Skip to main content
Read page text
page 14
14 HISTORY & POLITICS Purple, white and green. Dignity, purity and hope. The colour scheme in the branding of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded by the former suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst in Manchester in 1903, with her eldest daughter, Christabel, was unveiled at the giant Women’s Sunday event of June 21, 1908, attended by around half a million supporters. With women instructed to dress in the WSPU’s colours, the event was a sartorial demonstration of suffragette militancy, combining daintiness and determination. But the WSPU’s colour scheme was one of many, each suffrage organization having its own. Timed to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the partial enfranchisement of British women, numerous engaging books look at both the Pankhursts and their opponents and consider the complexities of the suffrage campaign, how it was fought in all its nuances and shades. Named after Mrs Pankhurst’s own battle cry, Rise Up, Women! is a substantial and impressive product of Diane Atkinson’s long association with the Museum of London. Her book is surely destined to become a key general text, ranking alongside classic tomes such as Elizabeth Crawford’s The Women’s Suffrage Movement (1998) and Antonia Raeburn’s The Militant Suffragettes (1974). Raeburn’s frequently cited book, graced with a foreword by J. B. Priestley and drawn from interviews with militants, is sadly out of print. Atkinson’s book provides an accessible, captivating, chronological account that incorporates recent developments in ancestry research as well as first-hand accounts. Rise Up, Women! traces the suffragettes’ campaign back to the Great Reform Act of 1832, in which women were for the first time expressly excluded from voting for parliamentary candidates. Atkinson also emphasizes that female suffrage featured in a draft of the Charter of 1838 (though Chartists later dropped it for “manhood suffrage”). Despite some surprising misquotations (including an extract from an interview with the WSPU organizer Grace Roe), Atkinson’s book functions as a warm invitation to explore Britain’s archival treasures, notably in the Museum of London, the Women’s Library, LSE and the British Library. Atkinson presents the suffragette movement as a “drama” with numerous supporting actors and “walk-on parts”, but she ensures that we become fully acquainted with the many personalities behind the names. She also shows how their ideas about female emancipation went far beyond the campaign for the vote. There is blue-eyed Edith Rigby, a doctor’s wife, who wore substantial amber beaded necklaces, sandals, enjoyed Turkish cigarettes and opened a working women’s night school in Preston. She scandalized the neighbours by treating her servants as equals and whitening her own doorstep. In 1991, Atkinson interviewed the oldest surviving suffrage campaigner, 101-year-old Victoria Lidiard, from Bristol. She was jailed for two months in Holloway for smashing a window at the War Office, and later became the first woman optometrist. The Spong sisters are a fascinating family, who helped campaigners to improve their health, fitness and quality of life. The mother, Frances, took part in demonstrations and inspired her daughter Dora Spong, born in Balham, south London, a nurse, sanitary inspector and midwife who worked in the impoverished areas of Tottenham and Batter- Aim high The lives of the women who fought for the vote EMELYNE GODFREY D i a n e A t k i n s o n R I S E U P , WOMEN! The remarkable lives of the suffragettes 670pp. Bloomsbury. £30. 978 1 4088 4404 5 J a n e R o b i n s o n H E A R T S A N D M I N D S The untold story of the Great Pilgrimage and how women won the vote 374pp. Penguin. £20. 978 0 85752 391 4 R o b e r t W a i n r i g h t M I S S MUR I E L MA T T E R S The fearless suffragist who fought for equality 376pp. Allen and Unwin. £18.99. 978 1 76029 739 8 M a r g a r e t W a r d H A N N A S H E E H Y S K E F F I N G T O N Suffragette and Sinn Féiner: Her memoirs and political writings 463pp. University College Dublin Press. £30 (€35). 978 1 910820 14 8 J u n e P u r v i s C H R I S T A B E L P A N K H U R S T A biography 563pp. Routledge. £120 (US $150). 978 0 415 27947 5 sea. Dora was the first of her sisters to be jailed for obstruction in June 1908. Florence Spong was a weaver and woodcarver, and Annie Spong an accomplished artist, like numerous WSPU campaigners. She painted several Lord Mayors of London, took dancing classes with Isadora Duncan’s brother Raymond, and became a physical culture expert whose exercises, designed to benefit body and mind and “relieve awkwardness”, were performed with a musical accompaniment by another sister, the soprano Irene Spong, who served time in Holloway. Fledgling WSPU speakers could learn from Irene how to project their voices over a restless audience. The Spong sisters’ father, James Osborn Spong, invented labour-saving devices. Perhaps this was his contribution to helping the cause of women’s emancipation in the kitchen. Unfortunately, he named his meat mincer The Minnie, after his eldest daughter, a vegetarian like her mother and sisters. After that, “Minnie announced . . . that she preferred to be known as Frances”. Atkinson also uses family history resources to explore the lesser-known personal stories of the more famous campaigners. Flora Drummond, known as the General, self-assuredly challenged Winston Churchill and led marches, notably the Women’s Sunday, on horseback, sporting a sash in the WSPU colours, epaulettes and a peaked cap. A close friend of Emmeline Pankhurst was the artist and philanthropist Kitty Marshall, whose husband Arthur frequently represented the suffra- gettes in court. The Marshalls’ Essex home offered a sanctuary for Mrs Pankhurst while their house in Westminster was a place for suffragettes to swap their clothes and don disguises, as they were being followed by Scotland Yard’s Special Branch. Atkinson’s research of digitized divorce records reveals how Kitty underwent a traumatic divorce from her first husband, a philanderer, Hugh Finch (a subject I address in my own forthcoming biography of Kitty). Atkinson leaves the reader to decide to what extent the private experiences of the women she writes about influenced their involvement in the suffrage movement. But perhaps these events ought to be set in a greater historical context; what was Kitty’s view of Christabel Pankhurst’s campaign for moral purity and a change in divorce law? Unusually, Rise up, Women! also offers pen portraits and brief histories of some remarkable “antis”, including, famously, the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward and Gertrude Bell. Herbert Asquith’s adamantine opposition to women’s suffrage is matched by that of his second wife Margot, who is described as “intelligent, spoilt, opinionated, mischiefmaking”, a woman who scoffed at pro-suffrage speeches given by campaigners to Asquith and Lloyd George. Having her windows smashed by suffragettes probably did not make Margot, who was terrified for her young son’s safety, more sympathetic to the militant movement. According to Jessie Stephenson, a vital strategist of the WSPU, who is quoted in Rise Up, Women!, the suffragist (non-militant) National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) was “dry as bones”. Jane Robinson’s Hearts and Minds: The untold story of the Great Pilgrimage and how women won the vote proves otherwise. Although largely forgotten today, the Great Pilgrimage of 1913 was, the book notes, one of the biggest and most successful demonstrations in British history: marching groups proceeded from six main routes, and their tributaries, all converging on London. While the WSPU stepped up militancy, the suffragists’ Pilgrimage was intended as an “orderly and dignified crusade”. The Pilgrimage was inspired by a mass march of October 1912 from Edinburgh to London, undertaken by suffrage campaigners whose tweed clothing earned them the name “Brown Women”. By contrast, the Pilgrims’ costume consisted of a practical but smart dark coat and skirt, white blouse, sash and rosette in the colours of the NUWSS: red, white and green. For ease of walking in mud, their skirts were raised a daring four inches off the ground. Their banners further informed onlookers on the road or at meetings that they were not arsonists or stone-throwers: “By Faith Not Force” and “Better is Wisdom than Weapons of War”. Robinson has not merely relied on secondary works, as suffragette historians frequently do. Her work on the sheer volume of women’s suffrage petitions to Parliament is commendable, as is the tour she gives the reader of the contents of a little-known suffragette scrapbook in North Carolina which contains art- work and photographs. The book is sprinkled with slightly too many nudging asides to the reader, but there is a wittily iconoclastic interpretation of Bertha Newcombe’s painting of 1910, which depicts Elizabeth Garrett and Emily Davies presenting John Stuart Mill with the 1866 petition to Parliament that contained 1,499 signatures. Mill appears in the painting as “an elongated Mr Pickwick, twinkly, benign, and ultimately ineffectual”, while Elizabeth Garrett, of ostensibly “severe” appearance in real life, “simpers in the background in lettuce green with a lacy shawl”, and the normally soberly dressed Emily Davies is shown wearing “creamy frills”. Robinson also recounts how a (male) journalist was persuaded that the Pilgrims would converge on London by swimming the Thames, and arrive by balloon and aeroplane. There was a suffragist who took the campaign to the air: Muriel Matters. Robinson asks how she funded her venture to throw hundreds of Votes for Women leaflets from the sky during the opening of Parliament on February 16, 1909. How could she, even with her earnings, afford the costly dirigible? Or was the venture sponsored by the WSPU’s more democratically run breakaway organization, the Women’s Freedom League? Robert Wainwright takes up this thread in Miss Muriel Matters: The fearless suffragist who fought for equality, which opens in north London, 1909, with a shivering Muriel posing for press photographs. She contemplates the airship, emblazoned with “Votes for Women” and adorned with Women’s Freedom League streamers of white, gold and green, and the tiny basket in which she and its pilot, Henry Spencer, will perch above the metropolis. The book then abruptly cuts back to a scene in 1862 in which Muriel’s grandmother attempts to convince an unsympathetic male-run Adelaide Municipal Council to grant her permission to let her cow feed on public land. It is clear by this sharp juxtaposition of events that venturing forth into new territories – the Matters emigrated from Plymouth to Australia in the 1850s – and challenging male authority were part of Muriel’s inheritance. Born in 1877 in Adelaide, Muriel had nine siblings. Her father, John, was inclined to sudden peregrinations and unreliable investments, but her mother, Emma, held the family together. As a teenager, Muriel encountered Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at around the time when South Australian women were given the right to vote. Ibsen, together with Robert Browning and Walt Whitman, kindled her desire to study elocution. Her recitals were well received in Adelaide where she was described by the press as “commanding and articulate”. By the early 1900s she had come to London, where she avoided the attentions of the pianist Bryceson Treharne, who maintained that women’s brains ought to preclude them from playing Chopin. Muriel’s talents made her suited to campaigning. She was first engaged as a suffrage speaker at a by-election in Peckham in 1908. Her pioneering caravan tour helped draw in attentive audiences from smaller villages untouched by the rail networks. Wainright intentionally describes the claims to distinction of each town and contrasts its glorious history with depictions of local hooliganism which, though cleverly lampooning the perpetrators, do not diminish the note of menace behind their actions. A highlight for Muriel TLS F EBRUARY 9 2 0 1 8
page 15
HISTORY & BIOGRAPHY 15 was meeting Henry James in Rye, a friend to her cause. Wainright places Muriel’s support of a strike of overworked waitresses in the context of the ethos of the Women’s Freedom League as a feminist organization, working in a democratically run fashion for women’s emancipation beyond the vote. In contrast to the WSPU’s militancy, the WFL adopted a policy of civil disobedience. A prime example is Muriel chaining herself to the grille of the hated Ladies’ Gallery. This disruptive action would buy her some essential minutes to address her audience below, the first speech given by a woman in the House of Commons. Wainright conveys the cloying atmosphere of the Gallery, the incongruous image of Muriel carrying a book of Browning’s poetry and Helen Fox attempting to eat chocolates to divert suspicion, as they contemplate what Muriel is about to do. While daring in her campaigning, Muriel was disheartened by the escalation in windowsmashing and she joined the NUWSS. This is where her story converges on those of the Pilgrims in Robinson’s book, as she travels to London with the South East contingent, eerily revisiting some of the old sites from her caravanning days. Wainright’s selection of Muriel’s speeches and essays show her to be not only an able artist but a considered writer, who argued for a “new order”, not “one founded on birth, nor on money, nor even on intellect, but on character”. During the bitter January of 1914, Muriel left her new husband in London to help the families affected by the Dublin Lockout Strike, siding with its leaders, Jim Larkin and James Connolly. Muriel’s desire to help vulnerable children, by writing an appeal letter to the Daily Herald for food and clothing for the children of the striking families, subsequently prompted her to enrol as a teacher in Sylvia Pankhurst’s East End Montessori school at the Mother’s Arms. While teaching there, Muriel wrote to Connolly’s friend Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, whom she had met during the Dublin Lockout. Hanna’s husband Frank, in Wainright’s words, was “a good man, gentle and kind, who strived for fairness in the harsh world”. His murder by a British army officer (who was later declared insane) during the Easter Uprising prompted Muriel’s letter. When the authorities did not respond to Hanna’s appeal for an inquiry into his death, Muriel accompanied her to an interview with Asquith who, shirking an inquiry, offered financial compensation to silence her. When he was killed, Frank was wearing the badge of the militant Irish Women’s Franchise League which he co-founded in 1908. A photograph of the badge appears in Hanna Sheehy Skeffington: Suffragette and Sinn Féiner by Margaret Ward. This large and wellsourced biography considers Hanna as an influential Irish feminist, mother, university graduate and pacifist who went on a tour of the United States, meeting Woodrow Wilson, and who stood for election in the last decade of her life. Ward gives the historical context for Hanna’s writings and prison accounts. Although she mentions the Women’s Freedom League’s publication the Vote, a curious omission is the WSPU journal Votes for Women, for which Hanna wrote. While suffragettes’ descriptions of the effects of hunger and thirst-striking are naturally unsettling, Hanna’s accounts of her heightened senses, her smelling tea from afar Endpapers from Rise Up, Women! and her observation of a drop of water on her parched skin simply evaporating are particularly striking. Among her journalism is a remarkable essay in the Irish Citizen in 1913, offering a bracing rationale for militancy: Desperate diseases need desperate remedies and if the vote is wrested from Government by methods of terrorism when five and forty years of sweet and quiet reason produced only seven talked-out or tricked-out bills, why, who can say it wasn’t worth a mutilated letter, a cut wire, a Premier’s racked nerves? It’s the kind of document that the Special Branch might have marked up for further attention. In another Irish Citizen article, Hanna assessed Elizabeth Robins’s human trafficking (“white slavery”) novel Where Are You Going To…? (1913), in which two middle-class sisters from a sheltered background are ensnared by a procuress. Only one escapes. While Hanna concluded that the topic’s subject was too “ghastly crude for firm artistic handling”, she concurred with numerous other reviewers that the novel was “a tract for its times”. Social purity became such a hot campaign issue for the WSPU under Christabel’s strident leadership that Simon Webb’s The Suffragette Bombers: Britain’s forgotten terrorists (2013) describes Christabel’s exposé of venereal disease, The Great Scourge and How To End It (1913) as an “outlandish”, even hysterical work of fiction. In Christabel Pankhurst: A biography, June Purvis offers a reassessment of Christabel’s work. Professor Purvis particularly takes issue with David Mitchell’s claim in Queen Christabel, the last full-length biography of Christabel, written forty years ago, that she was “abnormal”, as the favourite Pankhurst child who had an unhealthy controlling relationship with her mother Emmeline. She is widely blamed for the WSPU’s turning away from working-class women and from socialism (a perspective strongly represented in Webb’s book) while her sister Sylvia is revered as staying true to their father Dr Richard Pankhurst’s ideal of public duty. Christabel’s Second Adventist preaching is considered an aberration. Her father had said: “If ever you go back into religion you will not be worth the upbringing”. As Purvis points out, while there have been some positive appraisals of Christabel, the bias towards Sylvia has infiltrated suffragette history, prompted by Sylvia’s memoir, The Suffragette Movement (1931), which was also the basis of a BBC drama about the militant suffragettes, Shoulder to Shoulder (1974). As is to be expected, there is a certain amount of overlap with Purvis’s earlier volume, Emmeline Pankhurst: A biography (2002), including the account of Mary Leigh and Charlotte Marsh throwing slates from a roof in Birmingham in 1909. Purvis generously implies that they were “taking care not to hit the Prime Minister or his chauffeur”. I would query how much control one has over an irregularly shaped missile, thrown at a distance. She also writes that Edith Garrud, trainer of Mrs Pankhurst’s Bodyguard group, was the first woman jujitsu instructor in Britain. Actually, she was pipped to the post by George Bernard Shaw’s friend Emily Diana Watts, who also specialized in exercises inspired by Greek sculpture. Purvis makes a strong case for revising opinion of Sylvia’s The Suffragette Movement in the light of archival documents, to show how Sylvia’s descriptions of Christabel as an absent, self-absorbed sister do not ring true. For instance, Purvis goes back to the sisters’ early childhood, looking at Sylvia’s comment that Christabel was lazy at school. Her examination of school reports from 1893 shows that Christabel’s frequent non-attendance at school (possibly due to illness or helping her mother) was likely to blame for her poor marks. Purvis also argues that it is likely that a visit to a lock hospital (specializing in sexually transmitted diseases) with her mother made a deep impression on Christabel and influenced her purity campaign. Her severance from the Independent Labour Party is explained by her need to “put an end to the rule of one sex by the other”, while her conversion to Christianity is addressed as a gradual and considered process of introspection. Christabel is shown as a caring friend, acting as Annie Kenney’s protector at the Free Trade Hall in 1905 when angry stewards lunged at the women for asking a sneering Sir Edward Grey whether the Liberals would grant votes to women. The book tackles the misconception that, after her flight to Paris in 1912, she spent her time shopping while her sister and mother went on hunger strike. Purvis’s book does not excuse Christabel’s less appealing actions but invites readers to understand the reasons behind her behaviour. Yet despite Purvis’s persuasive arguments, I cannot shake off the impression created by the novelist Gladys Schütze who wearily turned up at Christabel’s Paris flat with WSPU documents wrapped in her hair. She recalled being treated like a piece of “luggage” by the haughty Miss Pankhurst, too distracted (possibly overworked, if we apply Purvis’s more understanding perspective) to offer her a cup of tea after her long journey. Like Atkinson’s book, Purvis’s biography is also a drama. Her presentation of Christabel’s life as a sibling rivalry within a celebrity family drama, whose protagonists’ voices call to each other across the archives, makes this work of academic significance a compelling read, too. Despite their different approaches, it is the personal element that these five books have in common. Purvis’s tone may be academic, but her protagonists’ personalities resonate through their letters. While giving an overview of the suffrage movement, Diane Atkinson’s book is nevertheless a diorama of biographies of suffrage “actors”. Michelle Sheehy Skeffington tells the reader about the legacy of her grandmother through the artefacts she left behind and the traits that she passed on. Both Jane Robinson and Robert Wainright often reconstruct scenes, based closely on contemporary reports and reminiscences. The value of the biographical approach to history is not only to convey the facts but also to compel us to appreciate, to have a feel for, the sacrifices campaigners made and the personal difficulties they were forced to surmount and to bring them to life. Robinson, for instance, shows Emma Sproson missing her young baby, many miles away, as she contemplates the scratchings on her cell wall made by former suffrage prisoners. In a foreword to Margaret Ward’s book, Michelle Sheehy Skeffington relates that, being left-handed, she grew up appreciating a story of her grandmother’s arrest for windowsmashing at Dublin Castle. When a police officer grabbed her right hand, she, also being lefthanded, promptly threw another stone. TLS F EBRUARY 9 2 0 1 8

Page Text

View plaintext

14

HISTORY & POLITICS

Purple, white and green. Dignity, purity and hope. The colour scheme in the branding of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded by the former suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst in Manchester in 1903, with her eldest daughter, Christabel, was unveiled at the giant Women’s Sunday event of June 21, 1908, attended by around half a million supporters. With women instructed to dress in the WSPU’s colours, the event was a sartorial demonstration of suffragette militancy, combining daintiness and determination. But the WSPU’s colour scheme was one of many, each suffrage organization having its own. Timed to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the partial enfranchisement of British women, numerous engaging books look at both the Pankhursts and their opponents and consider the complexities of the suffrage campaign, how it was fought in all its nuances and shades.

Named after Mrs Pankhurst’s own battle cry, Rise Up, Women! is a substantial and impressive product of Diane Atkinson’s long association with the Museum of London. Her book is surely destined to become a key general text, ranking alongside classic tomes such as Elizabeth Crawford’s The Women’s Suffrage Movement (1998) and Antonia Raeburn’s The Militant Suffragettes (1974). Raeburn’s frequently cited book, graced with a foreword by J. B. Priestley and drawn from interviews with militants, is sadly out of print. Atkinson’s book provides an accessible, captivating, chronological account that incorporates recent developments in ancestry research as well as first-hand accounts.

Rise Up, Women! traces the suffragettes’ campaign back to the Great Reform Act of 1832, in which women were for the first time expressly excluded from voting for parliamentary candidates. Atkinson also emphasizes that female suffrage featured in a draft of the Charter of 1838 (though Chartists later dropped it for “manhood suffrage”). Despite some surprising misquotations (including an extract from an interview with the WSPU organizer Grace Roe), Atkinson’s book functions as a warm invitation to explore Britain’s archival treasures, notably in the Museum of London, the Women’s Library, LSE and the British Library.

Atkinson presents the suffragette movement as a “drama” with numerous supporting actors and “walk-on parts”, but she ensures that we become fully acquainted with the many personalities behind the names. She also shows how their ideas about female emancipation went far beyond the campaign for the vote. There is blue-eyed Edith Rigby, a doctor’s wife, who wore substantial amber beaded necklaces, sandals, enjoyed Turkish cigarettes and opened a working women’s night school in Preston. She scandalized the neighbours by treating her servants as equals and whitening her own doorstep. In 1991, Atkinson interviewed the oldest surviving suffrage campaigner, 101-year-old Victoria Lidiard, from Bristol. She was jailed for two months in Holloway for smashing a window at the War Office, and later became the first woman optometrist. The Spong sisters are a fascinating family, who helped campaigners to improve their health, fitness and quality of life. The mother, Frances, took part in demonstrations and inspired her daughter Dora Spong, born in Balham, south London, a nurse, sanitary inspector and midwife who worked in the impoverished areas of Tottenham and Batter-

Aim high The lives of the women who fought for the vote

EMELYNE GODFREY

D i a n e A t k i n s o n R I S E U P , WOMEN! The remarkable lives of the suffragettes

670pp. Bloomsbury. £30.

978 1 4088 4404 5

J a n e R o b i n s o n H E A R T S A N D M I N D S The untold story of the Great Pilgrimage and how women won the vote 374pp. Penguin. £20.

978 0 85752 391 4

R o b e r t W a i n r i g h t M I S S MUR I E L MA T T E R S The fearless suffragist who fought for equality

376pp. Allen and Unwin. £18.99.

978 1 76029 739 8

M a r g a r e t W a r d H A N N A S H E E H Y S K E F F I N G T O N Suffragette and Sinn Féiner: Her memoirs and political writings

463pp. University College Dublin Press. £30 (€35).

978 1 910820 14 8

J u n e P u r v i s C H R I S T A B E L P A N K H U R S T

A biography 563pp. Routledge. £120 (US $150).

978 0 415 27947 5

sea. Dora was the first of her sisters to be jailed for obstruction in June 1908. Florence Spong was a weaver and woodcarver, and Annie Spong an accomplished artist, like numerous WSPU campaigners. She painted several Lord Mayors of London, took dancing classes with Isadora Duncan’s brother Raymond, and became a physical culture expert whose exercises, designed to benefit body and mind and “relieve awkwardness”, were performed with a musical accompaniment by another sister, the soprano Irene Spong, who served time in Holloway. Fledgling WSPU speakers could learn from Irene how to project their voices over a restless audience. The Spong sisters’ father, James Osborn Spong, invented labour-saving devices. Perhaps this was his contribution to helping the cause of women’s emancipation in the kitchen. Unfortunately, he named his meat mincer The Minnie, after his eldest daughter, a vegetarian like her mother and sisters. After that, “Minnie announced . . . that she preferred to be known as Frances”.

Atkinson also uses family history resources to explore the lesser-known personal stories of the more famous campaigners. Flora Drummond, known as the General, self-assuredly challenged Winston Churchill and led marches, notably the Women’s Sunday, on horseback, sporting a sash in the WSPU colours, epaulettes and a peaked cap. A close friend of Emmeline Pankhurst was the artist and philanthropist Kitty Marshall, whose husband Arthur frequently represented the suffra-

gettes in court. The Marshalls’ Essex home offered a sanctuary for Mrs Pankhurst while their house in Westminster was a place for suffragettes to swap their clothes and don disguises, as they were being followed by Scotland Yard’s Special Branch. Atkinson’s research of digitized divorce records reveals how Kitty underwent a traumatic divorce from her first husband, a philanderer, Hugh Finch (a subject I address in my own forthcoming biography of Kitty). Atkinson leaves the reader to decide to what extent the private experiences of the women she writes about influenced their involvement in the suffrage movement. But perhaps these events ought to be set in a greater historical context; what was Kitty’s view of Christabel Pankhurst’s campaign for moral purity and a change in divorce law?

Unusually, Rise up, Women! also offers pen portraits and brief histories of some remarkable “antis”, including, famously, the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward and Gertrude Bell. Herbert Asquith’s adamantine opposition to women’s suffrage is matched by that of his second wife Margot, who is described as “intelligent, spoilt, opinionated, mischiefmaking”, a woman who scoffed at pro-suffrage speeches given by campaigners to Asquith and Lloyd George. Having her windows smashed by suffragettes probably did not make Margot, who was terrified for her young son’s safety, more sympathetic to the militant movement.

According to Jessie Stephenson, a vital strategist of the WSPU, who is quoted in Rise Up, Women!, the suffragist (non-militant) National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) was “dry as bones”. Jane Robinson’s Hearts and Minds: The untold story of the Great Pilgrimage and how women won the vote proves otherwise. Although largely forgotten today, the Great Pilgrimage of 1913 was, the book notes, one of the biggest and most successful demonstrations in British history: marching groups proceeded from six main routes, and their tributaries, all converging on London. While the WSPU stepped up militancy, the suffragists’ Pilgrimage was intended as an “orderly and dignified crusade”. The Pilgrimage was inspired by a mass march of October 1912 from Edinburgh to London, undertaken by suffrage campaigners whose tweed clothing earned them the name “Brown Women”. By contrast, the Pilgrims’ costume consisted of a practical but smart dark coat and skirt, white blouse, sash and rosette in the colours of the NUWSS: red, white and green. For ease of walking in mud, their skirts were raised a daring four inches off the ground. Their banners further informed onlookers on the road or at meetings that they were not arsonists or stone-throwers: “By Faith Not Force” and “Better is Wisdom than Weapons of War”.

Robinson has not merely relied on secondary works, as suffragette historians frequently do. Her work on the sheer volume of women’s suffrage petitions to Parliament is commendable, as is the tour she gives the reader of the contents of a little-known suffragette scrapbook in North Carolina which contains art-

work and photographs. The book is sprinkled with slightly too many nudging asides to the reader, but there is a wittily iconoclastic interpretation of Bertha Newcombe’s painting of 1910, which depicts Elizabeth Garrett and Emily Davies presenting John Stuart Mill with the 1866 petition to Parliament that contained 1,499 signatures. Mill appears in the painting as “an elongated Mr Pickwick, twinkly, benign, and ultimately ineffectual”, while Elizabeth Garrett, of ostensibly “severe” appearance in real life, “simpers in the background in lettuce green with a lacy shawl”, and the normally soberly dressed Emily Davies is shown wearing “creamy frills”. Robinson also recounts how a (male) journalist was persuaded that the Pilgrims would converge on London by swimming the Thames, and arrive by balloon and aeroplane.

There was a suffragist who took the campaign to the air: Muriel Matters. Robinson asks how she funded her venture to throw hundreds of Votes for Women leaflets from the sky during the opening of Parliament on February 16, 1909. How could she, even with her earnings, afford the costly dirigible? Or was the venture sponsored by the WSPU’s more democratically run breakaway organization, the Women’s Freedom League? Robert Wainwright takes up this thread in Miss Muriel Matters: The fearless suffragist who fought for equality, which opens in north London, 1909, with a shivering Muriel posing for press photographs. She contemplates the airship, emblazoned with “Votes for Women” and adorned with Women’s Freedom League streamers of white, gold and green, and the tiny basket in which she and its pilot, Henry Spencer, will perch above the metropolis. The book then abruptly cuts back to a scene in 1862 in which Muriel’s grandmother attempts to convince an unsympathetic male-run Adelaide Municipal Council to grant her permission to let her cow feed on public land. It is clear by this sharp juxtaposition of events that venturing forth into new territories – the Matters emigrated from Plymouth to Australia in the 1850s – and challenging male authority were part of Muriel’s inheritance.

Born in 1877 in Adelaide, Muriel had nine siblings. Her father, John, was inclined to sudden peregrinations and unreliable investments, but her mother, Emma, held the family together. As a teenager, Muriel encountered Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at around the time when South Australian women were given the right to vote. Ibsen, together with Robert Browning and Walt Whitman, kindled her desire to study elocution. Her recitals were well received in Adelaide where she was described by the press as “commanding and articulate”. By the early 1900s she had come to London, where she avoided the attentions of the pianist Bryceson Treharne, who maintained that women’s brains ought to preclude them from playing Chopin.

Muriel’s talents made her suited to campaigning. She was first engaged as a suffrage speaker at a by-election in Peckham in 1908. Her pioneering caravan tour helped draw in attentive audiences from smaller villages untouched by the rail networks. Wainright intentionally describes the claims to distinction of each town and contrasts its glorious history with depictions of local hooliganism which, though cleverly lampooning the perpetrators, do not diminish the note of menace behind their actions. A highlight for Muriel

TLS F EBRUARY 9 2 0 1 8

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content