A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  The expectations that advocates of women’s suffrage placed on the franchise also bore comparison with earlier radical movements. Like the Chartists, suffragettes and suffragists alike believed in the transformative power of the vote. Enfranchisement would not only lead to political emancipation but to the transfiguration of a male-dominated society into a different mould. In this sense, the WSPU and NUWSS continued the tradition of Victorian women’s suffrage movements in arguing for sexual, social and economic emancipation, as well as political liberation. As we have seen, historians have often criticised the Chartists for offering largely political solutions to what were essentially social and economic problems, and for placing a ‘naive’ trust in the capability of the ballot box to effect significant change. Yet, if the consequence of the 1918 and 1928 Representation of the People Acts was not the feminine millennium envisaged by Christabel Pankhurst, it nonetheless came close to the ‘bloodless revolution’ described by the working-class suffragette, Annie Kenney. In this regard, the movement for women’s suffrage was the most successful of all the British radical movements and the most influential in terms of its broader social impact.

  The suffrage movement had strong roots in nineteenth-century Manchester radicalism. As the youngest Pankhurst daughter Adela wrote: ‘The very stones of Manchester might have cried out to [Christabel] how political reforms were gained, for the blood of the Chartists … had flowed over them in days not long gone by.’12 Several leading suffragists and suffragettes had family connections with early nineteenth-century radicalism. Mrs Pankhurst asserted that her paternal grandfather had narrowly escaped death at Peterloo, while Anne Cobden Sanderson and Jane Catherine Cobden Unwin, the daughters of Richard Cobden, the leader of the Anti-Corn Law League, both gravitated towards the suffrage cause.13

  Despite these claims to a shared political lineage with male radicals, historians have often looked to demographic factors to explain the rise of the women’s suffrage campaign. In comparison to the early twentieth century, the latter half of the nineteenth saw marriages produce very high numbers of children. For those women who married between 1841 and 1845, the live birth rate was 5.71, while one-third of marriages around 1860 led to eight or more children. For women who married between 1925 and 1929, the average birth rate was only 2.19. Certainly, women’s letters and biographies of the time show that the onerous burdens of childbirth and child-rearing were felt across the class divides. Queen Victoria could complain to her uncle, the King of Belgium,

  I think, dearest Uncle, you cannot really wish me to be ‘maman d’une nombreuse famille’ for I think you will see with me the great inconvenience a large family would be to us all, and particularly to myself; men never think, at least seldom think, what a hard task it is for us women to go through this very often.14

  While Hannah Mitchell remarked:

  One Friday, having done my weekend cleaning and baked a batch of bread during the day, I hoped for a good night’s rest, but I scarcely had retired before my labour began. My baby was not born until the following evening after twenty-four hours of intense suffering which an ignorant attendant did little to alleviate … My baby was brought into the world with instruments and without an anaesthetic … Only one thing emerged clearly from much bitter thinking at that time, the fixed resolve to bring no more babies into the world. I felt it impossible to face again either the personal suffering, or the task of bringing a second child up in poverty.15

  Mitchell’s comments were no exaggeration: in the 1880s, hospital records showed working women continuing to turn the mangle after their waters had broken, and returning to the same task a few hours after giving birth.16

  As Mitchell’s autobiography made clear, the crucial difference between working-class and middle-class women was not the negative response to the repeated pain, confinement and drudgery of childbirth and child-rearing – in itself a marked shift from the attitude of eighteenth-century female radicals, notably Mary Wollstonecraft, who had assumed motherhood was a natural and inevitable part of a woman’s life.17 Those experiences were shared across social classes. Rather, the difference lay in the contrast between the lives of poor women, dominated by a ceaseless round of factory labour and domestic work, and those of their middle-class counterparts, governed by societal norms of feminine ‘respectability’, values that effectively cut out most gainful employment.

  Besides its high birth rate, the other significant demographic fact of mid-Victorian England was the large number of unmarried women. Of the ten million women of all ages resident in England and Wales in 1861, there were 1.5 million unmarried women aged twenty and over and 750,000 widows aged twenty and over. Occupations open to these single women were limited in terms of both their earning power and their intellectual reward. For middle-class women, the only respectable occupations beyond that of wife and mother were those of teacher and governess. In 1861, 72.5 per cent of teachers were women, but teaching was ill-paid, of low social status, and offered no chance of advancement. Spinsters could also become governesses, but being a governess carried all the disadvantages of teaching plus significant pitfalls of its own, not least the precarious position of an unmarried female in another woman’s house.18

  In general, the number of women officially in work was in decline in the late nineteenth century: women as a percentage of the workforce diminished from 34.1 per cent in 1861 to 31.1 per cent thirty years later. Moreover, the majority of these women were young and single. The rhetoric of reformers who complained that the ‘factory monster’ was taking mothers away from their children overlooked the essential demographic truth about the female industrial workforce: in 1851, only a quarter of women factory workers were married, and of these only one-fifth had children younger than a year old.19 What that rhetoric about the damaging effect of the factory system on the family really demonstrated was that women workers continued to be viewed with moral disgust. These attitudes seem to have been internalised by ‘respectable’ working-class women too, for whom the ability to stay completely confined to the domestic sphere was a badge of success. It was, after all, in this period that the affectionate term ‘mum’ came to be a coveted title among would-be late Victorian domestic goddesses. Indeed, even suffragettes could be found extolling women’s fitness for public life on the grounds that management of the home was ideal practice for managing that grander domicile, the nation.

  The lack of alternative outlets for women’s intellectual energies has been seen as a major underlying cause behind the growth of the female suffrage movement. Certainly, unmarried middle-class women were prominent in the first feminist organisations that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Of the first eleven members of the Kensington Society that met in London in 1865, nine were unmarried. Although in part inspired by the national agitation surrounding the Second Reform Act, the Society’s concerns were much broader than the vote, encompassing marriage reform, women’s right to work and, especially, the need for decent education for girls and young women.20 Many of the Society’s members had a strong interest in education: Barbara Bodichon and Emily Davies went on to found Girton College, Cambridge; Frances Mary Buss founded the North London Collegiate School; and Dorothea Beale founded Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Other occupations were also well represented, particularly journalism – for instance, by Frances Power Cobbe and Sophia Dobson Collet. Another member, Elizabeth Garrett, became famed as one of the first recognised female doctors in England, while some, such as Helen Taylor, the outspoken stepdaughter and amanuensis of the Liberal philosopher and recently elected MP John Stuart Mill, had connections with politics.* The Kensington Society was responsible for the first women-sponsored petition for female suffrage, signed by fifteen hundred people and delivered to Parliament on 7 June 1866 as the House debated the Second Reform Act. The petition, drafted by Bodichon, Davies and Jessie Boucherett, called for the enfranchisement of ‘all householders, without distinction of sex, who possess such property or rental qualification as your Honourable H
ouse may determine’.21 Though it was greeted with derision in the Commons, such petitioning helped form the basis for subsequent women’s suffrage societies.22

  While it is important to stress the initial leadership given to the suffrage movement by well-connected middle-class women, its growth should not be solely attributed to the frustrations borne of the limited opportunities for unmarried women in Victorian England. Not least, such an explanation skirts dangerously close to contemporary anti-suffragist propaganda, which inaccurately portrayed the movement as a political parlour game for well-to-do women (although, ironically, the WSPU did at one stage produce its own board game, called ‘Pank-a-Squith’).23 More importantly, by the late nineteenth century, as we have seen, there was already a considerable prehistory of women’s activity within other political movements, much of it emerging from working-class communities. From the women’s reform societies that sent contingents to Peterloo to the thousands of women who signed the Chartist petitions, women had been very active participants in the radical agitation of the early part of the century. Some of that activity had already taken a militant bent: women had been involved in securing arms for a possible insurrection.24 As we shall see, towards the end of the century, with the emergence of women’s trade unions and the Women’s Cooperative Guild, female working-class activism was revived.

  Connections with broader reform movements were also important to middle-class suffrage societies. The Manchester Society for Women’s Suffrage, formed shortly after Parliament’s rejection of the petition for enfranchising women in February 1867, was chaired by Jacob Bright, younger brother of John Bright, the tireless campaigner for parliamentary reform (though the elder Bright was opposed to women’s political emancipation – according to his sister Priscilla, he ‘could never bear women to assist themselves’).25 As a young man Jacob Bright had had Chartist affiliations, and after Mill’s failure to gain re-election he took over the leadership of the suffrage cause in the Commons. On 6 November 1867, the National Society for Women’s Suffrage was formed from the Manchester, London and Edinburgh suffrage societies. Its creation led to a split in the women’s suffrage movement, with the departure of Conservative members of the London Women’s Suffrage Society, concerned about alienating public opinion by pushing too soon and too hard for the vote. This was despite the fact that the newly created NSWS had rather limited aims: these were, as its letterhead declared, the ‘Enfranchisement of Unmarried Women & Widows Possessing the Due Property Qualification’. Lydia Becker, a prize-winning botanist and the secretary of the Manchester Society, described the aims of the NSWS as ‘to see men and women of the middle classes stand on the same terms of equality as prevail in the working classes – and the highest aristocracy. A great lady or a factory woman are independent persons – personages – the women of the middle classes are nobodies, and if they act for themselves they lose caste!’26

  It was within this milieu of radical Manchester Liberalism that Dr Richard Pankhurst first came to prominence. Pankhurst had been awarded his LLD (with a gold medal) from London University in 1863, but after being called to the Bar he practised as a barrister on the northern circuit. Shortly after qualifying, he had joined the Manchester Society for Women’s Suffrage, although women’s suffrage was only one of many radical causes that he espoused. In November 1868 his legal expertise was drawn upon in support of wome n’s political rights in the case of Chorlton vs Lings, which concerned the right of female ratepayers to vote in local elections. Pankhurst argued that the 1867 Reform Act enfranchised women, as the word ‘man’ was habitually interpreted in both Roman and English law as encompassing both sexes. He contended that the famous words of the twenty-ninth chapter of Magna Carta, though framed in the masculine, held good for women too.27 The Court of Common Pleas, however, ruled that the uninterrupted customary usage of centuries with regard to the franchise had greater weight than the specific statutes Pankhurst cited.28

  Pankhurst had more success with the amendment that he helped to draft in 1869 to the municipal corporations bill. Led through the Commons by Jacob Bright, the amendment permitted women householders to vote in municipal elections. Pankhurst assisted Bright again the following year, drafting the women’s disabilites removal bill, which attempted to secure by statute what Pankhurst had failed to achieve through the courts. The bill would have made it law that in all acts relating to the franchise, ‘wherever words occur which import the masculine gender, the same shall be held to include females for all purposes connected with and having reference to the right to be registered as voters, and to vote in such elections, any law or usage to the contrary notwithstanding’. This, effectively the first women’s suffrage bill, was no more successful than the court action, which was not very surprising given the very broad female electorate it would have created. The dispute over whether to press for equal suffrage or accept a more limited female franchise would soon become a key bone of contention among the members of the NSWS.

  But Dr Pankhurst’s politics were very soon moving beyond the ‘radical Liberalism’ of Bright. Not only an advocate of equal voting rights for men and women, Pankhurst was also a republican who advocated the abolition of both the monarchy and the House of Lords and, as befitted the son of Baptists, he was a staunch opponent of the national Church. His speeches were filled with violent rhetoric and bloody metaphors. In one, he described the Lords as ‘A public abattoir where the liberties and interests of the people have been butchered like cattle of the field, for the profit of the privileged few … no more a legislative assembly than was Procrustes with his den of blood and his bed of mutilation.’29 In Sylvia Pankhurst’s history of the suffragette movement, her father is clearly given the most sympathetic treatment of any member of her family. To Sylvia, he was a political hero, fearlessly championing the cause of the downtrodden and the disenfranchised. She recalled that he had admired the Chartist Ernest Jones so much that he had purchased his papers when he had seen them being hawked on the street, only to gift them back to Jones’s impoverished widow.

  To Dr Pankhurst’s Manchester Liberal contemporaries, however, his open conversion to radical republicanism was repulsive. One leading Liberal, the Reverend Philip Harris, attacked him as one who was ‘passing through a phase of Red Republicanism … such a torrent of abuse, expressed in the most shrieking tones against every cherished institution in this country’.30 To others, Richard Pankhurst appeared more ludicrous than threatening, his extreme politics jarring with his gentle temperament, slight frame and high-pitched voice. In a posthumous description of him, the Manchester City News stated:

  There were two characteristics of Dr Pankhurst which beyond all others stick in the memories of those who knew him, his smile and his voice … The smile that was not the smile of gaiety, nor of amusement. It was not the twinkle of the humorist. It was a smile of universal kindliness and goodwill – such a smile as the visage of St Francis may have worn. The voice was a natural alto, a thin piping treble, heaven knows how many octaves above the normal pitch.

  It used to be amusing, in a way, to hear the Doctor, with that smile and in that voice, propounding the most blood curdling theories of government, and denouncing the wrath to come on Kings, and Priests, and Aristocrats. You knew that he would not hurt a fly, much less a fellow creature.31

  Dr Pankhurst had founded the Manchester Republican Club in 1873 and his views now placed him increasingly in opposition to both the Manchester Society for Women’s Suffrage and the local Liberal Association. He broke with the more pragmatic suffragists by refusing to support the bill promoted by the Conservative MP William Forsyth in 1874, which would have enfranchised only widows and unmarried women. In July 1883, Pankhurst formally broke with the Manchester Liberal Club and later the same year stood for election as an Independent Radical Liberal, on a platform of universal male and female suffrage, Irish Home Rule, the disestablishment of the Church of England, secular national education and land nationalisation. He lost heavily to his Conservative opponent, who s
ecured the votes of many Liberals.

  While Dr Pankhurst’s fledgling political career failed to take flight, the cause of women’s suffrage was also stuttering to a halt nationally. A series of private members’ bills on the issue, promoted by Jacob Bright, had come to nothing and the NSWS was itself increasingly divided, both over the issue of whether to plump for limited women’s suffrage or hold out for equal voting rights, and over the involvement of suffragists in the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts (CDAs) passed in 1864, 1866 and 1869. These acts aimed at tackling the spread of venereal disease among British troops by targeting infected prostitutes in garrison towns. Opponents saw a threefold problem with this legislation. First, it continued the sexual double standard by focusing on the prostitutes rather than dealing with their customers. Second, it threatened innocent women with arrest by plainclothes police and then compulsory medical examination, simply for passing through suspect areas. Third, these mandatory examinations and the forced internment in secure hospitals of infected women seemed even to many who were generally unsympathetic to women’s rights to be a flagrant assault on civil liberties.

  However, the stance of suffragists on these acts was not uniform. Many leading suffragists were members of the Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act, including Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, a founder member of the Manchester SWS, Harriet Martineau, the campaigning journalist, and Ursula Bright, wife of Jacob and another key member of the MSWS. The head of the Ladies’ National Association, Josephine Butler, had also signed the petition for women’s suffrage delivered to Mill in 1866. Butler always cast the struggle over the CDAs as a political as well as a moral cause. She presented the police powers conferred by the acts as a violation of the British constitution and the rule of law, and the campaign for their repeal as part of a tradition of radical protest that stretched from Wat Tyler to John Wilkes and on to the Chartists.32