The Spectator - February 08, 2018

BOOKS & ARTS

BOOKS

Women on the warpath

Jane Ridley describes how campaigners for female suffrage in Britain tried every

tactic in vain. It took a world war to secure even a limited number of women the vote

Rise Up, Women! The Remarkable
Lives of the Suffragettes
by Diane Atkinson
Bloomsbury, £30, pp. 650

Hearts and Minds: The Untold Story
of the Great Pilgrimage and How
Women Won the Vote
by Jane Robinson
Doubleday, £20, pp. 370

When Westminster Council granted plan-
ning permission for a statue of Millicent
Fawcett in Parliament Square to mark this
year’s centenary of women getting the
vote, many people were puzzled. Few had
heard of this feminist campaigner, and even
fewer knew about the suffragist movement
which she led. The suffragette Emmeline
Pankhurst seemed a far more appropri-
ate candidate for a statue. Not only was she
famous, but some feminist historians claimed
that her role in gaining the vote was more
important. These two books stand on dif-
ferent sides of the debate. Diane Atkinson
has written a collective biography celebrat-
ing Mrs Pankhurst and the suffragettes,
while Jane Robinson makes the case for
Millicent Fawcett and the suffragists.
The two leaders were very different.
Fawcett was a plump, bespectacled Edward-
ian matron and her sister, Elizabeth Garrett
Anderson, the first female doctor. Millicent
was a serious-minded woman who was con-
verted to the feminist cause by John Stuart
Mill. Emmeline Pankhurst, who founded
the Women’s Social and Political Union
(WSPU) in 1903, was slight and charis-
matic, an electrifying speaker and a fiery
Manchester radical.
Mrs Pankhurst was a remarkably modern
leader. She understood the power of celeb-
rity, and she exploited it brilliantly. She and
her two daughters, Christabel, her favourite,
and Sylvia, who was never so close to her
mother, enjoyed rock-star fame. Emmeline
enlisted a working-class poster girl, the mill
worker Annie Kenney, thereby broadening
her appeal beyond the middle-class women
who traditionally supported the vote. The
suffragettes relied on sensationalism not per-
suasion; their slogan was ‘Deeds not Words’.

For years Millicent Fawcett and her suf-

fragist friends of the National Union of

Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) had

campaigned for the vote, petitioning, hold-

ing meetings, passing resolutions and act-

ing in a peaceful, constitutional way. But

they got nowhere. When it became clear in

1905 that the incoming Liberal government

had no intention of enfranchising women,

Mrs Pankhurst decided to up the ante.

Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney

sneaked into a political meeting, shouted

‘Votes for Women!’, got themselves arrest-

ed and were sent to prison. This was the

beginning of the militant campaign. The

slogan ‘Votes for Women’ came about by

chance: Christabel and Annie snipped off

the last three words of a banner inscribed

‘Will the Liberal Government Give Votes

for Women?’ because it was too heavy.

The Daily Mail jeered that the Pankhursts

were suffragettes, a female diminutive of suf-

fragist which was intended as an insult. The

name stuck because Mrs Pankhurst cleverly

adopted it.

Atkinson describes the campaign as a

‘drama’ which ran for ten years, with stars,

chorus and supporting actors. In Rise Up,

Women! she salutes the suffragettes, giving

an almost day-by-day account of their mili-

tant acts, which at times becomes wearisome.

Robinson is less impressed by the militants’

glamour, and in Hearts and Minds she gently

skewers the suffragettes. Not that they were

all bad news. On the contrary, the Pankhursts

brought the much-needed oxygen of public-

ity to the women’s cause, and their militancy

was welcomed by Mrs Fawcett at first. But

the suffragettes’ headline-grabbing quickly

became a liability, making it less, not more,

likely that women would get the vote.

Mrs Pankhurst was an autocrat. She had

to be. You can’t organise violence by ladylike

drawing-room discussion. The WSPU had no

constitution. Mrs Pankhurst cancelled all

meetings, and ran the organisation through

a hand-picked kitchen cabinet. As Robinson

points out, the irony here was that the suffra-

gette movement for the extension of the vote

was itself supremely undemocratic.

One thing that made it possible for

Mrs Pankhurst to do without meetings was

the support of a wealthy couple, the Pethick-

Lawrences. They paid for organisers and

officers, thus releasing Emmeline from the

need to raise money through her organi-

sation. When she got fed up with the nice,

generous Pethick-Lawrences, she unceremo-

niously booted them out.

The suffragettes became increasingly

radicalised. Emily Davison, who attended St

Hugh’s, Oxford, was killed when she jumped

out in front of the King’s horse at the Derby.

Even if the evidence suggests that she

may not have intended to commit suicide,

she was as fanatical as many of her fellow

hunger-strikers. In prison, the women who

refused to eat were force-fed either by

mouth or — more horrific — by having tubes

stuck up their noses, making them vomit

uncontrollably.

My favourite suffragette — I have to

declare an interest, she was my great-great-

aunt — is Lady Constance Lytton. She was

radicalised by Annie Kenney. Noticing that

working-class women were savagely abused

by the prison authorities when they refused

food while, as an earl’s daughter, she was

given a speedy discharge, Aunt Con dressed

up as a poor woman with an assumed name,

and got herself arrested by throwing a

stone at a politician’s car. She was brutally

treated and force-fed in prison, after

which she suffered two heart attacks, becom-

ing a lifelong invalid.

The government’s handling of the

issue only made the militants worse.

Again and again, the Prime Minister

H.H. Asquith offered a Conciliation Bill,

granting women the vote, only to withdraw

it at the last moment. What exactly he was

trying to achieve by this tactic has never been

explained. Nor is it clear why this most Lib-

eral of politicians should have been so vis-

cerally opposed to women’s rights. On Black

Friday in November 1910 he went back on

his third promised Conciliation Bill and Mrs

Pankhurst stormed parliament with 300

Mrs Pankhurst was an autocrat.

She had to be. You can’t organise

violence by ladylike discussion