The rhetoric of many within the Labour movement tended to overlook the fact that the most powerful unions represented only some of the workers, and, indeed, pursued interests that were antagonistic to the needs of other sections of the working class. They tended to present the suffrage movement as essentially a bourgeois political cause that would serve merely to enfranchise the workers’ class enemies. Even some female trade unionists attacked suffragists for replacing ‘class antagonism’ with ‘sex antagonism’.54 There was some truth to this position: despite the Pankhursts’ claims to the contrary, equal suffrage would predominantly enfranchise middle-class women who were widely – and probably correctly – believed to be predisposed to vote Tory. And this evaluation of the political costs of equal suffrage revealed a more deep-seated problem. The adult-suffrage position maintained by the ILP and affirmed by socialist women’s groups at an international conference at Stuttgart in 1907 would, of course, have represented a much more far-reaching act of political emancipation than mere equalisation of the existing franchise. But it is debatable whether many male Labour activists were actually attached to the idea in principle. Adult suffrage served as a useful delaying tactic, allowing the Labour movement to argue that other issues were more pressing and achievable, and Hannah Mitchell was probably right when she quoted Shaw’s witticism in summing up the position: ‘If a man owes you a sovereign and being able to pay you fifteen shillings, refuses to do so, depend upon it, ladies, he never intends to pay the lot.’55
This lack of intellectual commitment to adult suffrage reflected a wider absence of interest in constitutional reform among British socialists. There was a strong sense that, with the enfranchisement of a large section of the male working class under the 1884 Reform Act, British democracy was practically the finished article. As Christabel Pankhurst would later put it, ‘Labour men cared relatively little for franchise reform even for men, because already the working-men voters were in a majority.’56 Of course, some residual attachment to radical republicanism remained, but it was outweighed by a rather complacent constitutionalism. As the Fabian Society remarked, the nation’s constitutional apparatus required only a little tinkering, not radical surgery:
When the House of Commons is freed from the veto of the House of Lords and thrown open to candidates from all classes by an effective system of Payment of Representatives and a more rational method of election, the British Parliamentary system will be, in the opinion of the Fabian Society, a first-rate practical instrument of democratic government.57
By the 1890s, the Fabians had publicly repudiated republicanism, Shaw rehearsing the shop-worn argument that a hereditary monarchy was better than the elected alternative, fearing that if the royals were done away with, the people would only ‘idolize some British Boulanger and worship the honour of the army. For my part I prefer the Queen.’58 Though the initial ILP programme put together by Hardie and MacDonald had demonstrated continuity with an earlier tradition of British radicalism in its demand for more frequent parliaments, payments for MPs, abolition of the House of Lords and adult suffrage, MacDonald later denigrated the pursuit of constitutional reform as mere ‘will o’ the wisps’.59 This would be a dominant argument within Labour circles throughout the twentieth century. The advocacy of constitutional reform was presented either as a species of antiquated radical Liberalism or as an ulterior means by which the establishment could inoculate itself against the spread of socialism. (For example, Labour intellectuals argued against a new British bill of rights on the grounds that it would empower unelected, upper-class judges.60)
For democratic socialists, then, further electoral or constitutional reform in what was already a mass male democracy was often perceived as an unnecessary diversion from the main business of creating a socialist society, a project that would largely be conducted via economic, not political, change. But even revolutionary groups such as Morris’s Socialist League that viewed parliamentary democracy as an irrelevancy were increasingly pessimistic about the radical potential of the British working class. Although the late 1880s were years of great social unrest, when revolution once again appeared to be in the air, the turmoil of the decade ultimately sealed the defeat, not the success, of revolutionary socialism. Meetings of the unemployed in London culminated in two major incidents: window-smashing in Pall Mall on ‘Black Monday’, 8 February 1886, which was followed by the arrest of H. M. Hyndman, Henry Hyde Champion and John Burns of the SDF; and ‘Bloody Sunday’, 13 November 1887, when Burns, Cunninghame Graham and Besant led a demonstration in Trafalgar Square in defence of the right of public assembly, after the government’s refusal to allow a meeting in protest at a new Irish ‘coercion bill’. In a wider international context, the march took place at a point when socialism globally was being brutally repressed. The British right-wing press applauded Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws in Germany, and papers like The Times supported the execution of eleven anarchists on 11 November in the wake of the Haymarket Riot in Chicago, when a rally in support of striking workers descended into bloody mayhem after a pipe bomb was thrown at the police lines.
In Trafalgar Square, the two thousand waiting police, backed up by four hundred troops and four squadrons of cavalry, responded with violence. At least three people died as a result of assault by the police or army, and some two hundred were injured.61 Cunninghame Graham and Burns were arrested, the former badly beaten by police after he had been seized:
one policeman after another, two certainly, but I think no more, stepped up from behind and struck him on the head from behind with a violence and brutality which were shocking to behold. Even after this, and when some five or six other police were dragging him into the Square, another from behind seized him most needlessly by the hair … and dragged his head back, and in that condition he was forced forwards many yards.62
At a meeting held to protest against the outrages on the following Sunday in Hyde Park, mounted police knocked down a young radical writer, Alfred Linnell, who subsequently died from his injuries.
The crushing of the demonstration, the rejoicing and gloating of the Conservative press at the police action, and the notable silence of the Liberal opposition all profoundly shook the faith of revolutionary socialists. Morris wrote a powerful ‘Death Song’ for Linnell’s funeral in which he warned ‘the rich’: ‘Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay, / But one and all if they would dusk the day’.63 Even Morris had been disturbed by the ease and severity with which the marchers had been scattered. If a revolution were to come, it did not look as if the British working class would lead it.
19
DEEDS NOT WORDS1
After the birth of her fifth and last child, and with the failure of her retail enterprise, Mrs Pankhurst, as Sylvia’s history testifies, had returned to politics. In 1889 she helped to form the Women’s Franchise League, on whose council sat Jacob Bright, Jane Cobden, Josephine Butler and the American suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. This organisation expanded the terms of the narrow suffrage advocated by the National Society for Women’s Suffrage to include married women, and demanded equal divorce and inheritance rights. It also embraced some of Dr Pankhurst’s political radicalism, publishing a pamphlet in favour of the abolition of the House of Lords. However, the WFL was wound up in the 1890s because of the ill-health of some of its leading members, including Pankhurst, who was suffering from gastric ulcers, probably exacerbated by his growing financial difficulties. The costs of Emmeline’s unsuccessful shop and the terms of their lease on the Russell Square house exacted a heavy toll.
No longer able to afford either, the Pankhursts returned to Victoria Park, Manchester, where they joined the local Independent Labour Party Association. As we have seen, they had become heavily involved in socialist activity in London and had already made contact with the leading ILP figure of the time, Keir Hardie. And the ILP held other attractions for a couple devoted to the cause of women’s suffrage. Though some of its members were equivocal on the issue, the ILP itself, l
ike the Fabians, allowed women full roles within the party as lecturers and as members of its national administrative council, rather than relegating them to an auxiliary association. A number of women already held important posts within the party, including Katherine St John Conway, later editor of the Labour Leader, Caroline Martyn and Enid Stacy, who were both council members.
The Pankhursts soon made their mark within the local ILP. Emmeline was elected to the Chorlton Board of Poor Law Guardians, a reminder that though women were not able to vote in national elections until 1918, they were already making inroads into local government. In May 1895 Dr Pankhurst was adopted as ILP candidate for Gorton, an industrial suburb of Manchester. He lost to the Conservative candidate – no Liberal stood – but polled an impressive 4300 votes. Despite the fact that his election platform contained many Liberal elements, though, it was clear that local Liberals had abstained from voting for him: his affiliation to the ILP was becoming professionally costly.
In 1896, in his role as a barrister, Richard Pankhurst unsuccessfully defended a number of local socialists who had been fined for speaking at the Boggart Hole Clough, a natural amphitheatre that was regularly used by the ILP for open-air meetings. The Clough, formerly part of the Carill-Worsley estate, had recently been acquired by the Corporation of Manchester. Although there were no specific by-laws to prevent public meetings, driven by the obvious political animus of Councillor George Needham – who aimed to stop the gatherings of a ‘certain party’ – the council used a law of 1868 against disorderly behaviour to prosecute ILP speakers. Mrs Pankhurst was prominent at the meetings, collecting money for the imprisoned men. On the evening of 3 July, a crowd of ten thousand gathered to protest at the prosecution of Mrs Pankhurst and other socialists. Speakers at the meeting included Keir Hardie and Tom Mann.* The following Sunday, the Pankhursts, accompanied by Christabel and Sylvia, drove to the Clough in an open barouche. They were greeted by a crowd of between twenty-five and forty thousand people. They had clearly become ILP celebrities: the following week’s Labour Leader carried sketches of Christabel, Sylvia and Emmeline. The savvy Emmeline had noted the considerable publicity that ILP figures such as Leonard Hall and Fred Brocklehurst had garnered for the party by choosing prison in preference to paying fines. This kind of coverage was invaluable for a party that was so poor in its early stages that its members had to advertise its meetings in chalk, on paving stones. The value of imprisonment as a publicity stunt would later inform suffragette tactics in its militant years.
However, for all the Boggart Hole Clough dispute’s worth to the ILP, it only added to the financial pressures on Richard Pankhurst. He continued to act as the advocate of progressive causes, securing one final legal victory when he won the right to a public footpath over Kinder Scout in the Peak District. But the stress of these high-profile cases and the accompanying loss of lucrative official legal business proved too much: he died on 5 July 1898 of a perforated ulcer. His death was a crushing blow to his devoted wife, and Emmeline retired from political activity. This seclusion was the product of financial necessity as well as personal grief. Richard’s pursuit of politically worthy rather than financially rewarding cases had left the family considerably in debt. Robert Blatchford, editor of the popular socialist paper the Clarion, offered to raise a subscription to help support the Pankhursts, but Emmeline refused to accept money for her own family from a working-class readership that often struggled to meet its own needs. Instead, she took up paid employment as registrar of births and deaths for Chorlton, an experience that also brought her a greater appreciation of the problems faced by working-class women.
Though the political career of Emmeline Pankhurst was temporarily on hold, the late 1890s saw a grass-roots resurgence in the women’s suffrage movement. Middle-class women’s suffrage societies had been reorganised under the umbrella of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett. Fawcett, the well-connected widow of a Liberal Cabinet minister, according to legend was marked out by Emily Davies as a future suffrage leader when she was still a teenager. Like other Victorian suffragists, Millicent had become politically active during the debates over the Second Reform Act in 1867. Her marriage to Henry Fawcett that same year marked the beginning of a close and loving personal and political partnership. Aside from running the household, Millicent acted as guide and secretary to her blind husband. He, in turn, was an outspoken and principled supporter of women’s suffrage in Parliament. In the wake of his sudden death in 1884, Millicent had thrown herself into, first, the campaign for moral reform, then the cause of women’s suffrage. The formation of NUWSS led in 1897 to a private member’s bill in favour of women’s suffrage receiving a second reading in the Commons for the first time.
Working-class political organisations too were undergoing a period of growth. Esther Roper, the bespectacled daughter of a poor factory worker turned Christian missionary, as secretary of the Manchester Society for Women’s Suffrage, began the first campaign for the vote directed specifically at working women. Roper correctly saw that the large numbers of women trade unionists were an as yet untapped source of strength for the suffrage movement, and she went about recruiting female unionists by deploying women workers as speakers and organising visits to factories. With her close friend and possibly lover Eva Gore-Booth, the poet and daughter of the Anglo-Irish landowner and Arctic explorer Sir Henry Gore-Booth, Roper did much to attract working-class women to the suffrage movement. The success of their efforts, and those of other working-class activists such as Selina Cooper of the Women’s Cooperative Guild, can be gauged by the near-thirty thousand signatures that the North of England Society for Women’s Suffrage managed to gather for a petition in 1901, when the membership of the NUWSS as a whole was only ten thousand.
The petition, though, was unsuccessful, and before the election of 1903 attempts at getting suffrage bills through the Commons were largely stillborn, as parliamentary politics continued to be dominated by the Boer War. Nonetheless, the growth of female trade unionism posed questions about the representation of women. The recently created Labour Representation Committee – which later became the Labour Party – left the funding of parliamentary candidates to individual constituency organisations.
The textile unions that affiliated to the LRC in 1902 were dominated by women, with close to 100,000 female members compared to only 70,000 men. Under the terms of their agreement with the LRC, the unions agreed to an affiliation fee of ten shillings per thousand members, in addition to which fourpence was levied each year on each member, women included, for Labour representation. Thousands of women trade unionists were therefore paying for candidates, but could not vote for them. Gore-Booth and Roper responded to this injustice by forming the Lancashire and Cheshire Women’s Textile and Other Workers Representation Committee, to campaign for the first women’s suffrage candidate to stand in an election.* The move demonstrated the growing frustration that many suffragists, who also shared a socialist political philosophy, felt at the Labour movement’s lack of commitment to votes for women, despite the important financial support given by women trade unionists.
The growth of a working-class women’s suffrage movement in the North of England was crucial to the re-engagement of the Pankhursts with the cause. This time, however, the leading figure was Mrs Pankhurst’s eldest (and favourite) daughter, Christabel. Emmeline had tried to engage her bright but dreamy child in opening a new fancy goods shop, but Christabel hated the work, and this venture, like Emerson’s, proved a financial failure. Striving to find something else to occupy Christabel’s restless mind, Emmeline suggested that she attend some classes at Manchester University. It was here that Christabel came into contact with Esther Roper and, through her, Eva Gore-Booth. Within a year, Christabel was giving talks for the North of England Society for Women’s Suffrage across northern England and Scotland. She was not yet the mesmerising public speaker of the high years of suffragette militancy – one observer of her early perfo
rmances noted that she was rather hesitant.2
As early as 1902 it was clear that Christabel, like her mother a member of the ILP, was having misgivings about the alliance between the suffrage and Labour movements. In an article in the ILP News published that year, she complained:
As a rule, Socialists are silent on the position of women. If not actually antagonistic to the movement for women’s rights, they hold aloof from it. One gathers that some day, when the Socialists are in power, and have nothing better to do, they will give women votes as a finishing touch to their arrangements, but for the present they profess no interest in the subject … Why are women expected to have such confidence in the men of the Labour Party? Working-men are as unjust to women as are those of other classes.3
Some suffragettes who broke away from the Pankhursts later claimed that Christabel’s brief involvement in Labour politics had only ever been based on a self-interested search for a platform. As Teresa Billington-Greig, a stormy agnostic who remained a committed socialist throughout her career as a radical suffragette, claimed: ‘Mrs Pankhurst believed there was hope for this Labour conversion policy, while Christabel only endured it till her time came.’4
A Radical History Of Britain Page 47
