The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  While miners’ wives had little political involvement and were only marginally represented in the women’s rights movements of the time, the working lives of the Lancashire spinners and weavers necessarily fostered a spirit of independence and even revolt. Women had their own wages to take home (always less than men’s, usually about three quarters of full pay for a man); they worked and discussed their problems with other women at the factories; they organized themselves in reform clubs, associations, cooperative stores and trade unions such as the Women’s Trade Union League and the Co-operative Guild.

  If women (and often their children aged ten and over) were instrumental in earning the family pay, they also bore the brunt of the workload. Coming home from a twelve-hour day surrounded by noisy looms and spinning machines, they were faced with heavy household chores (no labour-saving machines for them, and certainly no maid to help) and the care of their children, often six or more - always under the erosive tension of money worries, which forced some families to pawn their Sunday best from one weekend to the next. Caught in the struggle for respectability and cleanliness, and constantly menaced by the descent into debt and the poor-house, working women were locked into a grid of unrelenting rigidity, as the tailoress Lavena Saltonstall described: ‘In my native place the women, as a general rule, wash every Monday, iron on Tuesdays, court on Wednesdays, bake on Thursdays, clean on Fridays, go to the market or go courting again on Saturdays, and to church on Sundays. There are exceptions, of course, hundreds of exceptions, but the exceptions are considered unwomanly and eccentric people.’ Lavena was under no illusion as to what would happen to such radicals:

  Should any girl show a tendency to politics, or to ideas of her own, she is looked upon by the majority of women as a person who neglects doorsteps and home matters, and is therefore not fit to associate with their respectable daughters and sisters. If girls develop any craving for a different life or wider ideas, their mothers fear that they are going to become Socialists or Suffragettes - a Socialist being a person with lax views about other people’s watches and purses, and other people’s husbands or wives, and a Suffragette a person whose house is always untidy.

  It was scrubbing, cooking, working and childbearing all the way. How grindingly hard this life could be is illustrated by the account of one woman, Hanna Mitchell from Ashton-under-Lyne, who remembered the birth of her first (and only) child:

  One Friday, having done my weekend cleaning and baked a batch of bread during the day, I hoped for a good night’s rest, but scarcely had I retired before my labour began. My baby was not born until the following evening, after twenty-four hours of intense suffering which an ignorant attendant did little to alleviate ... My baby was brought into the world with instruments and without an anaesthetic ... Only one thing emerged clearly from much bitter thinking at the time, the fixed resolve not to bring any more babies into the world. I felt it impossible to face again either the personal suffering, or the task of bringing a second child up in poverty.

  Despite their low status in the household, women were taking decisions for themselves, and the campaign for women’s suffrage flowed almost naturally out of their discussions and concerns. Unlike most of the women she would have lived and worked with, Hanna Mitchell decided not to have any more children and found an understanding partner in her husband. She also became devoted to women’s suffrage. Other women also decided to make a change from the pattern that had been set for their mothers and grandmothers.

  The historian Jill Liddington has unearthed the biographies of working suffragettes from Lancashire and has given us a vivid image of who these women were and what motivated their decisions to involve themselves in politics. There was Mary Gawthorpe, born 12 January 1881 in Leeds, whose childhood in a red-brick terraced house, typical accommodation for workers at the time, is described vividly by Liddington:

  Downstairs, in front of the fireplace stood the heavy wooden tub (later replaced by a zinc bath), in continuous use on Saturday evenings. The floor was covered with coconut matting and a home-made rug; her mother’s invaluable sewing machine, also always in use, stood to the left of the fire to catch the best light. Upstairs were two bedrooms. Four daughters and a son were all born in the big bed; they appeared at regular intervals over a dozen years, ‘controlled entirely by Nature’s rhythm’. Lacking indoor toilets, the bedrooms contained ‘the sanitary indispensables for night use’ - the alternative being a dark walk up Melville Street to fearsome communal outdoor closets.

  Mary’s mother had worked in the mills since the age of ten. Her father was an active Anglican who spent much of his time in church and canvassing for the Conservative Party. Indeed, he partly owed his job as a foreman to the fact that his employer, who also happened to be the local MP, valued his campaigning skills. The constrained propriety of Home, Church and Party, of cleanliness and godliness, began to crack when the father had an affair and went off the rails, losing interest in his religious faith as quickly as he had found that his political convictions could be most usefully discussed in the pub. To the mother, committed to temperance, this came as a shock, as Mary would later recall:

  I am standing by the fire. Mother is also standing there. Father has just come in - he is late for tea, the evening meal. He is explaining himself and Mother says ‘Stop maudlin!’ ... Mother looks at me. Something that can be felt drops into me and I know that Father, whose teetotalism I have strenuously maintained in the school yard, for no beer is drunk in our house, is not teetotal, as indeed someone has said.

  Looking backwards I see that as the moment of transformation when I was first led to take, silently, Mother’s side …

  A clever girl, thirteen-year-old Mary had been allowed to stay at school longer than most other girls, who had either already gone into the factories as ‘half timers’, working six-hour shifts in the mornings and then catching up on much-needed sleep at school in the afternoon, or had taken positions as tailoresses or domestic servants. Now she was given the opportunity of avoiding life as a housemaid by becoming a pupil teacher, a kind of teacher’s apprentice. ‘One day I was a pupil,’ she commented. ‘Next day I was a pupil teacher.’

  As the girl thrived in school, her mother faltered under the dual strain of an unreliable husband and a workload she could no longer shoulder. By the age of forty-five, she had lost all her teeth and struggled to keep up with the demands of daily life. By now an assistant teacher earning £50 per year, Mary took the decision to liberate herself and her mother from the alcoholic father and husband. She accepted a live-in job at Beeston Hill and as she was the major family breadwinner by now, the family had to follow her. Her father refused to move, which may have been part of her plan in an age when divorce was still a stain on the family name. The mother, Mary and brother Jim went on their own. ‘We left him ... The work was done. We had left Father.’

  There is a photo, small, damaged by damp and almost erased on its right half, a photo that shows Mary during this period, a pretty girl with sparkling eyes and self-confident demeanour, her hair gathered in a knot on the top of her head and wearing a dark cotton dress with three white bands of embroidery running down the front. A young woman full of energy and intelligence, sure of herself and nobody’s fool. Her school work brought her into contact with the ideas of the Independent Labour Party and the Leeds Arts Club, run by an eccentric and gifted teacher and Nietzsche devotee who was interested in anything from socialism to theosophy. Here Mary encountered a whole world of ideas, a wealth of perspectives and horizons unknown in the household of her hard-working parents or in the drill-like school curriculum. It was at the Arts Club that she heard her first talk on women’s suffrage, and the idea set her on fire. From now on, she vowed to herself, she would dedicate herself to bringing about the vote for women.

  During this period, around 1904, the first wave of the suffrage movement headed by the Manchester activist Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) and her daughter Christabel had passed through its first, almost timidly respectab
le phase of giving talks and collecting signatures and moved on to more direct means of creating pressure on politicians. So far, they had gathered nothing but polite assurances and patronizing sermons. Asked during a political meeting in Leeds when he would grant the vote for women, Home Secretary Herbert Gladstone had opined that ‘the Parliamentary machinery (six million votes) was “already” large and cumbersome, and that if women were enfranchised, they would be “eligible for all offices” etc, just as men’, a fact he obviously found distasteful to contemplate. Not all of his male colleagues were taken in by so much Victorian obfuscation. Victor Grayson of the Independent Labour Party recorded drily: ‘The placing of women in the same category, constitutionally, as infants, idiots and Peers, does not impress me as either manly or just.’

  ‘We left him ...’ Mary

  Gawthorpe was one of many

  working-class pioneers of

  women’s rights.

  Voices like Grayson’s remained exceptional. Faced with a largely stolid and unmovable opposition, the suffragettes finally decided to go further. ‘The newer and more revolutionary ideas and methods are gradually supplanting the older and more subservient ones, for women are beginning to realise what freedom really means!’ a suffrage activist had told an Independent Labour Party protest meeting, and Mary was to be at the vanguard of this new breed of protesters. ‘Those who are really in earnest,’ she wrote, ‘must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season or out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas, and their advocates, and bear the consequences.’ Together with like-minded activists, she went to political meetings to disturb the proceedings by heckling the speakers and demanding votes for women, a practice that would invariably result in their being thrown out, and would often involve them being roughly treated and insulted by stewards and the public alike. Mary was not discouraged. She became a central figure in the suffragette movement and would be instrumental in the next and more spectacular stage of its campaign. Every meeting, every demonstration and every instance of hostility she encountered seemed to stiffen her resolve.

  Among the young women drawn in by this promise of escape from lives of rightlessness and Dickensian poverty, torn between work, respectability and constant pregnancies, was Lavena Saltonstall, born near Hebden Bridge in 1881. The Saltonstall family was struggling to cope with the father’s pay from the dye works and being constantly on the move between cheap lodgings whose damp ruined their health: Lavena’s five-year-old sister died of tuberculosis, her brother, aged nine, of the same illness. Less fortunate than Mary Gawthorpe, Lavena herself worked in a factory as a ‘half timer’ from the age of ten. Life was closing in upon the vivacious girl, who would bitterly reflect:

  As I am a tailoress many people think it is my bounden duty to make trousers and vests, and knit and crochet and sew, and thank God for my station in life.

  I am supposed to make myself generally useless by ignoring things that matter - literature, music, art, history, economics, the lives of the people round me and the evils of my day. They think I ought to concern myself over clean doorsteps and side-board covers - things that don’t matter so much …

  ‘What mattered’ was always dictated from the outside, and not just for working women. Society had its expectations of women, pressures that were all but impossible to escape.

  Among the established political forces, the Liberal Party had looked most likely to introduce a universal suffrage bill in Parliament, but after their 1906 landslide victory it soon became clear that Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman was in no hurry to include a reform of the electoral system among the raft of changes his government pushed through. Having campaigned for the Liberals and feeling entitled to a share in their triumph, the suffragettes felt angry and betrayed. Quiet, respectable and lawful measures, it seemed, were no longer enough, and the activists decided to change tactics.

  Already on 13 October 1905, the suffragists Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney had interrupted a speech by Sir Edward Grey at Manchester Free Trade Hall by constantly shouting: ‘Will the Liberal government give votes for women?’, only to be first ignored, and then dragged away by police. The constable was rough and the two young women gave as good as they got, kicking, screaming and spitting at the officer, an act of defiance that landed them in court, where they were fined five shillings each. They refused to pay, preferring to go to prison instead. The case created a sensation in the British press. Women who were violent - young middle-class women from respectable families who were jailed not only for their decidedly unladylike comportment but for their political opinions - all this touched a deep chord with the British public and it inspired suffragettes like Mary Gawthorpe:

  The clarion note ... was sounded when Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney were first arrested …

  I heard and answered that call instantly, as soon as the news that the two women were submitted to imprisonment rather than pay a fine was reported in the press, next day. According to my opportunities, I said, writing to Miss Pankhurst in Strangeways Prison, if it was necessary to go to prison in order to win the vote, I was ready. That declaration brought me into direct contact with Christabel ... She now followed me up with a barrage of press cuttings.

  Mary had not been the only woman to volunteer, and after the disappointment with the Liberals in 1906 it soon became apparent that a new generation of suffragettes was coming of age, a generation for whom demure fundraising teas and decorous, military-looking marches were no longer enough. Lavena Saltonstall was part of a group of women who decided that only the press coverage accorded to spectacular events could sway public opinion and put pressure on politicians. They decided to present another petition for voting rights - this time, however, not to a senior politician in the privacy of his office, but on the floor of the House of Commons. They did not wait for an invitation but planned to march on the House, intending to force their way into the debating chamber. They put their plan into action on 11 February 1908, and were arrested and brought before a judge, where Lavena simply remarked that she had nothing to say other than that the constable ‘resisted me in the execution of my duty’. She was sentenced to six weeks in prison. Others were sent to Holloway with her.

  Violence

  The suffragette campaign grew increasingly violent. Stones were thrown at shop windows in Oxford Street and at the windows of MPs and government ministers and, in 1912, at 10 Downing Street. The women who were arrested were often brutally handled and always chose prison over fines or being bound over to keep the peace. The government became nervous. Stories of violent policemen manhandling ladies and factory girls alike were exploited for all their worth by the press. Soon, another development made the situation even more acute. In June 1909, one of the imprisoned suffragettes refused to take food, and the idea of being held responsible for a woman starving herself to death for being denied the vote was too much for the Home Office. It was therefore ordained that women on hunger strike should be forced to ingest food, a measure that turned into an even greater public relations disaster. Newspapers published detailed reports of women being pinned down on chairs by several prison guards while doctors inserted rubber tubes into their stomachs through their noses, through which liquid food would be administered. This was a long and tortuous procedure which proved almost fatal for at least two women who had porridge forced into their lungs instead of their stomachs and nearly died of septic pneumonia.

  Carried by conviction: Emmeline Pankhurst during

  a demonstration.

  Leonora Cohen was one of these extreme rebels for the cause of women’s suffrage. Born in Leeds in 1873 as the daughter of an artist and stonemason with progressive ideas, she had married jeweller Henry Cohen, in itself an act of rebellion, as her prospective husband’s parents, Jewish immigrants from Russia and Prussia, were appalled at the idea of their son’s marrying out of the faith and so cut him off. Leonora was certainly no working girl. Her husb
and’s business went well, their son Reginald was sent to boarding school and Mr Cohen was one of the pillars of the Leeds and County Liberal Club. Having been happily immersed in running the house and looking after her son (a daughter had died of tubercular meningitis), Mrs Cohen began to develop her political interests. Aged thirty-eight, a mother and the wife of a respected local businessman, Leonora’s situation was difficult, as her first forays into activism soon showed. Of all her friends and acquaintances, only her husband Henry supported her regardless: ‘He stuck all that for my sake,’ she would later write, ‘I lost every friend I had ... My name was mud.’

  By now, the suffragettes’ attempts to storm Parliament had become a public spectacle, with crowds of onlookers and reporters waiting for the women to appear, as a reporter for the Yorkshire Post related somewhat breathlessly:

  All the roads adjacent to the Houses of Parliament were blocked by sturdy men in blue, who stood in steady lines waiting for the feminine onslaught ... Plain clothes men hung about furtively under lampposts; ambulance men paraded with self-importance…We found little to suggest that the Palace of Westminster was about to be disturbed …

  But a sudden change came over the scene. The flash-light of the photographer announced the approach of the enemy from Caxton Hall [the Suffragist assembly point] ... The Scotland Yard officers had the pale set faces of men who knew they would have to go through with it. From the Clock Tower the hour of eight was boomed out by Big Ben …

  This time, as on several other occasions, Leonora Cohen was in the middle of the fray, trying to break the police lines and make a dash for the House, but the women were repelled. In the ensuing battle, she was ‘thumped on the jaw with [the] clenched fist of [a] policemen, and knocked down under a mounted policeman’s horse’, as she later claimed. She got up and aimed a stone at the offices of the Local Government Board and hit a window. The missile was wrapped in paper, on which was written in green ink: