A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  It was her attendance at a meeting on 1 November 1913 organised by George Lansbury’s socialist Herald League to protest against the lockout of Dublin workers and the imprisonment of the Irish trade union leader James Larkin that led her into direct conflict with Christabel. The elder sister used the pages of the Suffragette to distance the WSPU from any idea of support for the Herald League, and privately wrote to Sylvia, telling her that ‘conflicting views and divided counsels inside the WSPU there cannot be’.26 (This despite the fact that the Herald League had provided protection for WSPU ‘mice’, like the ex-boxer ‘Kosher’ Hunt, who guarded Sylvia Pankhurst, to prevent their rearrest.27) Following a meeting between Sylvia and Christabel in Paris in January 1914, the East London Federation formally separated from the WSPU.

  With the Pankhurst family split, the Pethick-Lawrences ostracised and membership dwindling, the WSPU was in danger of going underground, transforming completely from a campaigning organisation into something like a tiny cell of arsonists and bombers. On 21 May 1914, Mrs Pankhurst was arrested for the last time, as a crowd of two hundred women rushed Buckingham Palace. But by this point militancy was a political dead-end. The comparisons that the suffragette movement as a whole frequently made between itself and the Ulster Unionists and previous British radical movements were apposite. In both of the latter cases the use of force had carried the very real threat of general insurrection. Though well supported financially, the WSPU on its own could not intimidate governments in the same way. Moreover, whereas the loyalists in Ulster had been willing to use lethal force, the WSPU, though it became less scrupulous about the risks to the public of militant action, never consciously aimed to cause death or serious injury. In this sense, it is inappropriate to describe its members as ‘terrorists’, as some historians have. They aimed largely at inconveniencing rather than incapacitating the public.

  The decline of the WSPU, though, should not be equated with the decline of the women’s suffrage movement as a whole. Indeed, under the leadership of the NUWSS it was in a stronger position than ever before, thanks to that organisation’s astute alliance with the Labour Party. On the eve of war its activities had left the Liberal government so worried for its electoral survival that Lloyd George had approached Sylvia Pankhurst about reviving the idea of tacking a women’s suffrage amendment on to a male suffrage bill.28 In Sylvia’s narrative history, this olive branch was presented as recognition of her own importance to the suffrage cause. In fact, Lloyd George’s offer was far more the product of the campaigning work of the NUWSS than of the militancy of the WSPU. Rather than militancy bringing women the vote, it was the First World War that rescued the leading militants, Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst, from the political wilderness.

  As the threat of conflict grew ever greater, Christabel’s writing took on an increasingly apocalyptic tone, a foreshadowing of her later spiritualist beliefs: ‘This great war, whether it comes now, or by some miracle is deferred till later, is Nature’s vengeance – is God’s vengeance upon the people who held women in subjection.’29 A week later, with war formally declared, Mrs Pankhurst announced that the militant campaign was over. She and Christabel now threw themselves enthusiastically into supporting the war effort. Their new, jingoistic rhetoric shocked some former supporters. The suffragist H. M. Swanwick, born in Munich, had been an admirer of Mrs Pankhurst,

  until a melancholy night in 1915, when the ghost of the woman she had been talked unbelievable nonsense about Germans at a Queen’s Hall [London] meeting. There was a man there, I remember, who maintained that the stewards at Liberal meetings between 1906 and 1914 had been ‘Huns’. ‘You will remember’, he roared, ‘with what brutality these stewards treated the women?’ Then, after a dramatic pause, he leant forward and snarled, ‘It was not for nothing that they spoke with a foreign accent and in a guttural tongue.’ Mrs Pankhurst nodded approval. I was so startled by this absurdity that I let out a shout of laughter. But the audience turned on me with a shocked ‘Hush!’ I had brawled in church. Nothing was, at that time, too fantastic to be believed against Germans.30

  Ironically, this anti-German rhetoric overlooked the fact that one of the leading suffragette activists before the war, ‘Kitty Marion’, was born Katherina Schafer in Dortmund, Westphalia.31

  The WSPU eagerly worked to recruit men for the war effort and women to help manufacture munitions. On 17 July 1915, Lloyd George and Churchill reviewed a two-mile procession of thirty thousand women, some of whom carried banners with such oxymoronic inscriptions as ‘Shells made by a wife may save a husband’s life’. On 15 October, in the clearest sign yet of the WSPU’s commitment to the war effort, the Suffragette was rechristened Britannia. Through the pages of Britannia, Christabel would return to the pathological themes of The Great Scourge, denouncing pacifism as a ‘disease’, urging the annihilation of the German nation and labelling wartime strike action as the work of either ‘Bolsheviks’ or the Kaiser’s agents.32 The Pankhursts and their supporters showed that they had lost none of their militant spirit, taking the patriotic cause right into the heart of pacifist, socialist ‘Red Clydeside’. When workers interrupted an anti-strike rally in Glasgow by singing the ‘Red Flag’, Pankhurst supporters

  [leapt] down from their places, and like a troop of lancers, went clean through the pacifists. It was a wild, weird scene … There was one lady who was a regular master of fistcuffs [she was trained in ju-jitsu]. One big beefy-looking shirker tried to punch her, but she ducked and his arm went nowhere and the lady’s fist just got the place it was meant to, and he collapsed at her feet, gobbling and groaning.33

  The WSPU’s unqualified enthusiasm for the war was not matched by the other suffrage societies. The NUWSS’s conference resolution in its support was modified by some members who secured the inclusion of a phrase calling for ‘the substitution for force … of a real European partnership based on the recognition of equal rights and established and enforced by a common will’.34 A number of NUWSS members joined a new anti-war group, the Union of Democratic Control, which included radical Liberals such as Brailsford, ILP figures such as MacDonald and former WSPU activists such as Pethick-Lawrence. Until 1915, the NUWSS maintained unity by taking an active part in relief work only. Over £150,000 was raised to support medical units.

  However, when the patriotic Millicent Fawcett that year refused to permit the NUWSS to participate in an anti-war conference at The Hague, large numbers of pacifist members left the Union. Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London Federation likewise maintained its pacifist, socialist stance. Indeed, she publicly attacked Britannia for whipping up anti-German feeling, citing an attack on a German bakery in Hoxton as an example of the violence this rhetoric provoked against innocent immigrant communities.35 In the East End, she worked tirelessly to combat poverty and deprivation, opening milk distribution centres, four mother-and-baby clinics and a ‘cost-price restaurant’ which in 1915 served seventy thousand two-penny meals. She was increasingly influenced by Marxism, chaning the name of her paper, the Women’s Dreadnought, to the Workers’ Dreadnought. It carried articles by the Scottish communist John McLean and even pieces by Christabel’s old university nemesis Walter Newbold, and it was through these Marxist contacts that she encountered an Italian anarchist-socialist, Silvio Corio, with whom she would later have a child.

  The pacifist stance of some former suffragettes and suffragists was largely outweighed by the patriotic contribution of women to the war effort. The numbers working in the munitions industry rose from 83,000 in July 1914 to 947,000 by the end of the war. Whether this work raised women’s position in society is debatable. Sylvia Pankhurst characterised munitions work as ‘sweated labour’, and the wages paid to the women in these factories, only two-thirds of men’s, lent some truth to the accusation. However, in two important ways war work did contribute to the advancement of women’s suffrage.

  First, the patriotic stance of the leadership of both the WSPU and the NUWSS allowed the Liberal Party to draw a line under
militant activity. On 7 May 1916, replying to a letter from Mrs Fawcett on the issue of male suffrage and the insertion in any forthcoming bill of a clause relating to women, Asquith assured her: ‘You may be certain that the considerations set out in your letter will be fully and impartially weighed, without any pre-judgement from the controversies of the past.’36 Second, far from representing the abandonment of suffrage agitation, the war work of both the WSPU and the NUWSS contributed to a redefinition of citizenship during the First World War. Instead of emphasising that, as human beings, men and women were due the same political rights, many advocates of women’s suffrage now suggested that citizenship was dependent on service and sacrifice. Just as male soldiers who had been prepared to give their lives for their country deserved the vote, so too did women doctors, nurses and munitions workers. Individuals, male or female, who were not prepared to defend the nation, such as conscientious objectors or striking workers, should be denied the right to vote.37 This new rhetoric nonetheless employed some of the old tactics of militancy: old WSPU activists were at the forefront when it came to handing out white feathers to men who refused to enlist.38

  The establishment of a coalition government during the war had also brought in more pro-suffrage ministers, including Robert Cecil and Arthur Henderson. But Asquith suggested in August 1916 that the issue of the franchise was too controversial to be broached during wartime, a statement that met with an uncharacteristically muted response from the WSPU. However, the resignation of Asquith on 5 December over the conduct of the war, and his replacement by Lloyd George, opened the way for a quicker resolution of the issue. Further good news for the suffrage campaign followed, with the resignation from the Conference on Electoral Reform a week later of the two leading opponents of votes for women, Sir Frederick Banbury and Lord Salisbury. When the conference reported its conclusions the following January, it announced that as well as male suffrage on residency qualification, some form of women’s suffrage would be confirmed.

  In supporting the report, Lloyd George reiterated that women’s war work made them deserving candidates for the vote. On 19 June 1917, the clause in favour of women’s suffrage was passed by 385 votes to 55, the bill finally passing the Lords on 10 January 1918 and receiving the royal assent on 6 February. Women over thirty were enfranchised if they were householders, wives of householders or university graduates, or if they occupied property with a rental value of more than £5 a year. In accordance with the notion that the vote was a reward for war service, male conscientious objectors were disenfranchised.39 Under the terms of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, thirteen million men now had the vote, along with eight and a half million women – the first time any women had been enfranchised since 1832.

  In the final analysis, militancy had played little part in securing women the vote. Taken at face value, neither had women’s war work: as a number of women’s organisations pointed out at the time, the 1918 act left most working-class women without a vote. The perception that triumph for the movement for women’s suffrage had come not with a bang but a whimper was neatly expressed by the feminist writer Vera Brittain:

  With an incongruous irony seldom equalled in the history of revolutions, the spectacular pageant of the woman’s movement, vital and colourful in adventure, with initiative, with sacrificial emotion, crept to its quiet, unadvertised triumph in the deepest night of wartime depression.40

  In her account of the suffragette movement, Sylvia Pankhurst wrote that the 1918 act dispelled ‘the mirage of a society regenerated by enfranchised womanhood as by a magic wand’.41 It was a slight both at her sister Christabel’s expectation of an imminent feminine millennium and at the more long-standing British radical belief that the vote could be an elixir for all social and economic evils. Many historians have concurred with this pessimistic assessment of the impact of enfranchisement on the status of women. By the early 1920s, most women had lost the jobs they had had during the war, jobs that in any case had largely been traditionally female and of relatively low status. Conservative critics attacked the morality of young single women in postwar Britain. Sylvia Pankhurst herself was not immune to vilifying so-called ‘flappers’. In an article commissioned to commemorate the twenty-first anniversary of Emily Wilding Davison’s death, she complained: ‘Amongst crowds of young women, the emancipation of today, displays itself mainly in cigarettes and shorts … and other absurdities of dress and deportment, which betoken the slave woman’s sex appeal rather than the free woman’s intelligent companionship.’42

  Such a pessimistic analysis, though, overlooks both the achievements of the suffrage movement and its remarkable vitality after the war. The equalisation of suffrage in 1928 was not a political inevitability, but the product of further hard campaigning by former suffragettes and suffragists. A July 1926 demonstration and meeting at Hyde Park in support of universal suffrage showed the continuing solidarity within the suffrage movement, with a procession that included Millicent Fawcett, Charlotte Despard, Flora Drummond, Annie Besant, Mrs Pankhurst and Margaret Ashton. Militancy did not return, but this was a tactical decision, not a moral judgement on the past. As Eleanor Rathbone put it: ‘We acquired by experience a certain flair which told us when a charge of dynamite would come in useful and when it was better to rely on the methods of a skilled engineer.’43

  If women remained under-represented in Parliament (the first woman elected to the Commons in 1918, Countess Markievicz, as a Sinn Fein member, did not take her seat), they were clearly making ground in other fields. By 1925, fourteen thousand had been enrolled on degree and diploma programmes, there were half a million women clerical workers, thirteen hundred qualified women doctors, and, for the first time, women were allowed to sit exams for the highest administrative class of the civil service. By 1927, there were even 142 women police officers, a role which had its origins in the operation of volunteer women police units raised by the WSPU to protect women workers during the First World War.

  Mrs Pankhurst died on 14 June 1928. As her daughter Christabel noted,

  The House of Lords passed the final measure of Votes for Women in the hour her body, which had suffered so much for that cause, was laid in the grave. She, who had come to them in their need, had stayed with the women as long as they still might need her, and she went away.44

  Emmeline Pankhurst is now revered as the leading figure in the history of British women’s political emancipation. She emerged as twenty-seventh in the BBC’s 2002 poll of ‘Great Britons’, between Queen Elizabeth II and Guy Fawkes. In contrast, vitally important figures such as Millicent Fawcett are scarcely known beyond academic circles. We now closely associate the struggle for the vote with militant action, but this is to misunderstand both militancy and the wider suffrage movement. Militancy has, quite rightly, been seen by a number of historians as eventually counterproductive. From 1905 to 1908, WSPU militancy undoubtedly helped revive a movement that had struggled to be taken as anything more than the intellectual hobby-horse of bored middle-class women. After this point, militancy largely frustrated the cause of women’s enfranchisement by making it virtually impossible for politicians to do a deal without appearing to sanction violence.

  But reading militancy in this way is to miss what was truly revolutionary about it. As Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence said, ‘Christabel cared less for the political vote itself than for the dignity of her sex, and she denounced the false dignity earned by submission and extolled the true dignity accorded by revolt. She never made any secret of the fact that to her the means were even more important than the end. Militancy to her meant the putting-off of the slave spirit.’45

  Militancy was not simply the means to an end, then; it was an end in itself. Militant acts demonstrated the freedom of suffragettes from the bondage of a male-dominated world. They destroyed the objects they were supposed to idolise, rejected the masculine authority to which they were supposed to submit and affirmed in the most violent way possible that their bodies were their own and no one els
e’s. If commemorating militancy as the essence of the suffrage struggle obscures the vital role of suffragists, this is understandable. Militancy not only helped achieve the ‘bloodless revolution’: it was the essence of that revolutionary spirit.

  22

  THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM

  Nothing more than a wishy-washy Reformist Government which, when all the big issues that really matter came to be decided, would be swept along in the wake of a capitalist policy.

  Sylvia Pankhurst on the Labour Party in 19181

  For the Labour Party, as for the Women’s Social and Political Union and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, the First World War represented a watershed. Keir Hardie had attempted to develop Labour into an internationalist, socialist party opposed to imperialism and war. Yet, despite the grotesque human carnage at the Somme and at Passchendaele, as hundreds of thousands of men died under the relentless bark of machine guns or drowned neck-deep in the grim mire of no-man’s land, anti-war sentiment never reached revolutionary proportions in Britain as it had done in Russia. This was largely due to the fact that fighting a ‘total war’ required the mass involvement of the British people, both men and women. There were tangible benefits for many British workers. While strike action was forbidden by agreement between the government and the TUC, that agreement had also provided union leaders with new access to the political executive, a relationship that would develop into a very powerful connection over the next half-century. Even left-wing opponents of the war such as Ramsay MacDonald were forced to concede that the conflict had achieved far more social reform than had individual radical and trade union campaigns over the course of a century. With the creation of Lloyd George’s three-party wartime coalition in December 1916, the Labour Party was brought into government. Social reformers such as William Beveridge and Seebohm Rowntree and even socialists like Beatrice Webb were involved in policy-making discussions. Public education was improved and the school leaving age raised to fourteen by H. A. L. Fisher’s act of 1918. The way was opened up for subsidised local authority housing, and, with the creation of the new Ministry of Health, for the coordination of health services.