishness and the obstinacy of the Government was broken down, or the Government themselves destroyed. Until forced to do so, the Government, we perceived, would never give women the vote.
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