Lady Constance Lytton Read online

  The holiday itself was not an unqualified success. There was singing and dancing and the girls threw themselves into all the activities on offer with unbridled joy, but Constance found herself on the margins. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence spotted her awkwardness, and the two bonded over their connection to Olive Schreiner (Emmeline’s husband Fred was one of Olive’s friends).51 But when it came to the working-class girls, Constance’s shyness was exacerbated by her social position. She had nothing in common with these women and found it hard to know what to do with herself. Worse, she realised that she herself had unconsciously been trying to ‘save’ them, by bringing along ‘improving’ books. She was embarrassed. The only truly enjoyable occasion was a night when she dressed up as Deborah Jenkyns from Cranford. Only when pretending to be someone else could she be comfortable.52

  Then, one wet evening, the young women gathered around the fire, looking for an enthralling story to pass the time. Jessie Kenney volunteered to talk about her time in prison. Prison! Constance was shocked at the very idea. Worse still was the revelation that Jessie had gone to jail for her part in a suffragette demonstration. Like many people, supportive of women’s rights or not, Constance thought that the suffragette tactics were ‘unjustified, unreasonable, without a sense of political responsibility, and … a bad example’.53 But, on the other hand, Constance was interested in prison conditions and here was a unique opportunity to hear from a recent prisoner at first hand. So, setting aside her misgivings, Constance listened intently.

  After working in a cotton mill, Jessie had followed her sister Annie into the suffragette movement while still a teenager. She was now private secretary to Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence as well as responsible for organising the great processions and pageants in London. She was less voluble and demonstrative than her elder sister Annie, and not as polished a speaker as some of the other suffragette leaders; she was nevertheless equally capable of making an impression. Jessie had been in prison for a month following a disturbance in Parliament Square. Constance was profoundly moved by Jessie’s tale of the grim conditions in Holloway: ‘The tins in which the drinking water stood were cleaned with soap and brick dust and not washed out … the want of air in the cells; the conduct of prison officials towards the prisoners.’ Hearing this first-hand account went straight to Constance’s heart. There was only one redeeming feature of Holloway, it seemed: the food was good.54

  ‘Got knotted up with Suffragettes down at the club in Littlehampton; through them have come into personal first-hand contact with prison abuses. The hobby of prison reform has thereby taken on new vigour,’ she told Adela.55 Constance’s ‘hobby’ is a frustrating ‘fact’ in her history which has been accepted and repeated but for which there is no longer much evidence. There is no record, for example, of her being part of any organisation campaigning for prison reform. Neither does she ever mention visiting any prisons or prisoners before she became one herself. Nevertheless, she was right to conclude that ‘the fact of many educated women being sent to gaol for a question of conscience must do a great deal for prison reform’.56 This became an important issue for those suffragettes, like Sylvia Pankhurst, who were interested in broader progressive campaigns. Some of the suffragettes saw themselves as following in the footsteps of the great Victorian social reformer Elizabeth Fry and, as one suffragette put it, ‘like a flame the movement swept through the prisons, purging them and purifying them’.57 The single-minded Christabel, though, always saw prison reform as a distraction from the main prize.

  What happened next showed exactly the difference an intervention from the right sort of person could make. Constance wrote to Betty complaining of what she had been told: dirty clothes to wear and dirty socks to darn; humiliating inspections and vermin in the combs. Betty passed the letter on to the Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone, who, while saying the account was ‘obviously untrustworthy’, nevertheless demanded an explanation from the prison governor. That seems to have been the end of that, but it’s easy to see why the suffragettes wanted to recruit Constance, who could readily access the highest authorities in the land. She even intended to meet with Sir Evelyn John Ruggles-Brise, the Commissioner of Prisons, and Dr Mary Gordon, the first woman Inspector of Prisoners.58 It does not seem that this plan came off, though Sir Ruggles-Brise comes into this story again.

  Over the next few days, Constance began to consider Jessie’s cause as well as her experience. Though she still took a dim view of Jessie’s militancy, she could not help but be drawn to this quiet and plain-speaking woman. Constance was already as intrigued by the personalities as by the politics in the women’s movement. Emmeline and Jessie seemed to represent ‘something more than themselves … their remarkable individual powers seemed illumined and enhanced by a light that was apart from them as are the colours and patterns of a stained-glass window by the sun shining through it’.59 Annie Kenney too was remembered with striking intensity – and typically purple prose:

  Through Annie Kenney’s whole being throbbed the passion of her soul for other women, to lift from them the heavy burden, to give them life, strength, freedom, joy and the dignity of human beings, that in all things they might be treated fairly with men. It was straightforward in its simplicity, yet there was inspiration about her.60

  Constance had several intense heart-to-heart conversations with Emmeline and Annie but was still unconvinced. It took an animal, rather than a woman, to bring home the urgency of the suffragette cause. Out for a walk in the countryside, Constance came across a sheep that had been separated from the flock and become distraught. The handlers were trying to recapture it and a crowd had gathered to laugh at the scene. The sheep ‘seemed to reveal to me for the first time the position of women throughout the world. I realised how often women are held in contempt as beings outside the pale of human dignity, excluded or confined, laughed at and insulted.’ Constance began to see herself as utterly ignorant. ‘My sympathies had been spontaneous with regard to the wrongs of animals, of children, of men and women who belonged to downtrodden races or classes of society yet hitherto I had been blind to the sufferings peculiar to women.’61 She was ashamed of herself.

  This moment of conversion is a common feature of suffragette autobiography.62 It’s easy to see why: it’s extremely dramatic and has a huge impact. But it’s hard to believe that’s all there is to it. In the first place, there is Constance’s friendship with Olive Schreiner, one of the most prominent feminists of the day. Secondly, during her brief journalistic career she had described to Emily a projected article on the problems women faced. ‘She got very excited the other night, giving me a long account of what women had to complain of, and certainly they have a right to complain if all Con says is true,’ Emily wrote in a letter. ‘No doubt her article will give the solution to the whole question.’63 Finally, there is the fact that her sisters were already involved in the campaign for suffrage. Betty, together with Frances, supported the non-militants and Emily was already a member of the WSPU. Constance was unusual for women of her class in having relations who were already active in the struggle. She cannot really have been as ignorant of what they were up to as she liked to pretend. Indeed, in 1907, she had written to Aunt T backing votes for women. ‘I am for it. I am impressed by practically all the arguments for it, and I have never yet heard an argument against it which I thought convincing.’ A few months later, describing her politics to Dolly Ponsonby, John’s sister-in-law, she came up with ‘advanced – radical – socialist – individualist’.64 In truth, Constance did not suddenly ‘see the light’ in the summer of 1908. What changed was that what had been abstract and distant was suddenly given human form by Jessie and Annie Kenney, and by Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence.

  These is also a completely different version of the story of how Constance came to join the WSPU. Emily claims that she was actually responsible for introducing Constance to the suffragettes.65 She had been holidaying at Littlehampton for several years and through her friend Mrs Webbe had also met Emmeline Pethic
k-Lawrence. Emily, like Constance, was just the sort of woman the suffragettes, with their new interest in recruiting the well-to-do, were after. Jane Ridley, biographer of Edwin Lutyens, says Emily fell for Emmeline’s charms ‘like a ripe plum’.66 Soon she was selling Votes for Women on the seafront with her children, much to her husband’s disapproval. So why would Emily be left out of Constance’s story? Perhaps because by 1914, when Prisons and Prisoners was published, Emily had left the suffragettes far behind. Utterly opposed to all forms of violence, she reluctantly dropped out as suffragette militancy escalated. Nevertheless, Emily was ambivalent about the decision: ‘I know I am right, and yet it seems so contemptible to stand aside and criticise when these other women are giving their lives,’ she wrote.67 Emily had dedicated her life to theosophy instead and didn’t want her former association to taint her spiritual purity. Edwin had always been against Emily’s involvement and perhaps he encouraged Constance in this omission. Or perhaps it’s simply because the sheep story makes for a more dramatic yarn than Emily’s account. It allows Constance to paint herself as living in ignorant isolation before she went to Littlehampton, and to make the suffragettes her saviours.

  Back at home, Constance threw herself into the issue of women’s suffrage. She began studying the question earnestly and went to meetings to hear directly from suffragettes. At home, she was reading extensively: she subscribed to the suffragette newspaper Votes for Women and ordered back copies of the annual report. She could think of nothing but suffragettes and prisons. She called Votes for Women ‘wonderfully thrilling’ and wrote to Aunt T about her ‘immense admiration for the devoted workers and martyrs in the cause’.68

  Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence took Constance under her wing in these early months. Emmeline was genuinely attracted to this shy, awkward, earnest woman, but also acutely aware of the symbolic and practical value of having a women like Constance joining the WSPU. Emmeline tried to win Constance over by urging her of the importance of the mission and the role that she could play, telling her, ‘You have been led to us, for the fulfilment of your own life, for the accomplishment of your destiny and for the working out of a new deliverance for humanity.’69 (She was not given to understatement.)

  When suffragettes were released from prison they were given a reception to honour their service. Emmeline believed that these breakfasts were the best opportunity to make ‘converts and enthusiastic adherents to our cause … the sight of the women who have suffered so bravely, and their words of greeting to the heart of everyone present’.70 She took Constance along accordingly, and was certainly proved right. These breakfasts, with their extraordinary outpourings of emotion, could have been designed exactly to appeal to Constance’s profound sense of empathy. Driving to Holloway, Constance was taken through another world, defined by poverty and hopelessness, peopled by ‘grim despairing faces’. But at the prison gates, a dozen prisoners came tumbling out, ‘looking like children, some of them with their arms outstretched. The mixture of extreme joy and heart tugging for those still left inside was very overcoming,’ she told Aunt T.71 Almost in spite of herself, Constance was being steadily drawn in.

  But though Constance now believed in the vital importance of winning the vote and was prepared to back the campaign, she still held back from total commitment. She had ‘one or two serious disappointments with the policy of the Union’.72 Betty and Frances had lunch with Margot Asquith, husband of the Prime Minister and one of the Souls connected with the Balfours. Margot railed against the suffragettes: she had been spat at and received a letter which wished her husband and children dead. Betty and Frances spoke up for the suffragettes, but it was not difficult to see why this sort of behaviour would alienate Margot, and many women like her.73 Militant tactics were, at this point, beyond the pale.

  NOTES

  1 Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, p. 12.

  2 There is endless historical debate about the degree to which ‘separate spheres’ was just an idea, or whether it really reflected the way people lived their lives. The most obvious example is paid work: for most working-class women, work outside the home was a necessity, and even middle-and upper-class women had important, if unpaid, philanthropic and charitable service in their community. But by the end of the century, even trade unions were arguing that men should be paid wages that would allow their wives (and children) to stay at home. Other examples abound, like the degree of political influence women could exert, even though they could not formally vote.

  3 Susie Steinbach, Women in England 1760–1914: A Social History (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004), p. 257.

  4 Kathryn Gleadle, British Women in the Nineteenth Century, p. 163.

  5 Susie Steinbach, Women in England 1760–1914, p. 248.

  6 Joyce Marlow, The Virago Book of Suffragettes, p. 25.

  7 Jill Liddington and Jill Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us (Virago, 1978) is the classic text on this issue.

  8 Susie Steinbach, Women in England 1760–1914, p. 269.

  9 Kathryn Gleadle, British Women in the Nineteenth Century, p. 168.

  10 Sophia A. Van Wingerden, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain, 1866–1928 (Macmillan, 1999), p. 40.

  11 Susie Steinbach, Women in England 1760–1914, p. 277.

  12 Sophia A. van Wingarden, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain, p. 47.

  13 Sophia A. Van Wingerden, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain, p. 38.

  14 Kathryn Gleadle, British Women in the Nineteenth Century, p. 158.

  15 Sophia A. Van Wingerden, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain, pp. 36–7.

  16 The most complete version of the Pankhurst story is Martin Pugh, The Pankhursts: The History of One Radical Family (Allen Lane, 2001).

  17 Katherine Connolly, Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire (Pluto Press, 2013), p. 5.

  18 Sophia A. van Wingerden: The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain, p. 77.

  19 Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story, p. 42.

  20 Antonia Raeburn, Militant Suffragettes, p. 19.

  21 Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, My Part in a Changing World (Gollancz, 1938), preface.

  22 Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, p. 221.

  23 Christabel Pankhurst, Unshackled: The Story of How we Won the Vote (Hutchinson & Co., 1987), p. 84.

  24 Sophia A. Van Wingerden, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain, p. 74.

  25 Martin Pugh, The Pankhursts, p. 177.

  26 Michelle Myall, Flame and Burnt Offering, p. 113.

  27 Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story, p. 50.

  28 Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, My Part in a Changing World, p. 240.

  29 See, for example, Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: imagery of the suffrage campaign, 1907–1914, (Chatto & Windus, 1988) and Barbara Green, Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage (Macmillan, 1997).

  30 Sophia A. van Wingerden, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain, 1866–1928, p. 79.

  31 Krista Cowman, Women of the Right Spirit: Paid Organisers of the Women’s Social and Political Union 1904–1918 (Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 79.

  32 Sophia A. van Wingerden, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain, 1866–1928, p. 79.

  33 Sheila Rowbotham, A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States (Viking, 1997), p. 10.

  34 Christabel Pankhurst, Unshackled, p. 73.

  35 Susie Steinbach, Women in England 1760–1914, p. 285.

  36 Jil Liddington: Selina Cooper: The Life and Times of a Respectable Rebel (Virago, 1984), p. 193 and p. 199.

  37 Quoted in Frank Meeres, Suffragettes: How Britain’s Women Fought and Died for the Right to Vote (Amberley, 2014), p. 34.

  38 They left the Independent Labour Party, one of the constituent bodies that made up the Labour Party.

  39 Quoted in Katherine Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst, p. 28.

  40 Jill Liddington and Jill Norris, One Hand Tied Behind U
s, p. 205.

  41 Jill Liddington, Rebel Girls: Their Fight for the Vote (Virago, 2006), p. 224.

  42 June Purvis, ‘Christabel Pankhurst and the Women’s Social and Political Union’, in Maroula Joannou and June Purvis, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives (Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 157.

  43 Katherine Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst, p. 34.

  44 Quoted in Katherine Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst, p. 34.

  45 Reported in Votes for Women, 9 July 1908, quoted in Katherine Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst, p. 25.

  46 Betty says this is £1,000 in the Letters (p. 133) but the will itself says £2,000, as well as a blue bracelet and heart given to her by the late Duchess of Gloucester. The will was proved on 29 June 1905; the total value of the estate was nearly £59 000.

  47 Constance Lytton to Teresa Earle, 28 July 1907, Betty Balfour (ed.), Letters of Constance Lytton, p. 134.

  48 The Times, 4 July 1908 p. 15.

  49 www.maryneal.org has a wealth of information about this very interesting woman.

  50 Constance Lytton to Adela Smith, 10 September 1908, in Betty Balfour (ed.), Letters of Constance Lytton, p. 136.

  51 Constance Lytton to Edward Carpenter, 17 January 1909, Sheffield Archives, MSS 386–164.

  52 Constance Lytton to Adela Smith, 10 September 1908, in Betty Balfour (ed.), Letters of Constance Lytton, p. 136

  53 Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, p. 10.

  54 Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, p. 10 and Constance Lytton to Betty Balfour, 24 August 1908, quoted in Joyce Marlow, Votes for Women: The Virago Book of Suffragettes, p. 71.