Lady Constance Lytton Read online

  ‘Vigorous agitation’ was enshrined in the constitution, though no one yet could envisage just how ‘vigorous’ the suffragettes would become.

  Early in 1905, a Private Members’ Bill to give women the vote was squeezed out of parliamentary time by a Bill requiring carts on public roads to have lights at the back.19 That showed how important the question was to the new government. The Pankhursts had had enough. In October 1905, Christabel and her friend Annie Kenney attended a political meeting at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. The speakers, Winston Churchill and Sir Edward Grey, were both supposedly supporters of women’s suffrage. The women had made a long banner which asked, ‘Will the Liberal Party give votes for women?’ At the last minute, Christabel decided that the wording was too complicated and the banner too big: they hastily printed a new sign which said simply said ‘Votes for Women’, and one of the best-known slogans of the twentieth century was born.20 At the meeting, Annie stood up and demanded to know the answer to their question. The women were summarily thrown out and arrested. They refused to pay the fine and went to prison. This marks the beginning of what became known as the ‘militant’ campaign. Churchill sensed the danger and tried to pay Christabel’s fine, recognising that she would have instant and invaluable notoriety. He was right. All at once, the issue of ‘votes for women’ exploded into the political arena. What on earth had made these nice young women – pretty ones, too – decide to go to prison for a political cause?

  To capitalise on this renewed interest and to take on the new Liberal government, Emmeline decided that this was the moment to transfer the centre of operations from Manchester to London. Christabel was studying to become a barrister at a Manchester law college, so Annie was duly despatched to London and Sylvia was roped in – rather reluctantly – as well. While undoubtedly committed to winning the vote, Sylvia also had her own interests in art and her own cause in the plight of the working-class women in the East End. She was committed to broader socialist campaigning and so was reluctant to dedicate herself entirely to the WSPU, only doing so out of obedience to her mother. Her involvement meant that the early supporters of the WSPU in London were almost all drawn from the East End slums where Sylvia worked. The most notable exception was Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. She was from a wealthy Quaker family who felt a call to serve working women, and had spent many years working with her friend Mary Neal in the East End. Emmeline was captivated by Annie Kenney and, despite initial misgivings, not only became Treasurer of the WSPU but offered her house and resources to the cause. She was a gift to the movement, the practical counterpart to the Pankhursts’ idealism, with a talent for everything the WSPU needed to get going – propaganda, fundraising, editing – and she gave up the rest of her social activism in order to devote her life to suffrage. Until the Pankhursts got involved, Emmeline suggested, ‘The suffrage movement was like a beetle on its back that cannot turn itself over and get on its legs to pursue its path.’21 Suddenly the beetle was scrambling all over the place.

  The WSPU was different from other women’s organisations from the start. Most women campaigning for suffrage were also working for other social reforms, but the WPSU expected their supporters to concentrate all their efforts on winning the vote. Members of the WSPU weren’t content to stuff envelopes and collect signatures year after year with no results. They wanted action immediately, and took their slogan, ‘deeds, not words’, very seriously. Members of non-militant organisations campaigning for the vote were called ‘suffragists’. In 1906, the Daily Mail coined the term ‘suffragettes’ as a derisory term to describe the militants: the WSPU used the label with pride.

  The Pankhursts’ trump card was their incredible personal charisma. Emmeline was the notional figurehead of the organisation, but Christabel was the leader and unashamedly ran the WSPU as a dictatorship. Sylvia, afterwards sharply opposed to her sister’s strategy and tactics, nevertheless remembered with admiration the extraordinary devotion she inspired among her followers. ‘Christabel had the admiration of a multitude: hundreds, perhaps thousands of young women adored her to distraction.’22 This gave her something like a personal army, just waiting to follow her every command; Christabel herself drew an analogy with being the conductor of an orchestra.23

  Through personality as well as politics, the Pankhursts attracted women who otherwise wouldn’t have been interested in women’s rights.24 They were blessed with extraordinary gifts of oratory and rhetoric, with the power to move mass audiences and captivate individuals. There is just one recording of Christabel’s voice, made in 1908, which gives some idea of her forthright determination, but it cannot give any sense of her impact. She was a fiery speaker, quick-witted and deeply impressive in her intelligence. Emmeline, on the other hand, had an incredible emotional appeal which moved her audiences tremendously, particularly as she grew older and visibly weaker.25 Emmeline touched the heart, Christabel appealed to the head: they were quite the team. The Pankhursts were reinforced by other women who were equally as dynamic, inspiring and larger than life. As well as Annie Kenney and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, foremost among these leaders were Flora McDonald, known as ‘the General’ for her military forcefulness, and the secretary, elegant, graceful and ladylike, Mabel Tuke.

  The WSPU directly challenged the notion of ‘separate spheres’ for men and women by taking their campaign to public meetings, out on the streets and into Parliament itself.26 As Emmeline Pankhurst wrote in her autobiography, ‘There would be no more peace until the women’s question was answered.’27 The suffragettes wanted the British people to see that their cause was not only just but urgent. They relished this task, especially in the early years, when, as Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence later recalled, ‘the spirit of laughter and adventure, the spirit of youth had been dominant amongst us’.28 They were imaginative, impatient and exuberant. They heckled Cabinet ministers, disrupted by-elections and deliberately sought arrest. A series of stunts, each more dramatic than the last, kept their campaign in the public eye. When the Prime Minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, was prevaricating over receiving the suffragettes, Annie led a group straight to his front door in Downing Street and jumped on his car. When Keir Hardie introduced a Private Members’ Bill into the Commons and the suffragettes in the gallery thought the idea was not being taken sufficiently seriously, they showered the MPs with banners and literature. When the Prime Minister eventually agreed to receive the suffragettes in May 1906, expressing his support but advising patience, to his astonishment, Annie Kenney jumped on a chair to express her dissatisfaction. Another suffragette, Dora Montefiore, refused to pay her taxes and, when the bailiffs came, she boarded up her home. The suffragettes were putting on a show.29

  But perhaps the most staggering step the suffragettes took was their willingness to go to prison. They would deliberately break the law in some way – increasingly as part of an organised event, like a protest march, often towards Parliament – and then were brought to trial en masse. When arrested, the women were always offered the alternative of paying a fine, but it was a badge of honour that they rejected this and went to prison.30 At first, this was in ones and twos, but soon it was dozens and the women’s prison at Holloway was stuffed with suffragettes.

  Britain had never seen anything like this before. Often well educated, ‘respectable’ and articulate, these women were also, in the eyes of the law and of polite society, violent hooligans and moral deviants who disregarded natural order and shattered social customs as well as breaking laws.31 People hardly knew what to make of them. The police certainly didn’t know what to do with these unlikely criminals, so far removed from their usual charges. Neither did the magistrates, who struggled to know what punishment to impose when it was obvious that no sentence would deter them from further criminal acts.32

  Some people were inspired and thrilled by the suffragettes’ extraordinary energy and commitment. But they were not, even at this early stage, universally admired for their bravery. They were often ridiculed in the papers, painte
d as ‘shrews, viragos, hysterics, unwomanly women who abandoned their children and lacked feminine allure’,33 and because they were now ‘unwomanly’ they were no longer treated with the respect and care usually afforded to women. Out campaigning on the road, they risked not only heckling but physical assault. Eggs were thrown. Cayenne pepper was hurled. Even ‘mice, poor little creatures, were flung at us’, Christabel remembered with a shudder.34 The hostility of the crowd was often matched by the brutality of the police. Even older suffragettes could expect a rough ride and Mrs Pankhurst herself reported several narrow escapes from scuffles. The suffragettes shocked British society, but they in turn were shocked by the ways in which they were treated. They were genteel ladies, and though their upbringing had restricted them, it had also protected them from the harsher realities of life. But they were not to be put off. They responded with indignation and a burning sense of righteousness in the justice of their cause.

  All the publicity garnered by the suffragettes masked the fact that their numbers always remained relatively small. Only around a thousand ever went to prison, for example, though many of these were repeat offenders who were incarcerated multiple times. This is not surprising. Becoming a militant required incredible reserves of dedication and extraordinary single-mindedness. On a purely practical level, women who couldn’t afford to leave their job, women with children and women who couldn’t risk family disapproval were simply unable to do what was required, however much they may have wanted to. This didn’t especially matter to Emmeline and Christabel, whose strategy depended on a small number of women having a massive impact with astonishing levels of intensity. The suffragettes were not a traditional campaigning organisation or a political party: instead they were, in historian Susie Steinbach’s words ‘a kind of army or secular religion’.35

  One consequence of the suffragette campaign, then, was that thousands of women joined the non-militant National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies: it had 13,000 members by 1909 and 42,000 in 1912.36 Some were women who reluctantly concluded that they couldn’t make enough of a commitment to join the WSPU. Many more, though, were women who decided they supported the ends but not the means of the suffragettes. Some of these women wanted to distance themselves from the antics of their militant sisters, but Mrs Fawcett, at least in the early years, was a supporter, saying, ‘Far from having injured the movement, they have done more during the last twelve months to bring it within the region of practical politics than we have been able to accomplish in the same number of years.’37

  But there were already hints of the drawbacks associated with the Pankhursts’ policies. For example, their policy was to campaign against any Liberal government candidate standing for election until the government committed to enfranchising women: this helped ensure Winston Churchill lost his seat at a by-election, and a new one had to be hastily found. But campaigning against a Liberal candidate if it led to a Conservative victory seemed ludicrous and self-defeating to critics. This move brought condemnation from the Labour Party, which adopted its own policy of refusing to support ‘votes for women’ if the franchise was based on a property qualification: instead, their policy was to advocate for universal suffrage – however unlikely that may have been. Despite Keir Hardie’s best efforts, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst left the party, dividing the suffrage and the labour movements for several years.38 This was a profound concern to many women, who disliked having to choose ‘sex’ over ‘class;’ Sylvia Pankhurst in particular was very uncomfortable with this position. Class was an increasingly salient issue for the WSPU. The first edition of the suffragette paper Votes for Women demanded that ‘if you have any class feeling you must leave that behind when you come into this movement. For the women who are in our ranks know no barriers of class distinction.’39 But, in practice, it tended to attract women who were already relatively well off. Their belief that other concerns were secondary to the vote – because having the vote would help solve other problems – could seem overly optimistic and hopelessly naïve to working-class women faced with enormous practical difficulties in their day-to-day lives. Such women could also be put off by what could sometimes be seen as ‘self-indulgent’ antics.40

  Another controversial element of the WSPU, which continues to divide historians, was the perceived level of autocracy. This does not mean that members just followed orders with unquestioning obedience. Many ordinary members took action on their own initiative, including Marion Wallace Dunlop, the first hunger striker, or Emily Wilding Davison, who started the craze for torching postboxes. It was the ordinary rank-and-file members who kept militancy on the advance with increasingly violent acts, only gaining approval from Christabel later. But Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst would not tolerate any woman whom they saw as a threat to their own popularity or power in the organisation. The suffragette historian Jill Liddington quotes a contemporary critic saying, ‘Mrs Pankhurst would walk over the dead bodies of all her children except Christabel and say, “See what I have given for the cause,”’41 while Christabel is seen, in the words of her biographer June Purvis, as ‘ruthless, cold, ambitious, unscrupulous, autocratic, snobbish, calculating, selfish, right-wing and unco-operative opportunist’.42 While this ignores the realities of what they had to do to survive, it is nevertheless astonishing how many of their friends and loyal supporters the Pankhursts managed to alienate. Some of these left in disgust or astonishment: others were acrimoniously ejected. The first split came in 1907, when Charlotte Despard and Teresa Billington-Greig left to form the Women’s Freedom League, a more democratic organisation committed to passive resistance. Losing some of their most important personnel at the same time as they were severing ties with the labour movement shows just how confident Christabel and Emmeline were.

  The suffragettes deliberately employed a two-pronged strategy, combining mass protest action with individual acts of daring.43 In 1908, the Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone (the son of Robert Lytton’s nemesis William) made the mistake of saying that men had won the vote through large-scale protest ‘but of course, women cannot be expected to assemble in such masses’.44 The suffragettes set out to prove them wrong. In June, MPs were taking tea on the terraces of the House of Commons, looking forward to their summer break. Their peace was shattered by a boatload of suffragettes careering down the Thames. A gleeful Flora Drummond unfurled a banner informing the MPs of a mass march at the weekend. ‘Cabinet members especially invited,’ it read. Then suffragettes carried off their greatest propaganda victory to date: a march and demonstration in Hyde Park, which attracted half a million people. The suffragette colours of white, purple and green were out in force; the air was buzzing with excitement and goodwill. The suffragettes felt that, surely, with so much visible support, the government could not ignore their demands for much longer.

  There were, though, hints of trouble ahead. Campbell-Bannerman resigned owing to illness in April 1908, dying a few weeks later. Herbert Asquith, a long-standing, implacable opponent of women’s suffrage, was now the Prime Minister. Though the Hyde Park demonstration passed off without incident, afterwards, Edith New and Mary Leigh went to Downing Street and threw stones at No. 10. Later that month, arrested on a deputation, Florence Haig told police, ‘Mr Asquith has shown us that peaceful demonstrations are useless’.45 Until now, the suffragettes had been loud, disruptive and a general nuisance. They had not, however, been deliberately violent.

  Nevertheless, the general mood was optimistic and joyful. The suffragettes left London for their summer holidays alive with hope and energy. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence headed off to the seaside in Littlehampton for her annual break with her friend Mary Neal. Every year, they offered sea bathing, boating and dancing to a group of working-class girls at a hostel they had set up called The Green Lady. One of their guests that year was quite different from their usual mill girls and factory hands.

  In May 1905, Constance’s great-aunt Georgina Bloomfield died, leaving £2,000 to her namesake niece.46 Constance decided,
with characteristic unselfishness, to spend it on improving life for the local village girls. But she shrank from established methods of charity and cast about for a better way of investing the money, a way which might make a genuine difference to their lives. Eventually, she decided upon establishing a Morris dancing club. Morris dancing had been undergoing a revival since the turn of the century. Neville was an early enthusiast and introduced Constance to the movement. Morris dancing appealed to Constance because it put her ‘into touch with the village-folk … free from churchiness or Lady Bountifulness or District Visitor Business or other terrors.’47 In the summer of 1908, Constance, Betty and Neville attended a folk music event in Westminster, run by the Esperance Club, which was encouraging working-class girls to take up Morris dancing.48 Constance enlisted their help to run the sessions for her and became friends with the club’s founder, Mary Neal.

  Like her friend Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Mary Neal was a relatively wealthy woman from a good family who had put aside her privilege in order to work among the poor in east London. The two women had collaborated on a series of projects, like a dressmaking club which gave working-class girls a steady job and a fair wage, and the Green Lady Hostel at Littlehampton, which offered them much-needed holidays. After Emmeline got married in 1901 and began to work more closely with her husband, Mary became interested in Cecil Sharp’s embryonic work studying English folk music and dance. She taught Morris dances to the Esperance Club girls, convinced of their many ‘improving’ benefits. In fact, though it is Cecil Sharp who is remembered for rescuing folk music and dancing when it was at risk of being lost entirely, it was Mary Neal and the women in her club who brought that music to life and convinced Sharp that his project was worthwhile.49 Though their paths diverged, Emmeline and Mary remained very close and they joined the WSPU together. But the vote was never one of her main concerns. Constance liked Mary because she was ‘the only practising philanthropist I have ever met who is sympathetic to me – one feels she does it all for her own fun, not for the good of her soul, and to join in with, and really appreciate the lives of those she befriends, rather than to “save” them’.50 Constance was invited to join the club’s holiday in the summer of 1908.