How political parties reacted to women's suffrage: the Conservative Party

Conservative governments dominated the twenty years between 1886 and 1906 with a brief Liberal interlude between 1892 and 1895[1]. Between 1886 and 1900, the Conservatives were politically dominant. However, its fragile dominance began to unravel after the 1900 general election. Although the party was victorious in 1900, with 334 Conservatives and 68 Liberal Unionists returned, the results hid its underlying vulnerability leading to the disastrous general election of January 1906. This was the product of various things. Lord Salisbury[2], prime minister from 1886 to 1892 and 1895 to 1902, lost his political grip and his subsequent retirement in July 1902 created divisions within the leadership especially when his nephew, Arthur Balfour succeeded him.

Increased rivalry between the great powers, and the perceived threat from Germany, led to more resources being channelled into imperial defence and this fuelled unease about Britain’s military competence. The second Boer War (1899-1902) where all the resources of the world’s largest imperial power took three years to defeat an army of South African farmers severely dented the self-confidence of the Conservatives as the party of empire, patriotism and national pride.  A perception of decline in Britain’s economic and commercial prompted some to question established free-trade economic ideas and led to important divisions within the Conservative Party after 1903.  A growing popular awareness of poverty by the 1890s and the emergence of the nascent Labour Party led to mounting demands for the state to introduce welfare policies to alleviate the problem.   In political terms, these developments had a significant impact of the party’s support and appeal. Rising levels of taxation and governmental spending to pay for the war undermined support as a succession of by-election defeats from 1901 demonstrated. The Conservative reputation as the political party of low taxation and little state intervention that had been so successful in winning over business and commercial interests and in creating middle and working class enclaves of support was badly damaged. The idea of Conservatism espoused by Lord Salisbury seemed increasing antiquated, indifferent and negative losing both political appeal and electoral purchase.

Arthur Balfour[3] sought a more centrist Conservative position. His mild, reformist approach tried to maintain established party support among landowners, commercial and financial groups and among the middle classes while pushing through essential policies to restore national finances after the South African War. It was a calm and sensible policy though not one necessarily designed to win the 1905-6 election. Its purpose was to avoid more extreme measures, maintain party unity and preserve as much support as possible while the party waited for the political pendulum to swing back in its favour. This strategy did not appeal to party supporters or backbench MPs, especially those in marginal constituencies and confirmed the increasing view of the leadership as hesitant. This left Balfour vulnerable to more radical forms of Conservatism championed by Joseph Chamberlain[4] that challenged Balfour’s mild approach between 1903 and 1905 and then, in the wake of electoral disaster, dominated it thereafter.

At the heart of Chamberlain’s ideas was tariff reform[5] that he launched in a dramatic speech in Birmingham on 15^th May 1903. Chamberlain saw tariff reform as a solution to the financial, social and political problems that confronted the country in the early 1900s. Protecting British markets, both manufacturing and agricultural, with trade barriers would mean a less severe business cycle and so secure better returns from land and maintain profit margins and stable levels of employment. The money raised from tariffs would be used to finance social policies like old age pension. Chamberlain believed that this package would undercut the appeal of the new Labour Party and wing growing numbers of working class votes behind the Conservatives. In addition, granting imperial territories exemption from tariffs would establish a free-trade area that would reduce the likelihood of imperial disintegration and strength of cultural and political bonds of empire through closer economic ties. Although Chamberlain won over a majority of the parliamentary party and the constituencies to his policy, especially between 1907 and 1910, it never took firm roots in the party in the same way as the anti-Home rule policy of Salisbury in the 1880s.  The problem with tariff reform was not that it was a poorly thought out policy but that it did not carry the whole party. From 1903 onwards, the Conservative party was in a state of civil war[6]. Few observers were surprised when the party lost the 1906 general election though they were surprised by the scale of the disaster. The Liberals took 401 seats compared to 184 in 1900 reducing the Conservatives to a mere 156 seats (compared to 402 in 1900). The defeat was one of the largest in its history and led to the Conservatives’ longest continuous period in opposition. Not until 1915, did the Tories again hold office (in the coalition government) and not with a Commons’ majority until October 1922.

The mixed political fortunes of the party after 1906 turned sharply against the Conservatives from 1909, as many of the props that sustained the existing social order, including the empire, the landed interest and the constitution came under attack from the Liberal government.  The Liberal party shifted in a more radical direction because of Henry Asquith replacing Campbell-Bannerman as prime minister in April 1908. Lloyd George was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer. Together with Winston Churchill at the Board of Trade and then the Home Office, they began a process of radical social welfare reform. Lloyd George was eager to move to a new tax system based on graduation (tax bands) and differentiation (taxing unearned income such as land rather than earned income, such as capital). This hit the landed classes and the very rich, which held the largest amount of unearned income and were likely to vote Conservative.

The Conservative resistance to these financial innovations centred on Lloyd George’s budget of 1909, the so-called ‘People’s Budget’. This increased death duties, imposed higher rates of taxation on unearned income, increased inheritance duties, introduced super-tax on incomes over £5,000 and modest taxes on land. In retrospect, they were exceptionally mild. However, for the Conservatives, the budget represented a series of grave threats to their political position. The House of Lords, in which there was a built in Conservative majority, rejected the budget in November 1909. This precipitated a constitutional crisis, as traditionally the Lords did not use its veto against ‘money’ bills.  This proved a high-risk strategy for the Conservatives and they lost. The constitutional crisis led to two general elections in 1910 and although the Conservatives recovered well, it was not enough to undermine the Liberal-Labour alliance. This threw the Conservative party into chaos. The result was the 1911 Parliament that removed the absolute veto from the Lords and replaced it with a three-year conditional one. This led to the increasing dominance of the House of Commons by the executive (the government). With no constitutional brake on the government, bills scheduled for 1912, including that for Welsh church disestablishment, a bill to end plural voting (whereby property-owners had more than one vote) and Irish Home rule would all become law by 1914, whether the Lords rejected them or not.

Balfour was replaced as Conservative leader in the Commons by Andrew Bonar Law[7] in 1912. The situation for the party was desperate. It was out of control and directionless, divided over tactics and policy and badly demoralised about its future prospects. What was needed was an alternative to tariff reform around which the party could unify. Bonar Law constructed a new approach based on the defence and restoration of the constitution. Playing the constitutional card provided a variety of ways with which to attack the government. This applied particularly to the question of Irish Home Rule. The Home Rule Bill was introduced in 1912 and, following rejection by the Lords, in 1913 and 1914. The Ulster Unionists, backed by the Conservative Party would not accept Home Rule at any price. They established illegal paramilitary organisations to resist. The outbreak of war in August 1914 provided a ready escape from the full consequences of the campaign against Home Rule.  The party was in opposition from 1906, divided over tariff reform and then faced with the constitutional onslaught of the Liberal government. In these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that women’s suffrage was not a major political priority.

The Conservative Party was the ‘natural home’ of the Antis but that does not mean that the party’s reaction to women’s suffrage was completely negative. There is good evidence to suggest that a number of individuals prominent in the campaign for women’s suffrage were Conservative (the most prominent was Lady Constance Lytton), but also that Conservative party organisations, notably certain sections of the Primrose League actively supported the campaign.

 

General position	The prospect and subsequent arrival of women’s suffrage prompted many Tories to lament the uncertainty of future politics. There was remarkable agreement in the party about the existence of a specifically female political agenda. Conservatives of both sexes generally assumed that women favoured ‘domestic’ political issues with a particular emphasis on matters affecting women and children and on social reform. Whatever the attitude of Conservatives to female involvement in the party, their enthusiasm was tempered by a sense of its irrelevance while women lacked the vote. Henry Bottomley reminded canvassers in 1912: “Don’t be satisfied with seeing the wife. She may talk, but remember the husband is the voter. See him.” Conservative attitudes to women’s suffrage were mixed between 1880 and 1914 and support came only when it was widely believed that women voters would support the party. Every Conservative leader from Disraeli onwards expressed some sympathy for women’s suffrage but the value of their support was diminished by their reluctance to take up the question while actually in office[8].
Negative reaction	It is important to understand that the Conservatives who opposed women’s suffrage often did so because they feared it would lead to universal suffrage. Lady Salisbury was convinced that even limited women’s suffrage would inevitably lead to the universal suffrage and that this would disadvantage the Conservative Party. Such people believed the vote to be a privilege based on personal fitness and not a right. The success that the Conservative had between 1874 and 1906 (they were in government with the exception of 1880-85, 1886 and 1892-5) was argument enough against further change of the electoral system. Many Conservatives saw no reason to tamper with a winning system. There were always more Liberals than Conservatives in favour of giving women the vote. While backbench Conservative hostility has probably been exaggerated, there is no doubt that many Conservatives figured in the lists of the anti-suffrage movement. Both Lord Cromer and Lord Curzon were leading opponents.
Positive reaction	Upper class women and Conservative Party supporters were also supporters of the women’s suffrage movement or active in the movement. Lady Dorothy Nevill, Lady Frances Balfour, Lady Betty Balfour, Lady Selborne, Lay Londonderry and many others were active in the campaigns for women’s suffrage. These women were part of the political establishment and important members of the Primrose League. As in so many areas, Conservative women tended, at first at least, to work in the background. Rather than forming their own suffrage organisations or getting involved with existing organisations, they generally preferred to talk to their husbands, brothers and relatives and try to convince them of the need to give women the vote. Some of them, like Lady Constance Lytton, a militant and Lady Betty Balfour, a suffragist, even managed to get themselves arrested. It was not until 1908 that Lady Selborne formed the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Suffrage Association. The organisation started The Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Review to promote their ideas. They argued that giving certain ‘qualified’ women (based on existing property qualifications) the vote would help avoid the catastrophe of universal male suffrage. Soon after its foundation, the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Suffrage Association joined the NUWSS and here an obvious conflict developed. The NUWSS was, in principle, a non-party organisation. The problem was that the Labour Party, unlike the other two, was officially committed to giving women the vote. As a result, the NUWSS supported more Labour candidates than those from the other two parties, a relationship that grew closed in 1912-13. Many people warned Balfour and Bonar Law about the dangers of allowing the Labour Party to take over the women’s suffrage question, as they feared that women would become embittered against the Tories. Since most of them believed that women would one day get the right to vote, there seemed to be no reason to create a large group of electors hostile to the party. His then was the dilemma facing all Conservative suffragists. Were they to be Conservative first and then suffragists or vice versa? Suffragism forced them towards the Labour Party, hardly a prospect that appealed to many Conservative women. On the other hand, they were getting little positive response from their own party. Battle did occur on this issue but most Conservative suffragists subordinated their suffragism to their Conservatism. In this, they were helped by the party being out of power during the worst part of the suffragette agitation. The Liberals bore the full brunt of their fury. The Conservative and Unionist Women’s Suffrage Association was devoted to constitutional methods and did not believe in the same methods as the WSPU. This did not mean that they were unsympathetic to the militants though few went as far as Lady Constance Lytton. The general hostility of the Conservative suffragists to the WSPU did not prevent them from being in touch with the Pankhursts and, on occasions, co-ordinating policy with them. This process was aided by the growing conservatism of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. Both increasingly distrusted the Labour Party and the trade unions, both of which were to some extent hostile to women’s suffrage. The Labour Party appeared more interested in adult suffrage and only coincidentally with female suffrage. The largely male trade unions were not favourably disposed to women’s rights seeing female employment as unfair competition. However, neither Balfour nor Bonar Law were prepared to take the risk of committing their party to either the WSPU or its methods largely because opinion in the party was deeply divided on the issue. The crux of the problem was that women’s suffrage would divide the Conservative Party. That is why no party leader dared to take up the question until after the First World War, when hostility to women’s suffrage and, more importantly universal manhood suffrage, had declined. An examination of the voting records on all the women’s suffrage bills presented to Parliament shows that Conservatives passed through three distinct phases. From 1867 to 1883, Conservatives consistently voted against suffrage bills by a margin of three or four to one. However, the following period, from 1884 to 1908, showed a reversal of this trend and, with one exception, the suffragists were in the majority. This growing support for women’s suffrage owed a great deal to the efforts of the Primrose League and the National Union approved suffrage resolutions in 1887, 1889, 1891, 1894, 1907, 1908 and 1910. After 1909, the results became less clear. A majority voted against suffrage bills on five out of seven occasions. This occurred because women’s suffrage was mixed up with adult suffrage and many Conservatives were only in favour of limited female suffrage. Their votes on these bills tell us more about their attitude to democracy than to women. The pre-war period was a time of fierce hostility between the Conservative and Liberal Parties. Women’s suffrage played only a small part in that drama. Far more important were the issues of the powers of the House of Lords and home rule for Ireland. The support, tepid though it was, of the Conservative leadership for women’s suffrage had less to do with principle than party advantage. Like the Liberal Party, the Conservatives were divided over the question. However, there was no inherent conflict between conservatism and women’s suffrage.

 

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[1] On the development of the Conservative Party in this period see, John Ramsden An Appetite for Power: A History of the Conservative Party since 1830, Harper Collins, 1998, Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball (eds.) Conservative Century: The Conservative Party since 1900, Oxford University Press, 1994, John Charmley A History of Conservative Politics 1900-1996, Macmillan, 1996 and Jeremy Smith The Taming of Democracy: The Conservative Party 1880-1924, University of Wales Press, 1997. Martin Francis and Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska (eds.) The Conservatives and British Society 1880-1990, University of Wales Press, 1996 is a valuable collection of essays including one on Conservatism and the politics of gender. The most detailed studies on the subject are: Richard Shannon The Age of Salisbury 1881-1902: Unionism and Empire, Longman, 1996 and John Ramsden The Age of Balfour and Baldwin, 1902-1940, Longman, 1978.

[2] There are two recent biographies of Lord Salisbury: Andrew Roberts Salisbury: Victorian Titan, Weidenfeld, 1999 and David Steele Lord Salisbury: A Political Biography, UCL Press, 1999. Roberts is eminently readable and is a complete biography. Steele is more specific. Both have something (a little) to say about his attitude to women’s suffrage.

[3] Kenneth Young Arthur James Balfour, Bell, 1963 and Max Egremont Balfour, Collins, 1980 have been superceded by R. J. Q. Adams Balfour: The last Grandee, John Murray, 2007.  Ruddock Mackay Balfour: Intellectual Statesman, Oxford University Press, 1985 concentrates on Balfour’s role in education, foreign and defence policy, aspects neglected in previous studies and has some useful things to say about his attitudes to women’s suffrage.

[4] Peter Marsh Joseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics, Yale University Press, 1994 is the best biography.

[5] The most useful works on tariff reform are Alan Sykes Tariff Reform in British Politics 1903-13, Oxford University Press, 1979 and E. H. H. Green The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the British Conservative Party, 1880-1914, Routledge, 1995. The context for tariff reform can best be approached through Anthony Howe Free Trade and Liberal England 1846-1946, Oxford University Press, 1997.

[6] Parallels have been drawn between the civil war over tariff reform between 1903 and 1906 and the debate within the Conservative Party after 1993 over the European Union. Both led to the impression of a divided party and both precipitated major electoral defeats, in 1906 and 1997.

[7] Robert Blake The unknown Prime Minister: The Life and Times of Andrew Bonar Law 1858-1923, London, 1955 is still useful though somewhat dated. R. J. Q. Adams Bonar Law, John Murray 1999 must be viewed as its replacement.

[8] G. E. Maguire Conservative Women: A History of Women and the Conservative Party, 1874-1997, Macmillan, 1998, pages 5-72 provides the clearest introduction to the subject.

How political parties reacted to women's suffrage: the Labour Party

Between 1903 and 1914, no political party in Parliament adopted women’s suffrage as part of its official programme[1]. Within all the major parties there was at least, some support for women’s suffrage though this was counterbalanced by support for the Antis and fears about the consequences of giving women the vote. The militant activities of the WSPU were viewed with outrage by those opposed to women’s suffrage. There is also evidence suggesting that some supporters of votes for women were irritated by WSPU militancy. The rapid increase in membership of the NUWSS in this period is significant. The fact that those who were sympathetic to women’s suffrage but disapproved of the activities of the WSPU had a non-militant alternative is important. It ensured that women’s suffrage had a ‘respectable’ side and prevented moderate support from being alienated. The WSPU may have brought the women’s movement considerable publicity and kept the issue in the public eye. However, the NUWSS ensured that the issue was not written off as something that could only appeal to extremists. How to respond to women’s suffrage campaigns was something that taxed all political parties between 1903 and 1914.

To understand why women’s suffrage was not viewed as a high priority in the decade before the outbreak of war in 1914, it is important to have some idea of the attitudes of the main political groupings. It is not easy to pinpoint these accurately as they were constantly in a state of flux. However, in general terms, the following opinions predominated:

• The Liberal party was in power during the whole period of WSPU militancy, from late 1905 to 1914. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (prime minister, 1905-8) probably sympathised with the suffragettes but merely advised them to ‘keep pestering’. His successor, Henry Asquith, was against women having the vote and was the brunt of much harassment. His opposition was grounded in the belief that if women were enfranchised on a property qualification, it would give the vote to many upper class women who would vote Conservative. A number of Asquith’s colleagues actually favoured female suffrage, among them Edward Grey (Foreign Secretary, 1905-16), Richard Haldane (Secretary of State for War, 1905-12) and Lloyd George (Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1908-16). They were, however, reluctant to go against Asquith when it came to voting on suffrage bills in the Commons.
• Most backbench Conservative MPs were against women having the vote; in contrast to some of the more prominent Tories, such as Arthur Balfour (prime minister 1900-1905) and Bonar Law (prime minister briefly in the early 1920s), who were sympathetic. There was a fear amongst the Tory opposition that adult suffrage would be granted giving the vote to working class men and women. They felt this would upset the balance of the electorate and work against them.
• During this period, the Labour Party was in its infancy and its main priority was to secure the vote for working class men[2]. Women’s suffrage was, therefore, a secondary issue. Many working class men who were not socialists took a dim view of women organising and this too influenced Labour party thinking. Prominent Labour party members who supported votes for women were George Lansbury, Philip Snowden and Keir Hardie. By 1912, womanhood suffrage had become official Labour party policy, so long as the vote was extended to all men at the same time.

From 1907, the WSPU became middle class in character and Mrs Pankhurst, in particular, moved towards the right gradually disassociating herself from the Labour party. It now appeared that her aim was limited suffrage for women; she had deserted working class women.

The Labour Party

The Labour Party emerged as a political force in British politics between 1903 and 1914[3]. The second and third Reforms Acts, respectively in 1867 and 1884, meant that more working class men were able to vote. With the exception of Keir Hardie and two other ‘Independent’ MPs elected in 1892, the only members of the working class to be elected to Parliament before 1900 were ‘Lib-Lab’ MPs (working class MPs sponsored and supported by the Liberal Party). Nevertheless, from the early 1880s, there was a growing momentum for setting up an independent working class (or ‘labour’) party to promote the interests of working class interests and provide working class representation.

The Independent Labour Party (ILP) was set up in 1893 but it remained weak because it lacked trade union support. Membership of the ILP grew rapidly between 1893 and 1895 when it had 35,000-50,000 members in over three hundred branches. Most of these branches were in Yorkshire (100), Lancashire and Cheshire (over 70) and in Scotland (40 and the Scottish Labour Party dissolved itself into the ILP in 1894) and London (30). Most of the remainder were in the Midlands and North East. There were few branches in Wales, the South East and South West or in Ireland. It was, therefore a provincial rather than a national party. The ILP had many women supporters who were allowed to be full members of the ILP, something that was not the case in the Conservative and Liberal Party branches at that time. Expectations were high in the 1895 election but all twenty-eight of its candidates were defeated, including Keir Hardie.

The biggest problem facing the ILP between 1895 and 1900 was opposition from the Lib-Lab leaders of the trade unions. However, attitudes softened because of legal challenges to the position of trade unions by employers that exposed their political vulnerability. The number of Lib-Lab MPs remained small; there were only thirteen after the 1892 election and this had shrunk to eleven by 1898. The Liberal Party seemed reluctant to back Lib-Lab candidates and this increased the annoyance of those trade unionists with political ambitions. It was only in 1900, when a number of trade unions agreed to set up the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) that an independent labour party with a real chance of gaining electoral success was born. Two LRC MPs were elected in the 1900 election (Keir Hardie and Richard Bell) compared to eight Lib-Lab MPs. The LRC picked up three more seats in by-elections in 1902 and 1903 (David Shackleton was elected for Clitheroe, Will Crooks for Woolwich and Arthur Henderson, Barnard Castle). In 1903, an electoral pact was made between the LRC and the Liberal Party when it was agreed that the Liberals would not oppose LRC candidates in thirty constituencies where it was thought that a LRC candidate was more likely than a Liberal to defeat the Conservatives.

By 1906, Arthur Henderson and Ramsay MacDonald, respectively chairman and secretary of the LRC, had created the skeleton of a national party machine. In the general election, the LRC won twenty-nine seats. The LRC was renamed ‘Labour Party’ in 1906. It had some success in the 1906-14 period wining 40 and then 42 seats in the 2 general elections in 1910 (the Liberal Party got 274 and 272 seats respectively). Then it grew in spectacular fashion after the First World War replacing the Liberal Party as the main party of opposition after the 1922 general elections (Labour won 142 seats and the Liberals 115) and won enough seats in the December 1923 general election to form the first Labour government. It was a minority government under Ramsay MacDonald and lasted less than a year.

 

General position 1903-14	It might have been expected that the Labour Party and the women’s suffrage movement would have been natural allies. However, this was not the case. The only group within the party to support and promote women’s suffrage was the ILP. As the women’s question grew more acute, Labour’s approach to it repeated that of the Conservative and Liberal parties. There were similar displays of male prejudice, a reluctance to divide the party by giving priority to women and similar calculations of political advantage. Martin Pugh recognises that the Labour Party was less divided than the other parties were over the issue and he points out that a small group of Labour MPs consistently voted for women’s suffrage as a group.
Negative reaction	Some leading members of the early Labour Party were hostile to suffragists because suffragettes were campaigning for the ‘equal franchise’ (the vote on the same basis as men) rather than the ‘universal franchise’ (votes for all). Socialists who did not believe in property qualifications were suspicious of a campaign that was led by middle class women, who had little in common with (and little apparent interest in) working class men. Indeed, some suffragists argued that they should have the vote because they were superior to members of the working class. Some individuals were particularly hostile to women’s suffrage. Pugh cites the comments made by John Bruce Glasier in his diaries and that Ramsay MacDonald, a lukewarm suffragist, was alienated by the WSPU’s militant campaign. Not just individuals were alienated by WSPU militancy. The Women’s Cooperative Guild was formed in 1883. It supported women’s suffrage and argued that women should have full equal rights with men. In 1909, the Women’s Cooperative Guild changed its demand for women’s suffrage to a demand for universal adult suffrage because it disliked the WSPU approach. The Guild also played an important role in the campaign for the Maternity Insurance Benefit. Many leading women trade unionists such as Margaret Bondfield and Mary Macarthur were active in the organisation. It also carried out research to obtain information that would support its campaigns. For example, Dr. Armand Routh provided evidence that working class women were much more likely to suffer still-births than non-working women. By 1910, the Women’s Co-operative Guild had 32,000 members. Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937)[4], one of the leading members of the Labour Party, had been a supporter of women’s suffrage since the 1890s. His mature position was outlined in detail in Socialism and Government (1909 edition) in which he argued that women’s suffrage was a necessary part of a socialist programme. If the sole function of the state had still been to protect its citizens from attack, he accepted, the classical objections to female enfranchisement might still be valid. In fact, the state was increasingly assuming the functions of the family. The family was not an exclusively masculine institution, and the socialist state could not be exclusively masculine either. Women’s suffrage was desirable because it would benefit the state, not because it would benefit women. It would benefit the state, not because women had the same rights as men, but because they performed different duties. This position was by no means identical with that of even the more moderate suffragists of the NUWSS but it was sympathetic enough to allow for a degree of cooperation between them. The WSPU was a different matter and MacDonald opposed the militant methods they used for the same reason that he opposed violence in trade union or international relations: because in his eyes, it was irrational and did more harm than good. He said, in the Leicester Pioneer (9th March 1912), “I have no objection to revolution, if it is necessary, but I have the very strongest objection to childishness masquerading as revolution, and all one can say about these window-breaking expeditions is that they are simply silly and provocative. I wish the working women of the country who really care about the vote…would come to London and tell these pettifogging middle class damsels who are going out with little hammers in their muffs that if they do no go home they will get their heads broken.” The essence of MacDonald’s argument was that women deserved the vote because of the unique role they played in the family. When the suffragettes appeared on the scene, it became less plausible to argue that the reason for giving women the vote lay in their role as guardians of the hearth and home. MacDonald’s opposition to the WSPU hardened as their campaign developed because their violent methods were merely the outward and visible sign of their revolt against precisely the conception of women in which MacDonald believed.
Positive reaction	Other leading members of the Labour Party were close supporters of the suffragists and reacted positively to the militancy of the WSPU. Keir Hardie, for example, was close to the Pankhursts and supported the militant campaign. The Labour MP, George Lansbury was an enthusiastic supporter of the WSPU. When the Conciliation Bill was defeated in early 1912, he was called upon by the Speaker to withdraw from the Commons following an altercation with Asquith in which he shook his fist at the prime minister and accused him of torturing innocent women. In October 1912, he circulated a memorandum to all Labour Party branches and affiliated organisations calling on all Labour MPs to vote against all government legislation until women were given the vote. He was condemned for disloyalty by the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party but this only made matters worse. In November 1912, he resigned his seat at Bow and Bromley and fought a by-election on the suffrage issue. Despite, or because of, the support of the NUWSS and WSPU, he lost. In 1912, two significant developments suggest that the party as a whole was becoming more inclined to give priority to women’s suffrage. At the annual conference in January, Arthur Henderson’s proposal that the Labour Party should only support an Adult Suffrage Bill if it included women’s suffrage was passed. The NUWSS dropped its non-party stance and made an electoral pact with the Labour Party establishing an Election Fighting Fund (EFF) to support Labour candidates in elections. Ironically, Ramsay MacDonald played a major role in working out the agreement for joint action in the spring and summer of 1912. By October 1912, Catherine Marshall, one of the suffragist leaders was able to claim, in a letter to MacDonald that £800 of suffragist money had been spent on Labour candidates[5]. The NUWSS leadership believed that joint campaigning with the Labour Party represented the most effective pressure suffragists could exert on the Liberal government. The purpose of EFF activity was twofold; first, to embarrass anti-suffragist cabinet ministers by ensuring they were challenged by Labour at future elections; and secondly, to strengthen the number of Labour MPs in the House of Commons. This policy caused friction within the NUWSS and between it and Liberal suffrage opinion. The subsequent formation of the Liberal Women’s Suffrage Union (LWSU) in early 1914 was an attempt to hold the loyalty of Liberal women who were also committed suffragists but who had difficulty in supporting an electoral alliance with Labour. The LWSU hoped to convince the NUWSS that it should restrict its EFF campaigning to anti-suffragist Cabinet ministers and not all anti-suffragist Liberal MPs and constantly argued against greater involvement in Labour politics. Initially, the NUWSS remained deaf to these pleas and relations between the two groups deteriorated rapidly after March 1914. A meeting between the two groups on 27th July 1914 proved inconclusive but its record suggests the growing influence of the LWSU in Liberal circles, the strength of the NUWSS’s commitment to its alliance with the Labour Party and the polarisation among women suffragists that was developing with the approach of the general election[6]. Keir Hardie (1856-1915)[7] was ardently committed to women’s suffrage: indeed, he depended partly on the financial support of women members of the Weavers’ Union in the early twentieth century[8]. The Cockermouth by-election in mid-1906 found Hardie under pressure from his party because he had show a singular lack of direction in the campaign in support of Bob Smillie, the Labour candidate. This arose from the failure of the Labour party to force an alliance with the suffragettes in the constituency. Indeed, the eventual eve-of-poll advice from the WSPU to the Cockermouth electorate was to vote Conservative. Since Hardie himself was so intimately involved with the suffragette leaders, and so often championed their cause, the odium of the suffragettes’ decision fell, rather unfairly, on him. Hardie had always been an uncompromising supporter of women’s rights. Votes for women had figured in his election addresses at Mid-Lanark and West Ham in the 1890s, and he had long established his reputation as one of the most determined and dependable advocates of women’s suffrage. His personal secretary, Mrs Margaret Travers Symons, the daughter of a wealthy Welsh architect, was a militant suffragette. Hardie claimed to link women’s rights with socialism: “the sex problem is at bottom the labour problem.” His support was based on broad democratic arguments that there were no political or moral grounds for discriminating between men and women. Apart from his special interest in women’s trade union, Hardie had no particular Labour or socialist slant to the arguments he used. He saw the granting of the franchise to all adult women, in parliamentary and local elections, as an essential key to a wider emancipation. Without the right to share in the exercise of power, women would always remain a subordinate and subjected section of the community, without rights, status or security. He had a personal reason for promoting rights for women in 1906, namely his close friendship with the Pankhurst family. He had been in touch with them since Richard and Emmeline Pankhurst became leading figures in the Manchester ILP in the early 1890s. He was closely in touch with Emmeline when she founded the WSPU in 1903. His attachment to Sylvia Pankhurst was of a different character and he drew closer to her in 1907 when she was imprisoned in Holloway. The significance of the affair between Sylvia and Hardie lent a powerful personal dimension to Hardie’s advocacy of women’s suffrage and massively reinforced the pressure that the women’s movement was bringing to bear on the Labour Party. However, there was a growing rift between the Labour Party and the WSPU coinciding with increasing dissatisfaction with Hardie’s leadership of the party. At the beginning of 1906, it was natural that the Labour Party should champion the cause of women. The ILP had several prominent women on its Executive Committee including Margaret Macmillan, Emmeline Pankhurst and Margaret Bondfield. The trade union movement regarded itself as the champion of women’s social rights. There was, initially, no protest when Hardie championed the cause in the House of Commons. However, by the summer of 1906, Hardie was absorbed, almost to the point of obsession, with the women’s suffrage question. No other Labour MP was so uninhibited in championing the women’s cause. Only Philip Snowden was so ardent in the cause, and he was soon to attack Hardie’s preoccupation with the women’s question. The potential division between Labour and the WSPU came in the summer of 1906 over the Cockermouth by-election. Instead of urging voters to support Labour, the WSPU concentrated on the campaign to turn out the Liberal candidate: in practice, that usually meant urging the electors to vote Conservative. After the by-election, Hardie was urged to devote more time to leading the Labour Party, and less to his contacts with the Pankhursts. He appears, very reluctantly, to have accepted that the Labour Party would have to cut itself adrift from the WSPU. The problem of his position as both party leader and spokesman for women’s rights came into the open at Labour annual conference in Belfast in January 1907. When the sensitive issue of the Women’s Enfranchisement Bill, recently introduced by the Liberal MP, W. H. Dickinson came up, a motion was carried against the executive’s advice to endorse the immediate and total enfranchisement of all women. Hardie’s reaction was to state that party conferences could not bind the party in Parliament and that MPs should be able to vote according to their ‘conscience’. In 1907 and 1908, Hardie upheld in the press the WSPU’s tactics of demanding votes for women on the same terms as those enjoyed by men. He pressed for the release of Christabel Pankhurst from prison and in 1909, joined a deputation to the Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone, demanding an inquiry into the conditions of suffragettes detailed in gaol. The forcible feeding instituted under the ‘Cat and Mouse’ Act in 1911 roused Hardie to a new fury on behalf of women’s equality. However, by 1909, Hardie was realistic enough to sense that women’s rights were a double-edged sword, especially in view of the disruptive tactics of the WSPU itself. The Labour Party was deriving little direct benefit from its involvement in the suffragette cause. He and Snowden continued to agitate on behalf of the women’s grievances in the Commons but even so, there was a gradual withdrawal by Hardie from the major involvement in the women’s causes that so dominated his life between 1906 and 1908. He now feared that the growing militancy of the WSPU would result in it becoming a small, sectarian and disruptive rump. Hardie was personally embarrassed in October 1908 by the actions of his personal secretary who used her position to interrupt a debate in the House with cries of ‘Votes for Women’ and in December 1911, she was convicted for obstruction during a stone-throwing demonstration. In 1912, Hardie emerged as the champion of George Lansbury, a passionate defender of women’s suffrage and critic of the Labour Party’s failure to oppose the government sufficiently over forced-feeding. The National Executive ruled that Lansbury could not be officially supported by the party when he resigned his seat in November 1912 to fight a by-election. Hardie defied the official party line, along with Snowden and campaigned for Lansbury. He argued that Labour should vote against the government’s Franchise Bill if female suffrage was not included. Lansbury lost and the whole affair was deeply saddening for Hardie. His attitude over the Franchise Bill strained relations with his Labour colleagues. He no longer captured the allegiance of the suffragettes either. Despite, his proven record of support for women’s suffrage, Hardie now found himself often heckled by women when he made speeches. They regarded him as a “man of words, not deed”, whose gradualism and constitutionalism had produced no tangible results.

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[1] David Morgan Suffragists and Liberals, Oxford University Press, 1975 remains important on the relationship between political parties and women suffragists.

[2] Laura Ugolini ‘It is Only Justice to Grant Women’s Suffrage: Independent Labour Party Men and Women’s Suffrage 1893-1905’ in Claire Eustance, Joan Ryan and Laura Ugolini (eds.) A Suffrage Reader: Charting Directions in British Suffrage History, Leicester University Press, 1999, pages 126-145.

[3] On the early development of the Labour Party see the contrasting views of Duncan Tanner Political Change and the Labour Party, Cambridge University Press, 1990 and Ross McKibbin The Evolution of the Labour Party 1910-1922, Oxford University Press, 1974. Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane and Nick Tiratsoo (eds.) Labour’s First Century, Cambridge University Press, 2000 adopts a thematic approach with a useful discussion of Labour and gender, pages 191-220. Andrew Thorpe A History of the British Labour Party, Palgrave, 2^nd ed., 2001 is the most recent general study.

[4] David Marquand Ramsay MacDonald, Jonathan Cape, 1977, pages 147-150 is the clearest statement of MacDonald’s vacillating position. It also introduces the problems facing the emerging Labour Party in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

[5] Sandra Stanley Holton Feminism and Democracy, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pages 76-115 examines the creation of the electoral alliance and its operation in 1913 and 1914.

[6] The 1911 Parliament Act had reduced the length of time between general elections from a maximum of seven years to a maximum of five years. Given that the last general election was in late 1910, most people expected the Liberals to call an election in late 1914 or early 1915.

[7] Kenneth O. Morgan Keir Hardie: Radical and Socialist, Weidenfeld, 1975 is perhaps the best biography available though it is, in places, in need of revision.

[8] MPs were not paid for their services until after the 1911 Parliament Act.

Suffrage since 1903: Anti-Suffragism

Organised opposition to women’s suffrage has almost as long a history as women’s suffrage.  A Parliamentary Committee for Maintaining the Integrity of the Franchise was formed in 1875 after the 1875 suffrage bill failed to pass its second reading and was in action when the bill was against debated in 1876 and 1878. The backbone of the Committee was a group of Conservative MPs led by Mr E.P. Bouverie and including Lord Randolph Churchill. Some Liberal MPs became members and some peers. Little more is heard of the Committee after the 1878 bill was defeated and it is probable that it did not survive the election of a new parliament in March 1880.  In June 1889, a protest (‘An Appeal against Women’s Suffrage’) against demands for the extension of the suffrage to women was published in The Nineteenth Century. It was largely the work of Mrs Humphrey Ward and was signed by 104 prominent women (prominent because their husbands were prominent). Brian Harrison suggests that this appeal had a considerable effect on decision makers and may have persuaded William Gladstone to reveal his opposition to women’s suffrage in 1892. The appeal did not result in the creation of an organisation to fight the growing popularity of the suffragist movement. That did not happen until 1908.

The Anti-Suffrage League was set up in 1908 after an exchange of letters in The Times (that consistently opposed women’s suffrage). A number of women wrote to the newspaper expressing their concern about the growing activity of the suffragists and suffragettes, arguing that it was time for the Antis to become active in response. Mrs Humphrey Ward continued to combat the idea of women’s suffrage and was instrumental in the formation in 1908 of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League. Its first meeting took place on 21^st July with the Countess of Jersey in the chair. Then, in December 1908, male Antis launched their Men’s Committee for Opposing Female Suffrage. The first issue of The Anti-Suffrage Review appeared in December 1908. The objective of the movement was to resist the proposal to admit women to the Parliamentary Franchise and to Parliament but to maintain the principle of the representation of women on municipal and other bodies concerned with the domestic and social affairs of the community.  It aimed to counter the suffragist argument that a majority of people favoured women’s suffrage. There were no opinion polls in the early twentieth century and so public opinion was always difficult to gauge. The Antis argued that there was a ‘silent majority’ on their side of the argument. During 1908, they were able to produce an anti-suffrage petition containing 337,018 signatures[1]. They also paid for surveys (canvasses), the results of which were published in the Anti-Suffrage Review[2].

The Women’s Anti-Suffrage League expanded rapidly and developed a considerable number of branches throughout Britain. In December 1908, it had 2,000 members and by October 1909, around 10,000 members. By April 1910, there were 104 branches; and by April 1912, 235 branches.  The earliest achievements of the anti-suffragists were impressive. Membership of the women’s organisations doubled in the year ending July 1910. Analysis of the branch distribution shows that London and the southeast accounted for most of the anti-suffragist effort: these areas gave 42 per cent of the total between 1908 and 1914. The movement was weakest in the industrial north and there was only limited support from the Celtic fringe. The League’s regional pattern of support resembles that for Edwardian rural and suburban Conservatism and Brian Harrison argues that, despite its elitist leadership, it appealed widely to the conservative working class.

The Men’s Committee for Opposing Female Suffrage was skilled at fundraising but failed to gain popular support. It was more a collection of major public figures than a nationwide movement, for the Antis’ great strength had always been the list of great men they could parade in support. Both groups were set up to be non-party and had members from all parties even though Harrison maintains the Conservatives were the natural home of the Antis.  In July 1910, the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage, under the presidency of the Earl of Cromer, is recommended by The Anti-Suffrage Review to make friends of the League. In December 1910, the two leagues were amalgamated into the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. The Countess of Jersey gave way to the presidency of the Earl of Cromer becoming deputy-president in January 1911. In April 1912, the Conservative Earl Curzon and the Liberal Lord Weardale replaced the Earl of Cromer as joint presidents. There was also a Scottish Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League, which the Duchess of Montrose founded in April 1910. The anti-suffrage movement seems to have been dominated by men to a considerable degree but there were some notable women members who took the position that there was a natural division of function between the sexes rather than that women were necessarily inferior to men.

The Antis recognised that getting the vote would be an important step towards involving women in the day-to-day world of men where they might well find themselves competing on unfavourable terms and be deprived of the protection they customarily received while keeping to the separate spheres. They feared they might lose more than they gained. The social composition of the women who led the anti-suffrage movement was even more upper class than in the WSPU and NUWSS. They were women who might have privileges to lose if equality between the sexes came about. There were, however, a number of ways in which the Antis were less efficient than the suffragists.  There is little evidence of working-class women taking part in the anti-suffrage movement though there is some evidence for tacit male working class support.  The Antis found it difficult to recruit younger women.  Anti-Suffrage League meetings were drab and uncolourful and its press office was less effective than that of the WSPU.  The Antis lacked the international contacts or support that the suffragists had.  Despite this, the Antis did have most of the press on their side and this ensured they were able to communicate their message effectively. It was also very skilful at working behind the scenes in Parliament.

However, it would, be misleading to suggest that most women in the ranks of the Antis had come to a considered conclusion that it was to their advantage to keep to the traditional role of their sex. Many approached the issue from the point of view of duty rather than that of personal advantage. The more active of the Antis were themselves ‘new women’ who were prepared to argue about their role in society, speak on public platforms, write articles and campaign for the causes in which they believed. Women anti-suffragists stressed their usefulness without the national vote. They stressed their role in local government claiming that they could make a valuable and suitable contribution to the community in this and other forms of social work. This, they suggested, allowed them to realise their potential for service and self-expression. National and imperial affairs were best left to men.

Sources

Source 1: E. Belfont Bax The Fraud of Feminism, 1913, pages 161-162, 170-172, and 173-174

Feminism, or, as it is sometimes called, the emancipation of women, as we know it in the present day, may be justifiably indicted as a gigantic fraud -- a fraud in its general aim and a fraud alike in its methods of controversy and in its practical tactics...It uniformly professes to aim at the placing of the sexes on a footing of social and political quality. A very little inquiry into its concrete demands suffices to show that its aim, so far from being equality, is the very reverse -- viz. to bring about, with the aid of men themselves, as embodied in the forces of the State, a female ascendancy and a consolidation and extension of already existing female privileges.... Many of them [feminists], in the vehemence of their Anti-man crusade, look forward with relish to the opportunity they anticipate will be afforded them when women get the vote, of passing laws rigorously enforcing asceticism on men by means of severe penal enactments.... The readiness, and almost eagerness, with which certain sections of British public opinion are ready to view favourably anything urged on behalf of female suffrage, is aptly illustrated by the well-known argument we so often hear when the existence of “militancy” is pointed out as a reason for withholding the suffrage -- the argument, namely, as to the unfairness of refusing the franchise to numbers of peaceable and law-abiding women who are asking for it, because a relatively small section of women resort to criminal methods of emphasising their demand...The whole modern women’s movement is based, in a measure, at least, on an assumption which is absolutely unfounded -- to wit, that man has systematically oppressed woman in the past, that the natural tendency of evil-minded man is always to oppress women, or, to put in another way, that woman is the victim of man’s egotism.....

Source 2: Harold Owen Woman Adrift. The Menace of Suffragism, 1912, pages 138-140

The fact, then, that Suffragism has been supported by the vehemence and disorderliness of a few woman is no commendation whatever of the vote being granted as an act of grace. Their earnestness is counter-balanced by the orderly earnestness of women who do not want woman to be enfranchised.... The Anti-suffragists, on the other hand, ardently desire to place their opposition at the mercy of the real will of the nation or even the wish of the women themselves. There is, to be sure, nothing Quixotic in this desire, for they know quite well that the mass of opinion in the country is with them and that makes it all the more bewildering that we should have a Parliament, many of whose members talk glibly about Woman Suffrage becoming law during this session, a complacent prophecy that apparently assumes the House of Lords to be eager to abrogate even its suspensory vote. And the organised Anti-suffragists have done their best to secure an indication of what the women of the country think by sending out at great trouble and expense many thousands of postcards asking a plain “Yes” to one or other of the simple questions, “Do you think women should have the parliamentary vote?” and “Do you think women should not have the parliamentary vote?”.... Now these figures reveal that less than one woman in six is in favour of Woman Suffrage...positive indifference to the Suffrage claim....

Source 3: Ray Strachey The Cause, Virago, 1978, first published, 1928, pages 319-320.

The logic of their case was that women could properly be entrusted with municipal affairs, while imperial matters were outside their “sphere”; but the two doctrines did not combine very happily together. They had some trouble with their own members, particularly with the imposing array of Peers who were their vice-presidents, since these gentlemen objected just as strongly to the presence of women on borough councils as anywhere else (outside the home); and the spectacle of their troubles was a constantly recurring delight to their opponents....

Source 4: Brian Harrison Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, Croom Helm, 1978, pages 13-14

The ‘Antis’, as the suffragists contemptuously called them, suffered the threefold penalty -- intellectual, moral and political -- incurred by those who back the wrong horse in politics. Their arguments were seen as foolish and often mutually contradictory. Their motives were seen by the suffragists at the time -- let alone later -- as a strange compound of prejudice and self-interest.... The penalty was for the Antis to be ridiculed as misguided and unimportant, consigned to history’s rubbish-heap. The Antis even lost confidence in themselves, or at least found activities more profitable than brooding over a past which some might regard as dubious....

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[1] This was the largest petition on women’s suffrage since 1874 and the following year the suffragists could only manage 288,736 signatures.

[2] It should be noted that when suffragists conducted similar exercises, they produced completely opposite results.

Suffrage since 1903: Arguments against women's suffrage

Not all women wanted the vote. Queen Victoria had referred to women’s suffrage as ‘wicked folly’. In 1908, Mrs Humphrey Ward[1] went so far as to form the National Anti-Suffrage League[2]. Arguments against women’s suffrage fell into six main categories.
The ‘separate spheres’ argument. According to this argument, the role played by men is different (and should be different) from that played by women. While the masculine public sphere is for men, the feminine domestic sphere is for women. Many men believed that women were ‘the weaker sex’ and would not be able to cope with the ‘hurly-burly’ of elections. This view originated in the period before the 1872 Ballot Act when voting was ‘open’ (not in secret) and violence and harassment was common. Women should keep out of the political arena. Their strength lay within the family providing support, inspiration and raising children. If the vote was given to women, it might cause political disagreements with their husbands and consequently accelerate the break-up of the family. In short, women were a civilising element in society. Forcing women into a public, political role would detract from their femininity or, as William Gladstone put it, “trespass upon their delicacy, their purity, their refinement, the elevation of their whole nature”. Giving women the vote, therefore, would damage their femininity. The ‘different biology and psychology’ argument[3]. It was a widely held that women tended to be temperamental and prone to outbursts of emotion so how could such beings be trusted with the franchise? The militant tactics of the WSPU after 1905 reinforced this viewpoint. Anti-suffragists held a number of assumptions about female psychology and physiology. It was argued that women were physically and mentally weaker than men. They were more emotional, unable to grasp abstract questions and slow to make up their minds. For those who had to conserve their limited energies for the vital and debilitating business of childbearing, politics would be too great a strain. The medical profession in general supported these views with scientific authority despite being largely ignorant about female physiology in this period. Sir Almroth Wright expressed this view, most notoriously, in the letter published in The Times on 28^th March 1912 at the height of the suffragette violence. He attacked the suffragettes as frustrated spinsters venting their bitterness on men but he also claimed that women in general were prone to hysteria that made them inadequate to receive the vote. ‘Physical force’ arguments. There was a range of ‘physical force’ arguments. It was claimed, “The voter, in giving a vote pledges himself to uphold the consequences of his vote at all costs ... women are physically incapable of this pledge.” The argument went on that if, for example, women voted to go to war they would not be physically strong enough to fight the enemy and as a result, did not deserve full citizenship. Some opponents of women’s suffrage pointed out that the maintenance of the British Empire required a large army and because women did not contribute to the defence of Empire, they should not have the vote. A further variant was the idea that, since women could not physically enforce the laws they made, men might simply refuse to accept them leading to a breakdown in law and order. The eminent jurist A.V. Dicey warned that since women constituted the majority of voters they would be in a position to force Parliament policies opposed by the male minority. Fears about the practical results. If adult suffrage were granted, there would be about 1.5 million more women voters than men. Thus, the government would reflect female views and as women were ‘less virile’ than men were it would result in Britain and the Empire being weakened. Parliamentarians entertained a number of fears about the practical effects of enfranchisement. To concede even a limited vote would lead eventually to complete suffrage and thus a female majority that might well push anti-male policies. There were also concerns that women would use their new political power to improve their position in the labour force or that they would neglect their domestic duties. Women did not really want the vote. Some opponents of women’s suffrage argued that the majority of women did not want the vote (or at least, did not care one way or another whether they had it). Suffragists, they claimed, were an unrepresentative if vocal minority. The Anti-Suffrage League argued that the vote was overvalued. Even though some men had the vote, there was still plenty of poverty, unemployment and low wages. Thus, it must not be assumed that female suffrage would solve all the problems of women. This view was reinforced by the argument that women themselves did not really want the vote. The campaign for the vote was carried on by a small, untypical minority and watched by most women with what Asquith called “languid and imperturbable indifference”. Other anti-suffragist arguments. Two further (and somewhat contradictory) arguments were put forward. First, there was the argument that women were already represented in Parliament by the men in their family. In addition, women already exercised some control over political decision making since leading politicians listened to the views of their wives, mothers and other female acquaintances. Secondly, women were incapable of making decisions and would do what the men in the family told them to do. This would result in some men, in effect, having several votes more than others. Many of the anti-suffragist arguments represented self-serving pleas by a traditional male elite anxious to preserve its position and authority. On the other hand, there is a danger in dismissing the entire anti-suffragist case simply because today we take it for granted that women should have the vote. Historians need to explain when and why certain parts of the anti-suffragist case lost their force. In the 1870s and 1880s, it is not obvious that most women were enthusiastic about the vote. Suffrage societies were very small pressure groups until well into the first decade of the twentieth century. Large women’s organisations such as the Mothers’ Union were not suffrage organisations and even the Women’s Co-operative Guild, which had 30,000 members, did not adopt women’s suffrage until 1900. Above all, the anti-suffragists drew strength from the fact that their membership was not exclusively male. Many women, including able ones who enjoyed a prominent public role such as Octavia Hill, Florence Nightingale and at one time Beatrice Webb, refused to support women’s suffrage. The 1889 anti-suffragist petition, published under the leadership of Mrs Humphrey Ward, demonstrated the strength of anti-suffragist feeling. The explanation for their attitude seems to have been that they thought they had achieved more influence by their own efforts than a mere vote could possibly give them.

You may also find the following blogs on my site useful: 
http://richardjohnbr.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/why-not-give-women-vote.html

http://richardjohnbr.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/opposition-to-womens-suffrage.html

http://richardjohnbr.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-anti-suffragist-movement.html

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[1] On the subject of Mrs Humphrey Ward, see the biography by John Sutherland, OUP, 1990. It may seem paradoxical that an advocate of women’s emancipation through education and local government should oppose the suffrage question. [2] Brian Harrison Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, Croom Helm, 1978 is the standard work on the subject. [3] Thomas Laqueur Making Sex: The Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge, Mass., 1990 provides an invaluable overview on this issue. Studies that are more specific are: Christine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (eds.) The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, London, 1987 and Ludmilla Jordanova Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries, London, 1990

Suffrage since 1903: Militancy and constitutionalism: some sources

Militancy and constitutionalism?

Source 1: Jane Marcus (ed.) The Young Rebecca. Writings of Rebecca West 1911-1917, Virago, 1982, pages 257-8, originally printed in 1933

A new side of her [Mrs Pankhurst] implacability then showed itself. Her policy has meant a ruthless renunciation of old ties. She cut herself off entirely from the Labour Party; she was even prepared, in these later years, to attack it as a component part of the Liberal Party’s majority. She had silenced her younger daughter, Adela, as a speaker because of her frank socialist bias and her second daughter Sylvia afterwards left the Union to form societies that were as much Labour as suffragist in the East End. She had been merciless in her preservation of party discipline. There was no nonsense about democracy in the Women’s Social and Political Union. Teresa Billington had long been driven out for raising the topic. Mrs Pankhurst, Christabel and the Lawrences exercised an absolute dictatorship. But now the Lawrences had to go. They opposed further prosecution of militancy and Christabel and Mrs Pankhurst quietly told them to relinquish their positions in the Union. There was more than appears to be said for the Pankhurst’s position from their point of view. They knew that the Government intended to strip the Pethick-Lawrences of their fortune by recovering from them (as the only moneyed officials of the Union) the cost of all the damage done by the militants; and they knew that in actual act Christabel settled the policy of the Union, they saw no reason why the Pethick-Lawrences should stay on to the embarrassment of all persons concerned. But the Pethick-Lawrences were heart-broken. Not for a moment did the crisis appal Mrs Pankhurst. Letters were burned in pillar-boxes; houses -- but only empty ones -- went up in flames; riot was everywhere....

Source 2: Sylvia Pankhurst The Suffragette Movement, Virago, 1978, first published in 1931, pages 412-13

The Union was an autocracy: none of the four most concerned thought it necessary to consult its membership...My thoughts flew back to the abolishing of the original democratic constitution in 1907, which had left the decision wholly to the small group of four, and ultimately to one, and had made possible the present impetuous course. The breach [with the Pethick-Lawrences] was deplorable, I thought, and wished both sides might have surrendered some points. They differed less with each other, I thought, than I had often differed in view from them.... At the great Albert Hall meeting of welcome -- to one leader only, as it turned out -- Mrs Pankhurst propounded the new policy, declaring that the Government must be made to realise that property would henceforth be as gravely endangered by the Suffragettes as by the Chartists of old. If she were prosecuted for incitement, she would not remain in prison, “First Division or no First Division”, whilst the militant men of Ulster were at large. That was her special contribution to the new policy: the hunger strike, not for political treatment, but for release....

Source 3: Roger Fulford Votes for Women, Faber, 1957, pages170-171

The developments of September and October 1907 were a mortal blow to the strength of the Union -- not perhaps obvious on the surface because it was to wax in ardour and fighting zeal -- but henceforth its exertions (though they were to be intensified) were confined to a narrower field. Under the virtual dictatorship of the Pankhursts and of the Pethick-Lawrences, the Union became enormously more efficient, but it missed the driving power of the more diverse supporters of the early days. As was clearly illustrated in the case of Parnell there are tactical advantages in a political movement attaching itself to an individual, but the danger of narrowing the effectiveness of the movement stands out no less clearly. The members of the Union were not unlike Napoleon’s Old Guard at Waterloo: those veterans were to fight with fortifying devotion but they lacked the feeling that the people of France were behind them -- a feeling that had impelled them to victory in earlier days. In the women’s movement, adoration for the leader and complete subordination to her ‘word of command’ were not enough: they might lead to triumph but they could not lead to victory...

Source 4: Antonia Raeburn The Militant Suffragettes, Michael Joseph, 1973, pages 39-40

By the autumn of 1907, there were already seventy branches of the WSPU. The movement had become so popular that many members of the old-established politically affiliated suffrage societies joined the militants while still involving themselves in party activity. This allowed for the infiltration of policy alien to WSPU tactics and, in spite of every effort on the part of the leaders to maintain unity, destructive criticism of their methods led to disruption within the branches. The Pankhursts and the Pethick-Lawrences acted on their own decisions without consulting delegated or anyone else, and although these means were vital for the growth of the movement, they met with disapproval from many members who saw them as undemocratic. For this reason, and because all branches subscribed to the WSPU funds, the members were most anxious that their representatives should be heard at the annual conference which had been agreed to when the constitution was drafted in the previous year [1906]. It had become increasingly clear to the leaders that it would be impossible to run the movement on a representational basis as it was originally conceived, and a month before the conference was due Mrs Pankhurst dramatically tore up the constitution and announced that she had decided to reorganise the Union. A new committee was to be selected and the annual conference abandoned. The national WSPU under the control of Mrs Pankhurst was not to be responsible for the entire organisation and the union branches would become local WSPU’s subject to direction from headquarters....

Source 5: David Mitchell The Fighting Pankhursts. A Study in Tenacity, Jonathan Cape, 1967, pages 28-30

It was useless, she [Christabel] argued, to rely on private members’ bills, ever at the mercy of the Government, which could always plead a press of other priorities, a lack of urgency, an absence of massive support. It was useless, too, to expect serious backing from the Labour movement. It would be years before Labour was a force to be reckoned with in Parliament, and the prospect of Labour Government seemed infinitely remote. In any case it was clear that.... the movement was not willing to make a firm commitment about women’s suffrage. How could a working-class movement be expected to show enthusiasm for the enfranchisement of about two million middle- and upper class women householders (who would presumably vote either Liberal or Tory), which was all that any suffrage agitation could realistically demand? The Conservative Party, though it was widely predicted that a limited female electorate would be predominantly Tory, was solidly, if illogically, opposed to opening the sluice gates even a crack. The political tide, moreover, was turning for a Liberal victory in the general election of 1906. The obvious strategy was to continue to attempt to win support from working class women, pointing out that ‘ladies’ would use the vote to improve women’s position throughout society...the use of forcible feeding, with its overtones of sexual brutality, screwed the tragic-comic, sado-masochistic spectacle, avidly reported in the press, to a new pitch of intensity...In 1907 Mrs Charlotte Despard, disapproving of the autocratic methods of the Pankhursts, split off with some sympathisers to form the more ‘democratic’ Women’s Freedom League. Then in 1912 Mr and Mrs Pethick-Lawrence, critical of attacks on property, parted company with Emmeline and Christabel...

Source 6: Constance Rover Women’s Suffrage and Party Politics in Britain 1866-1914, Routledge, 1967, pages 75-76, 90-91

The Pankhursts brought courage, imagination and enthusiasm to the cause of women’s suffrage; they also brought an element of fanaticism which is perhaps necessary in those who are to make an imprint on history. On the debit side, Mrs Pankhurst and Christabel ruled the movement by a dictatorship and, at times, their actions may be thought to have out-stripped the bounds of reason. They also may be thought to have dropped too easily their association with working-class groups when fashionable support came to their movement. Criticism, although easy, seems carping in view of the Pankhursts’ dedication to the women’s cause.... The policy of all-out attack on the government was a departure from that of the older suffragists and an acknowledgement of the way in which the constitution was developing, that is to say, the decline in the influence of the private member of parliament and the increasing strength of government. In effect, the suffragettes were saying to the government, “We shall give you no peace until our demands are met”. This policy of attack upon the government, even though it represented the party, which gave their cause most support, appears to have been in imitation of the Irish under Parnell.... While there are marked differences of opinion about the value of militancy to the movement, there is a fair amount of agreement that it was positively helpful in its early days...The militants kept the movement before the public eye and much of the credit must be given to them for Parliament dealing seriously with the question from 1910 onwards, in welcome contrast to the facetiousness of earlier years.... This policy was likely to be effective so long as it was looked upon as political protest. If, however, militant activities were put down to hysteria and fanaticism, they largely defeated their own object and gave ammunition to those who contended that women were unfit to have the vote.

Source 7: Brian Harrison ‘The Act of Militancy. Violence and the Suffragettes 1904-1914’, printed in Peaceable Kingdom. Stability and Change in Modern Britain, OUP, 1982, pages 26-27

The suffragettes have been amply surpassed by subsequent protest movements in the destructiveness and ruthlessness of their acts of militancy. Suffragette leaders explicitly ruled out taking the lives of others; they risked only the health of their own members. Martyrdom, not murder, was their style. Yet their militant acts were extensive and escalating; 1911 saw 176 false fire alarms and 22 convictions; 1912 saw 425 calls and 27 convictions and there were still more in 1913.... So shocking did these events seem at the time that non-militant suffragists tried to protect themselves against the political discredit of being associated with them by frequently repudiating militancy and by trying to rivet in the public mind a clear distinction between the militant ‘suffragette’ and the non-militant ‘suffragist’.... Suffragettes too were shocked; acts of militancy were not lightly committed by respectable Edwardian middle-class women...Militancy risked not only reputation and professional success but success in what was then seen as woman’s most important trade, marriage. Violent public hostility or clumsiness in the prison-doctor during forcible feeding could destroy woman’s greatest asset, her looks...

Constitutionalism?

Source 1: Ray Strachey The Cause. A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain, Virago, 1988, first published 1928, pages 307-310

There were two kinds of effort in the suffrage world, inspired by differing ideals and carried on by rival systems of organisation. The constitutional societies, which were united in the National Union and led by Mrs Fawcett, carried on the regular tradition of the whole movement. They did not regard their work as an attack upon men, but rather as a reform for the good of all and the next step in human progress. Their newspaper, which existed to promote Women’s Suffrage only, was called The Common Cause, and it was in these terms that they say their aim. Their chief effort was the conversion of public opinion and they felt that this conversion was as important and as much a part of their object as the gaining of the vote itself. Mrs Fawcett, their leader, had seen the whole movement grow; she know and she taught her followers to know, that their Cause was part of a development wider even than the change in the position of women itself...by 1910 it [the NUWSS] had grown to be an amazingly powerful and important political instrument. The militant society was entirely different. Its propaganda, though directed towards the same end as that of the National Union, rang with quite other notes, with defiance, antagonism and suspicion. “Deeds not Words” was the motto of the organisation and its deliberate policy was to seek sensational achievement rather than anything else. Its leaders did not scruple to brush aside the ordinary niceties of procedure and they did not care whom they shocked or antagonised. They distrusted everyone who was not a militant and laughed at all talk of persuasion. What they believed in was moral violence. By this force and by the driving power of their own determination, they hoped to drive the Liberals out of office and to coerce whoever succeeded them into granting their demand. The whole atmosphere of their work was thus aggressive and headlong; it resounded with charges of the treachery and ill will of their opponents and was sharpened by sarcasm, anger and excitement...The policy of sensational public protest was not one which left much time for the tasks of self government, nor was democracy much to their taste. The Women’s Social and Political Union adopted, therefore, a purely autocratic system and entrusted all decisions to their leaders -- Mrs Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel. These people alone decided what wads to be done; the others obeyed and enjoyed the surrender of their judgement and the sensation of marching as an army under discipline.

Source 2: Leslie Parker Hume The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies 1897-1914, Garland Publishing Inc, 1982, pages 225-7

The NUWSS, through its work at Westminster and in the constituencies, was responsible for winning both public and parliamentary support for women’s suffrage. In the process of taking its demand to the British public, the NUWSS created a network of suffrage organisations throughout Britain, and for the first time in the history of the British women’s suffrage movement, it made a concerted, national effort to attract the support of workers and to disabuse the populace of the notion that the women’s suffrage issue was the exclusive property of the middle and upper classes.... At a time when the activities of the militants threatened to vitiate the women’s suffrage cause and engender hostility to the very mention of women’s suffrage, the work of the NUWSS succeeded in keeping women’s suffrage alive as an issue. The WSPU’s progression from demonstrations to violence spelled potential disaster for the suffrage movement. The NUWSS was able to counter the militants’ influence and, despite the efforts of the WSPU, to win support, both public and parliamentary for the cause. The fact that there was, in August 1914, still a movement for women’s suffrage, is perhaps the greatest accolade that can be given to the NUWSS...Despite the many changes, which the NUWSS underwent between 1897 and 1914, the organisation still retained an aura of Victorian middle class respectability. This static quality was as essential to the organisation’s success in winning support for the women’s cause as were the innovations of the NUWSS in terms of its argument and its political policy...It may have been the WSPU that first attracted the attention of the country by flouting the staid convention of Victorian womanhood, but it was the suffragists of the NUWSS who created sympathy for the cause of women’s suffrage by outwardly conforming to the very image that the Pankhursts and their colleagues rejected. In this respect the militants were a valuable foil for the suffragists and made the adherents of the NUWSS appear deceptively reasonable and moderate.

Source 3: David Rubinstein A Different World for Women. The Life of Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Harvester, 1991, pages 168-169, 172-173

The period between 1909 and the outbreak of the Great War was the most intense and dramatic in the history of the women’s suffrage movement. As president of the largest suffrage organisation Mrs Fawcett was at the centre of events, her prestige as a veteran of the movement whose experience dated almost from its start unique and unchallenged...Her main problems were the increasingly violent and uncontrolled actions of the supporters of the WSPU and negotiations with politicians whose commitment to women’s suffrage could not be relied upon however blandly sympathetic their words. Between the adoption of its new constitution in 1907, when it was still a small organisation looking back to its Victorian roots, and 1914 the NUWSS built itself up into a formidable fighting machine.... By 1912, it employed 32 full-time organisers; by the end of 1913, it had 52,336 members and almost as many affiliated supporters and by 1914 it claimed 602 affiliated branches and societies. These local bodies like the national office and executive committee became much stronger and more effective over the years and it needed tactful leadership and a winning personality to persuade collections of talented and determined women committed to the suffrage cause to work with reasonable harmony through the problems and pitfalls of the period. It is difficult to imagine that any other leader could have carried out the task so successfully...Mrs Fawcett’s influence in persuading such ardent personalities to work together was based not on an authoritarian temperament but partly on ignoring the details of many of the quarrels, partly on distracting the participants by anecdotes and other irrelevancies and partly by the personal loyalty she inspired. This, not the charisma of Mrs Pankhurst, was her great gift...Her most important function outside the union was to present an intellectually impressive and personally attractive case for women’s suffrage. She must have grown weary both of the ritual tributes interspersed with personal attacks paid to her by opponents of the cause and the repetition of her name by suffragists as a kind of talisman. It may be true that while the militants antagonised the wider public by violence, a leader grown old in the movement, universally respected and widely known in the worlds of politics and journalism was taken for granted and hence sometimes ignored. This was the accusation of militant suffragettes who despaired at the lack of passion, which marked her speeches.... It is hardly possible to state with confidence whether Mrs Fawcett’s respectability, privileged contacts and lack of charisma were a ‘frost’ on the movement. The growth of the NUWSS’s numerical and financial support, however, does not suggest that she was a leader out of touch with her time....

Source 4: Les Garner Stepping Stones to Women’s Liberty. Feminist Ideas in the Women’s Suffrage Movement 1900-1918, Heinemann, 1984, pages 26-27

The NUWSS’s struggle for the vote had raised many feminist and political issues, particularly in the years leading up to the War. There was a closer relationship with the Labour movement and a more progressive feminist analysis. Millicent Fawcett may have supported the Election Fighting Fund on strategic grounds only, but this further associated the NUWSS with the problems of working class women. And while some arguments may now appear limited, given the contemporary pressure on women, they were still remarkable in their identification of many aspects of women’s oppression. Even those suffragists whose arguments rested on an acceptance of ‘woman’s sphere’ at least could argue that they were calling for a choice...Politically, the National Union’s demand for the vote implied that emancipation could have come through a reform of the political structure, rather than through its complete emancipation. Although some women, both in and out of the suffrage movement, were critical of either position, such ideas certainly appeared to be central to suffragist thinking...

Suffrage since 1903: Political context

Electoral and constitutional issues 1906-1914: a summary

Between 1906 and 1910, the Liberal government did not give high priority to electoral reform[1]. A comprehensive plan for franchise reform does not appear to have been prepared until 1911. This delay had three main causes. First, it reflected the growing government interest in passing social welfare policies for which there was significant support in the House of Lords. Secondly, the delay probably owed something to Liberal fears than an enlarged electorate might benefit the growing Labour Party. Finally, there were differences in all the parties over female suffrage. A majority of MPs was in favour of votes for women. Those Conservatives (60 to 80 MPs) who wanted women’s suffrage favoured a restricted measure to enfranchise householders, many of whom they hoped would vote for them. Those Liberals who favoured the women’s vote (including most Liberal MPs and two-thirds of the Cabinet) wanted it as part of a wider adult suffrage extension that would include unrepresented men. So too did a narrow majority at the Labour Party conference in 1906 that rejected a plea from Keir Hardie to support women householder enfranchisement. This frustrated any hopes that the Liberal government would soon introduce a measure for women’s suffrage. In the absence of such intervention, there was no more parliamentary encouragement for women’s suffrage than the continuing series of unsuccessful moves by backbench MPs.

In 1906, debates on the second reading of an Adult Suffrage Bill, introduced by Sir Charles Dilke were talked out. The same thing occurred in 1907 during the second reading debate on a bill to enfranchise women householders brought in by the Liberal MP, Willoughby Dickinson. The second reading of a similar bill introduced by another Liberal, Henry Stranger was carried by 273 votes to 94. The bill was then referred to a Committee of the Whole House and made no further progress. An Adult Suffrage Bill brought in by the Liberal Geoffrey Howard in 1909, passed its second reading by 35 votes but also made no further progress when referred to a Committee of the Whole House.  Even if a franchise measure had passed the Commons, it might (especially if it was an adult suffrage bill) have been quashed by the Lords. After the Liberal landslide victory in January 1906, Arthur Balfour, the Conservative leader declared that the Conservatives had a similarly impregnable majority in the Lords and would use it to frustrate the government. From 1906 to 1909, the Lords encouraged by Liberal by-election losses destroyed or rejected ten government bills including one to abolish plural voting. Franchise reform was not clearly among the measures that could be expected to pass the Lords[2]. Party attitudes to suffrage issues remained complex.

The women’s suffrage question was unresolved in the years before the First World War. The fundamental difficulty was uncertainty and division over the issue in the Liberal government, exacerbated by the militant tactics of the suffragettes. There were also other factors against a settlement: the opposition of most Conservatives to female suffrage, and the indifference of the Irish Home Rule Party to this question compared with the interests of their own leading objective. In this unpromising situation, some half-hearted legislative efforts were made which, even if they had succeeded, could hardly have been expected to provide a final settlement of the women’s electoral question.

Early in 1910, a prolonged, but unsuccessful effort began to obtain an agreed inter-party solution to the question. A Conciliation Committee was formed in February with Lord Lytton as chairman and H. N. Brailsford as secretary and with a large membership consisting of 25 Liberal MPs, 17 Conservative, six Irish Home Rulers and six Labour. The committee decided to sponsor a private member’s bill known as a Conciliation Bill ‘to extend the parliamentary franchise to women occupiers’. In social terms, the effects of the bill would differ from one part of the country to another, but most of those who qualified were believed to be middle or upper class. The total enfranchise would only be about a million, or one woman in 13. These provisions were designed to win the support of the Conservatives, but they lost much Liberal and Labour support. The WSPU, NUWSS and other suffrage groups gave official support to the measure. The solution was based on a narrow compromise and was seen as a temporary means of opening the way to fuller enfranchisement.

Three unsuccessful attempts were made to pass the Conciliation Bill in 1910, 1911 and 1912. On 12^th July 1910, the bill introduced by D. J. Shackleton, a Labour MP, passed its second reading by 299 votes to 189. The Cabinet, after debating the matter in three meetings, had decided not to allow further time for the bill that session. A few minutes after the bill’s success at its second reading, all hopes that it would be passed were extinguished when the Commons voted by 320 to 175 to refer it to a Committee of the Whole House. On 5^th May 1911, a second and revised Conciliation Bill, introduced by Sir George Kemp (a Liberal MP) passed the second reading by 255 to 89. However, on 29^th May, Lloyd George announced that the government had decided that further time would not be allowed for the bill that session, as other government measures would be jeopardised. In November 1911, Asquith stated that the government would introduce a suffrage bill next session providing for manhood suffrage and would permit amendments to be moved that would extend the bill to include women’s suffrage on the same basis as manhood suffrage. A third Conciliation Bill, introduced by J. T. Agg-Gardner, a Conservative MP failed to pass its second reading by 14 votes largely because of the lukewarm attitude of the government.

The government’s own manhood suffrage measure – the Franchise and Registration Bill – was given its first reading on 18^th June 1912 and passed its second on 12^th July. After the summer recess, it was debated in Committee of the Commons on 23^rd and 24^th January 1913. On 23^rd January, Bonar Law, the Conservative leader asked the Speaker (Sir James Lowther, later Lord Ullswater) whether the insertion of amendments for women’s suffrage would so change the character of the Franchise Bill that it would have to be withdrawn and reintroduced after revision. Lowther did not reply immediately but after reflection concluded that, the insertion of women’s suffrage would have this effect. On 23^rd or 24^th January, Lowther informed some cabinet ministers privately of his view (though he did not inform the Commons of his ruling until 27^th January). Asquith was surprised by the ruling maintaining that it was “entirely wrong and impossible to reconcile with what took place in the case of previous Franchise Bills”. However, there is no appeal against the rulings of the Speaker and the government had no alternative but to withdraw the measure.

The suffragettes immediately resumed and intensified their militant actions. However, there were two further attempts to get women’s suffrage. In May 1913, a private member’s bill introduced by Willoughby Dickinson was defeated on second reading by 47 votes. Also defeated, in the House of Lords in May 1914, was Lord Selbourne’s Women’s Enfranchisement Bill that lost its second reading by 44 votes. All the legislative activity surrounding women’s suffrage had ended in nothing. Manhood suffrage had also been lost because of its possible conjunction with women’s suffrage in the same measure.

Conclusions

The debate between 1903 and 1914 raised three important issues about women’s rights.

First and fundamentally, there was the issue of the vote. All the suffrage organisations saw this as central to their campaigns. There were, however, differences of emphasis. The Pankhursts saw the vote as an end in itself while other groups like the WFL and the Fabian Society saw it as part of a broader emancipation of women. This, however, led into debates on the economic role of women and the responsibility of men for their economic oppression and on the sexually oppressed role of women within the private sphere. Emancipation was broadened from simply being a matter of the franchise to one of the nature of economic, social and sexual power and the need for equality of opportunity.

The old division between ‘militants’ and ‘constitutionalists’, essentially between the WSPU and NUWSS, is no longer seen as a sufficient means for explaining the nature of suffragism in this period. The activities of the Pankhursts dominated contemporary perceptions of the issue, especially through the press, but their militancy was, until 1912, essentially an extension of the constitutionalist argument, a means of putting pressure on a seemingly intransigent government. It was also a policy of increasing extremism as the ‘shock-value’ of their militancy had to be escalated to maintain press coverage. Whether it was a self-defeating strategy is a matter of some debate since when the vote was finally achieved in 1918, it was the result of factors other than militancy. The focus of the historiographical debate has moved away from the Pankhursts towards other groupings within the suffrage movement. There has been a reappraisal of the role of the NUWSS and of other bodies like the WFL and the radical suffragists.

Historians have also reviewed the class dimension of the suffrage movement and its links to established political parties. The traditional middle class or bourgeois view has been challenged by studies that have given working class women a more positive role. In this scenario, the vote is part of a process of emancipation not an end in itself. The non-party view of the movement, exemplified particularly by the NUWSS and Millicent Fawcett, has also been challenged especially after 1912 when women’s suffrage became part of Labour Party policy.

The emergence of women’s history has resulted in a substantial reassessment of the nature of the suffrage movement after 1903. The dominant role of the Pankhursts has been downgraded. The role of militancy has been re-evaluated. The significance of constitutionalist arguments has been placed far more at the centre of the political stage. It is no longer enough to see the suffrage movement after 1903 solely in terms of the suffragettes. It was far more open and diverse than that. The suffrage movement is in the process of emerging from its one-dimensional existence and the complexity of the story being extended beyond that laid down in the 1930s by George Dangerfield and Sylvia Pankhurst.

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[1] On this issue see Martin Pugh Electoral Reform in Peace and War 1906-18, London, 1978 and Ian Machin The Rise of Democracy in Britain 1830-1918, Macmillan, 2000, pages 121-139.

[2] The position of the House of Lords was clarified because of the Constitutional crisis of 1909-11, two general elections in 1910 and the Parliament Act of 1911. This Act removed the absolute veto of the House of Lords and replaced it with a conditional veto in which it could delay legislation for three parliamentary sessions (three years). The Act also reduced the length of time between general elections from a maximum of seven years to five.

Suffrage after 1903: Suffragists 3 -- Radical suffragism

The development of modern understanding of the radical suffragists is the result of the publication of Jill Liddington and Jill Norris One Hand Tied Behind Us, first published in 1978 (reprinted with an extended introduction in 2000). They take the story of the suffrage movement after 1900 away from London and to the north of England, where the movement began in the 1860s[1].

What distinguished Lancashire suffragism in the 1900s were its vibrancy and the fact that many of its leaders came, not from the educated middle classes, but from working class women. They had come to suffragism through their experience of factory work and of organising working women. It is difficult to say how many women were involved in the radical suffragists’ campaign. Only the names of the most active are known and only a handful of these leading suffragists have been considered in any detail. One was Selina Cooper[2] who had gone into a local mill at the age of ten. She was the only working class woman with the confidence to stand up and to push through motions at Labour Party conferences on women’s suffrage and had been actively involved in the labour movement in southeast Lancashire by the 1890s. Another textile worker, Helen Silcock, carried the women’s suffrage campaign into the male-dominated TUC at the turn of the century. While Selina Cooper and Helen Silcock were championing women’s suffrage at a national level, other radical suffragists concentrated their efforts on building up a local base. As the campaign gathered momentum, it drew in other women into the labour movement. Outstanding among these was Ada Nield Chew[3], who started work as a low-paid tailoress in Crewe.

What brought women like these, with their wide experience in trade union and labour politics, into the women’s suffrage movement? Why was the vote so important? The radical suffragists wanted more than the possession of the vote as a symbol of equality. They wanted it to improve conditions for women like themselves. The radical suffragists rejected the aim of the NUWSS that asked only for the vote ‘as it is, or may be, accorded to men’ -- that is, a property-based vote. Many working class men could meet this qualification but few women could claim to own property in their own right. The radical suffragists wanted the vote not just for the wealthy few but also for women like themselves. They formulated a demand for ‘womanhood suffrage’ to include all women over the age of twenty-one. This was a call for votes for all adults but with a stress on the claims of women.

The rejection of middle class suffrage groups only occurred gradually. The radical suffragists were initially drawn together by Esther Roper, who became secretary of the local suffrage society in 1893. By 1900 she, and her friend Eva Gore-Booth, deliberately pursued a policy of taking suffrage ideas out of the drawing room and into the cotton towns of Lancashire. The result was a rapid expansion of the movement and a gradual take-over by enthusiastic and experiences working class women. As the campaign expanded, tensions between the old-fashioned suffrage ladies and the labour activists grew. The result, in 1903, was the formation of the first organisation of working women for the vote: the Lancashire and Cheshire Women Textile and Other Workers’ Representation Committee. It argued that ‘political enfranchisement must precede industrial emancipation’, the lack of political power weakened their bargaining position.

The radical suffragists continued their attack on the complacent attitude to women’s suffrage adopted by many politicians. Friends in the labour movement were quick to recognise their potential strength but it was even difficult for radical suffragists like Selina Cooper to work through the Labour Party. Women’s suffrage had been a largely middle class demand and to many of the trade union and socialist men who made up the bulk of the Party’s support, feminism was simply another name for increasing the privileges of propertied women. The radical suffragists tried to build a wider movement. Their grass roots campaign sought to get official backing of local trade councils and trade unions and their contacts with sympathetic women’s organisations, especially the local Women’s Co-operative Guild branches. They retained links with the old established North of England Society, valuing its ties with the NUWSS. They also worked with the WSPU in its early years in Manchester.

Initially the WSPU and the radical suffragists co-existed. However, by 1906-7, when the Pankhursts moved to London, differences between the two groups were apparent. The radical suffragists continued to work closely with local labour organisations, while the Pankhursts soon dropped their working class support in favour of influential allies among upper and middle class women. Their tactics also diverged. The radical suffragists had opted for building support at local level while the Pankhursts increasingly relied on sensational actions by London-based militants to catch the headlines. Selina Cooper was horrified when the Pankhursts eventually resorted to arson. The radical suffragists also disagreed with the Pankhursts’ aims. They did not accept that the vote was an end in itself. Selina Cooper summed up their position when she told an open-air meeting in Wigan in early 1906, “[Women] do not want their political power to enable them to boast that they are on equal terms with the men. They want to use it for the same purpose as men -- to get better conditions.... Every woman in England is longing for her political freedom in order to make the lot of the worker pleasanter and to bring about reforms, which are wanted. We do not want it as a mere plaything.”

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[1] In many respects, the notion of radical suffragism used by Liddington and Norris is a geographically narrow one since their book focuses on the suffragism of Lancashire. In practice, many historians today take a broader view of the concept.

[2] Jill Liddington The Life and Times of a Respectable Rebel: Selina Cooper 1864-1946, Virago, 1984 shows what can be done.

[3] Ada Neild Chew Ada Neild Chew: the Life and Writings of a Working Woman, Virago, 1982.

Suffrage after 1903: Suffragists 2 -- Women's Freedom League

The first major split within the WSPU led to the formation of the Women’s Freedom League in November 1907[1]. In September 1907, the Pankhursts decided to select a new executive committee for the WSPU. They were clearly concerned that they were losing control of the organisation and felt their position threatened by other capable women such as Charlotte Despard and Teresa Billington-Greig[2]. The rift was, however, over more than personality.  Democratic principles were involved and a basic disagreement over organisation. The Pankhursts believed that militant tactics required an autocratic structure. The women who left were increasingly sceptical of this approach and could not resolve the contradiction of an undemocratic organisation fighting for democratic reform.  The split also reflected the growing conservatism of Christabel and her mother. By 1907, they wanted to appeal mainly to wealthy women and the move to London the previous year was a further break from the ILP and working class heritage. To ILP members like Charlotte Despard and Teresa Billington-Greig, this new policy was a betrayal. The split was between right and left within the WSPU.

The WFL was probably the smallest of the three major bodies. In 1907, it has been estimated that 20 per cent of the WSPU left to join the League but Teresa Billington-Greig who puts the figure at half disputes this. By 1908, the League had 53 branches from Aberdeen to Clapham but by 1914, even the League itself only claimed 4,000 members and the circulation of its paper The Vote was small, reaching a peak of over 13,000 in November 1913. The Vote was used to inform the public of WFL campaigns such as the refusal to pay taxes and to fill in the 1911 Census forms.

Unlike the WSPU, the WFL did become a democratic organisation with annual conferences deciding policy and electing a national executive committee and president. However, Charlotte Despard dominated the organisation and in 1912 over a third of the candidates at a Special Conference voted to remove her from the presidency because of his growing autocratic manner. It was a militant society though it never adopted the tactics of the WSPU. Militancy was aimed solely at government and the later methods of the WSPU were condemned. On the other hand, the early tactics of the NUWSS were seen as too soft but this criticism abated as the National Union developed a more aggressive policy.

Like the WSPU, the Women’s Freedom League was a militant organisation that was willing the break the law. As a result, over 100 of their members were sent to prison after being arrested on demonstrations or refusing to pay taxes. However, members of the WFL were a completely non-violent organisation and opposed the WSPU campaign of vandalism against private and commercial property. The WFL were especially critical of the WSPU arson campaign. The aims of the League went beyond the vote. It was its broader demands that made the League different from both the WSPU and NUWSS[3]. As well as the vote, it called for equal opportunities. In its early days, there was an acceptance of a woman’s natural domestic and maternal role. All the stereotypes of women as housewives, child carers and domestic workers were tacitly accepted and even welcomed at this stage. Even though this was linked to demands for greater opportunities outside the home, it was increasingly criticised as the aims of the organisation broadened in 1909-10. Women became critical of what Cicely Hamilton[4] called ‘the Noah’s Ark principle’ [5]and she published a critical book on marriage, Marriage As A Trade, in 1909. The debate within the League became increasingly provocative and a Women’s Charter was put forward in late 1909.

In identifying both housework as ‘work’ and the economic power of men within the family, the League was making a further contribution to feminist thought and to the debate within suffragism that paralleled the work of the Fabians. Nevertheless, the League went further by linking women’s oppression to their lack of the franchise. Marion Holmes argued in 1910, “The difference between the voter and the non-voter is the difference between bondage and freedom”. Members of the WFL, like those in the NUWSS, believed that the vote would transform the lives of women. All this implies that emancipation would come through reform and legislation. Gradually the political analysis of the WFL widened and began to examine the relevance of economic power and class. This was partly due to the influence of leading members like Charlotte Despard but was also connected with the industrial militancy of 1910-14. The WFL supported the struggles of working class women and was quick to support their use of strikes. It constantly urged women workers to organise. The vote was not an end in itself but was linked to wider economic and social issues. The League’s attitude to working class women was a result of the links between the organisation and the Labour movement.

The WFL not only supported the struggles of working class women but also became actively involved. It worked, for example, with trade unionists and working women in Poplar in 1910, even before Sylvia Pankhurst organised her Federation in the East End. Yet, not all members approved of the growing association of the WFL with the Labour Party. The 1912 Conference not only accused Charlotte Despard of autocracy but of thrusting her political views on the League. Some felt that the League should have been struggling for all women, not just those of the working class. The growing class struggle from 1911 pushed the political analysis of the League further to the left and this reinforced the view that power did not solely rest with the possession of the parliamentary vote.

Most members of the Women’s Freedom League, was pacifists, and so when war was declared in 1914 they refused to become involved in the British Army’s recruitment campaign. The WFL also disagreed with the decision of the NUWSS and WSPU to call off the women’s suffrage campaign while the war was on. Leaders of the WFL such as Charlotte Despard believed that the British government did not do enough to end the war and between 1914 and 1918 supported the campaign of the Women’s Peace Council for a negotiated peace.

Three members of the Women’s Freedom League stood in the 1918 General Election. Charlotte Despard (Battersea), Elizabeth How-Martyn (Hendon) and Emily Phipps (Chelsea) all argued that women should have the vote on equal terms with men; that all trades and professions be opened to women on equal terms and for equal pay and that women should be allowed to serve on all juries. However, in the euphoria of Britain’s victory, the women’s anti-war views were very unpopular and like all the other pacifist candidates, who stood in the election, they were defeated

The importance of the League to an understanding of suffragism is immense. When viewed in the context of the development of the NUWSS nationally after 1910, it appears that the ‘non-militant’ wing of the campaign for the vote was increasingly associated with the Labour movement and the problems of working class women. The political analysis of the League argued that women’s emancipation went beyond the mere gaining of the vote. In this identification with working class women, there was an inherent danger that women’s oppression as a sex could be submerged and forgotten. The League did address this issue and concluded that emancipation required change in the relationship between men and women. This change, however, was not to be based on a new code of sexual relationships but on the prevailing moral code. In that, the WFL reflected the attitudes of the Labour movement.

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[1] Claire Eustance ‘Meanings of militancy: the ideas and practice of the Women’s Freedom League, 1907-14’, in Maroula Joannou and June Purvis (eds.) The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New feminist perspectives, Manchester, 1998, pages 51-64 and Hilary Francis ‘Dare to be free!: the Women’s Freedom League and its legacy’, in June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton (eds.) Votes for Women, Routledge, 2000 pages 181-202 are the most recent studies.

[2] Margaret Mulvihil Charlotte Despard: a biography, Pandora, 1989, and Andro Linklater, Charlotte Despard: An unhusbanded life, Hutchinson, 1980 are useful biographies. Carol McPhee and Ann Fitzgerald (eds.) Teresa Billington-Greig The non-violent militant: selected writings of Teresa Billington-Greig, Routledge, 1987 is a valuable collection of her writings

[3] This also accounts for the rejection of the title Women’s Enfranchisement League in favour of Women’s Freedom League in November 1907.

[4] On Cicely Hamilton, see Liz Whitelaw The Life & Rebellious Times of Cicely Hamilton, The Women’s Press, 1990

[5] This declared that ‘all human beings naturally and inevitably gravitate towards matrimony, pair off and beget children.’