Frederick Pethick-Lawrence felt that it was foolish to antagonise the public when no sustained propaganda effort had been made to convert them to the cause.23 Militancy, which had first served to reignite the smouldering embers of the women’s suffrage cause, now threatened to dampen them completely.
Divisions among the suffrage societies, the intransigence of Asquith and the constitutional crisis precipitated by Lloyd George’s budget had combined to marginalise the issue of votes for women. The deadlock was broken by the January 1910 election, which left the Liberals with only two more seats than the Conservatives, and which, at least the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies claimed, had produced a Commons with 323 MPs in favour of women’s suffrage. A petition in favour had also managed to attract 280,000 signatures, as well as a more than usually sympathetic reception in the House. When the Women’s Social and Political Union announced a truce on 31 January, the main political parties felt able to discuss the franchise without seeming to give in to intimidation. Mrs Pankhurst’s retrospective explanation of the Union’s reasons for agreeing to a truce revealed the impasse that had been reached:
My own strongest, but unspoken, reason for welcoming the Conciliation movement was that it might avert the need for stronger militancy and would at least postpone the use thereof. Mild militancy was more or less played out. The Government had, as far as they could, closed every door to meetings. Cabinet Ministers had shown their contempt for the mildness of our protests and had publicly taunted us on that score.24
The WSPU had to choose, then, whether to cooperate with the newly formed conciliation committee or to move towards more extreme forms of militancy in the hope of forcing the government’s hand.
The committee was chaired by the Conservative Lord Lytton, brother of Constance, the suffragette. Brailsford, whose wife Jane had been on hunger strike, acted as an informal liaison officer with the NUWSS. The committee’s challenge was to find a middle way between universal suffrage proposals, which alienated Conservative suffragists, and the equal-votes solution, which Liberals and Labour worried would simply strengthen the power of the propertied. The resulting bill aimed to reproduce the same franchise as then existed for women on the local government registers. It met with the general approval of both the NUWSS and the WSPU, which remained publicly in favour of equal suffrage – though as far as the NUWSS was concerned, the growing influence of socialist activists was leading to calls for it to endorse universal suffrage.
Initial signs for the bill were very hopeful: it passed its first reading by 299 votes to 189. Though this forced even Asquith to consider providing the bill with further facilities for amendment in the next session of Parliament, the Cabinet’s discussions indicated that some of the bill’s firmest opponents were among those, like Lloyd George, who wished to see more sweeping franchise reform. Its limited terms meant that it received only lukewarm support from the People’s Suffrage Federation and the Women’s Cooperative Guild. The Labour Party also failed to press for further amendments, although some thirty-two Labour MPs voted for it.
The truce, which had held for just over nine months, ended on 18 November when Asquith announced that Parliament would be dissolved but made no reference to the conciliation bill. A renewed attempt to rush Parliament was met with a ferocious police response, completely unlike that previously experienced by WSPU activists. Up to this point, police given the task of cordoning off Parliament from demonstrators had acted with considerable restraint. This all changed on ‘Black Friday’. The three hundred women, led by Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, the daughter of the Maharaja of Lahore, were kicked, punched in the nose, and had their hair pulled and their breasts grabbed as they tried to break through police lines. In all, 115 women and four men were arrested, but charges were later withdrawn, only adding to allegations of police brutality. Brailsford and Jessie Murray, a leading female doctor, took depositions from women about their injuries. These confirmed accusations of sexual assault. A Mrs H. testified: ‘One policeman … put his arm round me and seized my left breast, nipping it and wringing it very painfully, saying as he did so, “You have been wanting this for a long time, haven’t you.”’25 The police brutality has been explained by the fact that the usual Commons guard of A Division had been replaced by new men drafted in from Whitechapel and the East End, who had had no experience of dealing with political demonstrations, but were used to administering rough justice to poor people whose complaints were less liable to make headlines.
In the short term, militant activity did not appear to have harmed either the WSPU’s membership or its popularity with suffrage activists. The circulation of Votes for Women had grown from 16,000 in 1909 to 30,000 the following year. There was no sign, either, in the immediate aftermath of ‘Black Friday’ that the WSPU would change its tactics. On 22 November, two hundred women marched on Downing Street in response to Asquith’s announcement that facilities for an amendment to the conciliation bill would be provided in the next parliament but not in the next session. During the course of the ‘Battle of Downing Street’, Augustine Birrell, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, was pushed about by a crowd of angry women and slipped, damaging his knee, which left him confined to bed for several days. This now-familiar scene of a Cabinet minister beset by angry suffragettes concealed a shift in WSPU strategy. Marches on Parliament, which had formed a key component from 1906 to 1910, were now judged too risky. Instead, the Union moved towards a campaign of widespread property destruction, first through window-breaking and then arson and bombing.
In this next phase of the WSPU’s militant campaign, its activists would often see themselves as engaged in a war against not only an obdurate Liberal government but also an unsympathetic general public, which would be shaken from its apathy to the suffrage question by violent action alone. The irony was that there was clear evidence that the public at large was increasingly being won over to the enfranchisement of women. The general election of December 1910 made virtually no difference to the make-up of Parliament, but, outside of Westminster, eighty-six city and town councils passed resolutions supporting the second conciliation bill. These included five of the largest provincial cities in England and the three largest cities in Scotland. Its promoters proposed several modifications to the bill in its 1911 version, leaving it open to widening amendments.
The WSPU itself had shifted from the anger of Black Friday to an incautious optimism. Christabel Pankhurst had already, prematurely as it turned out, announced that the Union would not oppose Liberal candidates at forthcoming by-elections. Its members were in celebratory mood at the suffragette Women’s Coronation Procession in which forty thousand women walked from the Embankment to the Albert Hall. Behind the scenes, though, the bill was seriously threatened, not by staunch antis like Asquith, but by those, especially Lloyd George, who saw this version of the female franchise as effectively spelling political suicide for the Liberal Party. He remarked in private: ‘We seem to be playing into the hands of the enemy. The Conciliation Bill would, on balance, add hundreds of thousands of votes throughout the country to the strength of the Tory Party.’26
A survey of the views of local Liberal associations conducted by the party’s Chief Whip confirmed that the party as a whole agreed with the Chancellor’s assessment. Lloyd George’s pivotal role in the defeat of the second conciliation bill only reinforced Christabel’s conviction that he, and not Asquith, was the suffragettes’ worst enemy in Parliament. Such a view overlooked the fact that Lloyd George’s position was actually the same as the WSPU’s: that the Liberal Party needed to bite the bullet and accept equal suffrage. He was simply unwilling to accept a compromise that would only have benefited his political opponents.
On 7 November, Asquith announced that in the next session the government would introduce a bill providing for manhood suffrage based on residency and which would be open to amendment in the future to include the enfranchisement of women. The announcement brought a swift and furious reaction from the WSPU:
they would not trust the government to bring in such an amendment, and they considered the proposal an insult to their collective intelligence. They were not alone in viewing Asquith’s proposal with suspicion. Even The Times was sceptical about the administration’s intentions: ‘experience warns us against interpreting Mr Asquith’s words in their plain and obvious sense’.27
The WSPU, as ever, was not inclined to wait and see. On 21 November, it began a mass window-breaking campaign, targeting the offices of the Daily Mail and the Daily News, the Guards’ Club and Dunn’s Hat Shop as well as government buildings. Two hundred and twenty women were arrested, along with three men. These attacks revealed the broader, transgressive nature of suffragette militancy. By destroying clothes and hat shops, the suffragettes simultaneously destroyed the objects the male world expected them to venerate. The target of the militants’ hostility was not simply a government that denied them their rights as citizens: it was a patriarchal culture, exemplified by men-only institutions such as the Guards’ Club which saw them as submissive adornments.28
Lloyd George now announced to a public meeting of five thousand people in Bath that the conciliation bill had been ‘torpedoed’. Breakfasting with C. P. Scott a week later, he declared that the WSPU’s leadership had lost its senses: ‘Christabel Pankhurst has lost all sense of proportion and of reality … It’s just like going to a lunatic asylum … and talking to a man who thinks he’s God Almighty.’29 The WSPU’s conduct was certainly becoming more extreme. In December, Emily Wilding Davison began the arson campaign, setting fire to postboxes by inserting paraffin-soaked rags through the slots. She received six months in prison, though the WSPU denied that her actions had received the sanction of its leadership – a claim which increasingly smacked of ‘plausible deniability’ rather than the truth. In March the following year, 150 women armed with hammers smashed shop windows on Oxford Street in London, causing £5000 worth of damage and leading to 124 arrests. Four days later, more windows were broken in Knightsbridge and Kensington High Street.
The timing of the action was questionable, to say the least. Such militancy provided a convenient pretext with which to deny women the vote. The Morning Post declared, ‘Nothing could indicate more plainly their lack of fitness to be entrusted with the exercise of political power.’ Lord Robert Cecil, a leading Unionist supporter of the conciliation bill, saw militancy as fundamentally counterproductive:
If the deplorable outrages committed by the so-called Suffragists were devised for the purposes of advancing the cause of Women’s Suffrage, they can only be described as senseless. But if their object was to put all possible difficulties in the way of the Constitutional Suffragists, and particularly in the way of the Conciliation Bill, then the proceedings, however unscrupulous, were exceedingly well designed.30
Some MPs may have been concerned that a vote in favour of the bill would look like an endorsement of vandalism, but for many Liberals it provided a convenient excuse for ditching a bill that they feared would only aid their political rivals. The third conciliation bill was defeated by 208 votes to 222, assisted by Liberal defections and also by the opposition of Irish MPs who, with the encouragement of Churchill and Lewis ‘Loulou’ Harcourt, thought that the suffrage issue was destabilising a Liberal government that would shortly deliver them Home Rule.
The reaction of the government was now to pursue a policy of ‘decapitation’ against the WSPU. They arrested the Pethick-Lawrences at the Union’s headquarters at Clement’s Inn but found that Christabel Pankhurst was not there, having already moved to a flat of her own near by. Alerted to the police action, she went into hiding before fleeing to Paris the next day. Both the Pethick-Lawrences and Mrs Pankhurst were given lengthy prison sentences.
If the WSPU appeared temporarily in disarray, the NUWSS seemed only to have gained strength from the struggle over the conciliation bills. At grass-roots level, there were many NUWSS members who were politically sympathetic to Labour. The vacillations of the Liberals over the bills had weaned their leadership off their natural affiliation with the party. The Labour Party had become more flexible on the issue of the franchise, encouraged by the likelihood of a government-sponsored adult-suffrage bill raised by Asquith’s mooted compromise of 7 November.
The alliance was practically sealed by the firm commitment given to women’s suffrage at the Labour Party’s January 1912 conference, in a statement which affirmed that though adult male suffrage remained the ultimate goal, no vote would be given to a bill that did not include women. This move was followed in May by a statement from the NUWSS confirming its policy of supporting Labour candidates. The statement was neutrally worded so as not to alienate those leading NUWSS members who were dyed-in-the-wool Liberals: ‘In recommending that preference be given at elections to candidates who were not only themselves in favour of women’s suffrage, but belonged to a party which also identified with it, they were acting simply in the interest of women’s suffrage, and they were perfectly ready to extend the same principle to other political parties which might in the future offer similar conditions.’31 The noncommittal wording belied the energy with which the NUWSS threw itself into supporting Labour candidates. Through the Election Fighting Fund it not only gave Labour its backing in principle, but effectively put at its service the resources of a much better-organised, -supported and -financed political pressure group. In 1910, the NUWSS had over two hundred branches and a membership of 21,571. Even the less well-supported WSPU could, thanks to its wealthy donors in West London, command party funds twice the size of those at the disposal of the Labour Party.32 It was the Election Fighting Fund that effectively transformed Labour from a party dependent for electoral success on backroom deals with the Liberals into a genuine national political force.
The partnership very quickly brought results. In the 1912 Crewe by-election, the EFF helped to defeat the Liberal candidate. At Midlothian, the Liberal candidate was again thwarted: the Unionists overturned a large majority and the EFF garnered 2413 votes for Labour. Nonetheless, some leading Labour figures remained sceptical about the alliance, especially Ramsay MacDonald, who saw his role as the Lib-Lab wire-puller-in-chief under threat. He continued to denigrate the suffrage movement as essentially a middle-class cause and refused EFF assistance in his own constituency of Leicester.
The compromise tabled by Asquith back in November 1911 on the suggestion of Lloyd George, however, was no more successful than any of the three conciliation bills. A point of order from Bonar Law, the pro-suffrage Conservative, noted the exclusion from the final form of the bill of the occupier franchise, which had been present at the second reading. The Speaker let the Liberal Party know that, as a result of this error, he was considering ruling the bill incapable of containing the proposed women’s suffrage amendments. Asquith publicly expressed shock at the ruling, though in private it caused him much amusement: ‘the Speaker’s coup d’état has bowled over the Women for this session – a great relief’.33 In any case, the news was not the ‘bombshell’ that Asquith claimed: the civil servant in charge of drafting the bill, Arthur Tring, pointed out on 8 January 1913 that there was a procedural question mark over the women’s suffrage amendments.
The NUWSS, emboldened by its new alliance with Labour, responded by rejecting the consolation prize of an offer to support a private member’s bill with facilities for further amendments. The reaction was significant. W. H. Dickinson’s private member’s bill failed largely on the grounds that it was too democratic for most Conservative MPs, as it enfranchised the wives of householders as well as single-women property-owners. But, conversely for the NUWSS, the bill was not now democratic enough. Philip Snowden, then MP for Blackburn and later chairman of the ILP, believed that the shift in both the Labour and the NUWSS’s positions was deeply significant for the fate of women’s suffrage in general. It had now put ‘into the region of the impossible’, Snowden wrote to Millicent Fawcett, any attempt to introduce a male franchise bill into the Commons that did not at the sam
e time enfranchise women.34 For the WSPU, predictably, the defeat of the government’s bill was taken only as evidence, once again, of women’s betrayal by Parliament. It was the catalyst for a renewed and ever more violent wave of militant activity. But the danger was that the WSPU’s brand of militancy was now not merely politically counterproductive, it was becoming irrelevant.
21
THE SPECTACULAR PAGEANT DRAWS TO A CLOSE
In the wake of Christabel Pankhurst’s flight and the imprisonment of her mother and the Pethick-Lawrences, Annie Kenney was placed in ostensible charge of the WSPU. In reality, she was simply the cipher for Christabel’s orders, becoming known as ‘blotting paper for Christabel’, a title that Kenney found amusing, signing her letters to Christabel ‘the blotter’.
Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst were now in total control of the movement. The government attack on the WSPU’s leadership had prompted an internal power struggle that by the end of 1912 had been conclusively resolved in favour of their ‘duumvirate’. On 22 May, Mrs Pankhurst and the Pethick-Lawrences were found guilty of conspiracy, though the jury urged leniency on account of the political motives behind their crimes. The judge nonetheless sentenced them as second-division prisoners and, in response, Mrs Pankhurst and the Pethick-Lawrences announced they would go on hunger strike in a week if their status were not changed. Their case brought an appeal to Asquith signed by a hundred MPs and leading international socialists including Jean Jaurès, Eduard Bernstein, Romain Rolland and Marie Curie, urging that the suffragettes be recognised as political prisoners.
A Radical History Of Britain Page 51
