Suffrage Days: Stories From The Women's Suffrage Movement
By Sandra Stanley Holton
Routledge, 1996. 309 pp., $39.95 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
The movement for the women's vote early in this century, argues Sandra Holton in Suffrage Days, is often seen as a middle-class phenomenon, marginal to the real stuff of politics, and dominated by the Pankhurst family (Emmeline, Christabel, Sylvia, Adela) to the exclusion of other activists.
As Holton (research fellow [sic] at the University of Adelaide) argues, the reality was otherwise. The involvement of socialist women, the appeal to working-class women and the involvement of numerous activists other than the Pankhursts were all part of a dynamic movement that not only won the vote for women but challenged many aspects of women's traditional role and put feminism securely on the political map.
Holton interweaves biographies of the lesser known participants in the British suffrage movement with the history of that movement from 1865 to 1918.
Middle-class suffragists included Elizabeth Wolstoneholme Elmy, who broke out of the "dependent, passive identity" of the "surplus middle class woman" of the 19th century, and Alice Clark, a major business woman and Quaker, who was pulled by the cross-currents of the militancy of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and the moderation of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS).
Working-class suffragists included Hannah Mitchell and Mary Gawthorpe, one of the WSPU's most popular speakers, who came to the suffrage movement via the socialist and labour politics of Yorkshire. They espoused a non-revolutionary socialism of the radical Independent Labour Party type.
Holton explores how the "romantic friendships" between many of these women helped to sustain and enrich their activism and commitment.
Holton also honours those men who actively supported the women through mirror organisations and who were sometimes arrested and suffered at the hands of the English state. The bohemian, free-thinking, sexual radical and writer Laurence Housman (brother of the poet A.E. Housman) was the most visible, but even the likes of test cricketer Jack Hobbs were known to join men's demonstrations in support of women's suffrage.
Holton's book is particularly valuable for her analysis of the politics of the suffrage movement, the divergent goals, strategies and tactics which divided the women into radicals and moderates.
The radical suffragists adopted the goal of the vote for all women and all men, i.e. full adult suffrage. The moderates were content to seek equal voting rights for women on the same basis as men. As men's suffrage was determined by property ownership, this was a demand which would amount to enfranchising wealthy women only.
The radicals believed in demonstrating mass support for women's suffrage, whereas the moderates preferred "manoeuvring among sympathetic politicians behind the scenes". The radicals adopted tactics of large demonstrations, civil disobedience and stump spruiking, whereas the moderates preferred the more genteel garden party and the finer points of parliamentary procedure.
Out of sheer frustration in 1912, the WSPU adopted "the argument of the stone", window-breaking of government buildings, whilst militant freelancers moved from symbolic glass-smashing to arson and destruction of art works. Sylvia Pankhurst was one who recognised these tactics as an ineffective minority substitute for building the popular base of the movement. Holton agrees that this was a "fundamental failure of political strategy".
The politics of change from below by mass pressure also confronted the politics of change from above by an elite in the political consciousness of the different wings of the movement.
The middle-class women in the NUWSS pinned their hopes on politely influencing the Liberal government to introduce reform. They put Liberal Party loyalty before an independent women's movement. This electoralist support only helped to prop up a government that continued to disappoint women time and again. The radicals who broke from the halter of "practical" parliamentary politics had far more effect in forcing the government to change policy.
World War I and the relationship of the movement to the state also divided the two wings of the movement. The constitutionalist NUWSS became fiercely patriotic and supported the government under the guise of defending democracy, reason and progress against "Prussian barbarism".
The more militant yet still middle-class WSPU also displayed the fangs of war lust and suspended the suffrage campaign for the duration. The working-class and socialist suffragists were much less likely to wind up supporting the government's war aims.
These political differences led to splits within the movement. As well as the main WSPU-NUWSS split, there was the early formation of the Women's Franchise League, which sought suffrage for married women. Socialist suffragists split from the WSPU to form, not only Sylvia Pankhurst's East London Federation of the Suffragettes, but also the Women's Freedom League.
Yet other expelled or disaffected activists from both the WSPU and the NUWSS combined to form the United Suffragists. In 1915 many of these groups and individuals coalesced in the new British section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
Splits, fragile consensuses, local independence from central leadership, informal coalitions, personal feuds and divided loyalties — all these marked the suffrage movement, as they do any political movement composed of committed but fallible human beings.
The movement, however, was bigger than any of this, and in 1918, the vote, albeit limited to women ratepayers over 30, was won. A crucial beachhead was established that was to lead to full women's suffrage.
The vote was won by the activism of masses of women who broke from their expected lot in life and laid claim to the public sphere in a political process that opened up further rights to conquer.
Holton's book is a valuable addition to feminist history, although slightly disappointing is her political neutrality between radicals and moderates. Rectifying the "neglect of the constitutional wing", and indulging her "interest in alternatives to Radical suffragism" can give the moderate wing more importance than it deserves in the winning of women's suffrage.
Holton does not take sides, preferring to celebrate a "range of feminisms", but the story she tells points comprehensively to the most effective side being those who believed in a radical, mass-based movement for change, compared with the moderates who stuck cautiously and narrowly to the confines of parliament and state. The radical suffragists fully verified the lines of the 1970s equal pay campaign song: "Don't be too polite, girls, don't be too polite".