Shopgirls

by Pamela Cox

  Led by Margaret Llewelyn Davies, the Guild kept up the pressure in one of the most important of its many projects. She put it to the men at the top of the co-op that an adult woman such as the store manageress simply couldn’t survive on thirteen shillings a week. Another Guild member, Mrs Wimshurst from Lewes, put it another way at her local district conference in 1909. The co-op movement ‘ought not to make it compulsory for girls to marry if they did not want to’, she said, adding that girls ‘were often compelled to marry because the wages they received were so low that they felt compelled to accept the first offer from a decent man’. The Lewes delegates, almost all of them wives themselves, laughed heartily at this while resolving to win greater independence for their daughters and granddaughters. Their efforts paid off. By 1911, sixty local societies had established new minimum wage rates for women, and two years on, 250 had done so.44 This was a pivotal moment. Most trade unions were still unsettled by the very idea of self-supporting women and the threat they posed to the male breadwinner wage. The Women’s Guild was helping to change their minds.

  Inspired by the co-op’s example, the shop assistants’ union embarked on a new battle for a minimum wage while stepping up its old battle against living-in. The two issues were inseparable. As long as they were required to live in, assistants would never be paid a living wage. But at what level should that wage be set in the sprawling and diverse world of shops? Union official Philip Hoffman wrote that early investigations to establish who was being paid what revealed ‘an utterly confused and anarchic state of affairs’.45 The union’s effort to cut through the confusion came in the form of a modest green booklet published in 1910, which set out a new list of suggested minimum rates, organised by trade and location. A London grocer would pay more than a provincial grocer but less than a London draper, for example. The rates would also vary according to age and experience, typically with pay rises when staff reached seventeen, twenty-one and twenty-eight years of age. Predictably, the proposed new system preserved an old tradition: men were still to earn more than women at every level, although women’s rates would be raised.

  Having agreed their preferred wage floors, the union now faced an uphill struggle to persuade shopkeepers to adopt them. Hoffman was in the front line. He criss-crossed the country, visiting store after store, persuading assistants to stand firm until their demands were met. His first victory was at Staffordshire draper’s McIlroy’s of Hanley in 1911. Its staff of eighty-four, mostly young women and almost all living in, were paid between two and eight shillings a week. With the new and momentous agreement in place, their pay more than doubled. Those under twenty-one now earned 7s 6d and those over twenty-one earned seventeen shillings. They now had to meet their own living costs, but most were all too happy to do so, much preferring to have their own money in their own pocket. News soon spread across town and a group of assistants at a rival Hanley draper’s, Teeton’s, walked out on strike in an effort to win a similar deal. The strike lasted two weeks and was described by Hoffman as ‘very bitter’ because some staff refused to join, claiming that they were ‘perfectly satisfied with their wages’. The strikers prevailed. Teeton’s matched McIlroy’s minimum wages.46

  Spurred by the gathering momentum, Hoffman sped down to south Wales, where dissent was growing, especially in drapery. In Llanelly, he worked with the assistants of David Evans to abolish living-in. Moving on to Merthyr Tydfil, he helped organise a strike at Roger Edwards and Co. It quickly snowballed, becoming the focal point of a much bigger debate and culminating in a ‘huge procession through town, with bands and banners looking gay and splendid in the sunshine’. The procession was bound for the local football ground, where the crowd was addressed from the grandstand by the local MP. It helped, of course, that the MP was Keir Hardie, a giant of the Labour Party and its leader until 1908. Hardie also ran a radical newspaper, The Pioneer, which devoted generous column inches to the cause. The whole affair had mixed results for Hoffman himself, however. Vilified by the town’s shopocracy as ‘that bloody German’, he was successfully sued for libel by incensed octogenarian Mr Edwards, who took issue with The Pioneer’s reporting of the case. Financially ruined, but undeterred, Hoffman found love in Merthyr, marrying one of Edwards’ striking young shopgirls, a Miss Morgan. Edwards stood his ground, but not for long. Within a few months, Hoffman was able to claim that living-in had now been ‘almost swept away from south Wales’.47

  Momentous as these events were, the reality was that a minimum wage was not an equal wage. It was still the norm for young female employees – across all industries – to leave paid work when they married and this was a significant factor behind the holding down of all women’s wages. And although groups like the Women’s Cooperative Guild and the Women’s Industrial Council were remarkably effective, their members were still denied the vote and, with it, access to the kind of political power that would force further change. By the 1910s, suffrage campaigns to change all that had been running for nearly fifty years. From the late 1890s, the movement had been led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), a group more commonly known as the ‘suffragists’, who favoured peaceful and patient lobbying. But in 1903 a more militant group – the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) – was formed by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters. Dubbed ‘suffragettes’, initially by a mocking Daily Mail, they believed that the time for talking was over and began taking direct action. They called their new campaign ‘Deeds not Words’. By chaining themselves to railings, setting fire to pillar boxes and burning down public buildings and the empty homes of politicians, the suffragettes courted arrest and publicity. Many of those imprisoned as a result used hunger strikes to protest against their being classified as criminals rather than political prisoners.

  Though their actions shocked many, public support for the principle of votes for women was strong, particularly from the middle classes, but also reaching across the social scale. Early documentary film shows local suffragist groups being cheered as they paraded through the streets, often as part of traditional fundraising, May Day and Whitsuntide processions. In Crewe, for example, they marched as part of a pageant to raise money for the local hospital, behind stilt-walkers, marching bands, a harlequin parade and a fencing display.48

  Canny shopkeepers had long realised that they could cash in on this public support and an extremely beneficial two-way relationship between shopkeepers and suffrage activists had evolved, making them rather cosy, if unusual, bedfellows. Many store owners profited from selling suffragist fashions and merchandise but, more significantly, they also paid to advertise in the suffragist press, all too aware that this gave them access to affluent, influential middle-class consumers. Journals and magazines like The Vote, The Suffragette and Votes for Women regularly carried adverts from stores such as Swan & Edgar, Burberry’s, Derry & Toms, Selfridges and many more. This generated vital revenue for suffrage campaigners, who repaid the favour in order to secure it. The Vote explicitly called out to its readers to ‘support those advertisers who support us’, and each journal published ‘shopping guides’, effectively lists of stores advertising with them, encouraging its readers to shop there. This in turn directly influenced the fashions of the time. Votes for Women proudly claimed that their suffragette colours were en vogue for the autumn season: ‘Almost every shop window is showing purple hats and green hats, purple ties and green ties, purple cloth gowns and green cloth gowns in endless variety.’49 Displays of shoes in the windows of Lilley and Skinner were intertwined with suffragette ribbons. At Peter Robinson’s, you could buy white walking costumes designed especially for parades and demonstrations.

  At the newly opened Selfridges on Oxford Street, support didn’t stop at hats, ties and walking outfits. Indeed, Harry Gordon Selfridge paid for the publication of the Suffrage Annual Who’s Who, which lambasted the traditional Who’s Who for excluding scores of high-achieving women.50 His in-store theatre group, the Selfridge Players, per
formed a play called The Suffragette in the West End. Selfridge also allowed his own shopgirls to declare their support for the cause, at a time when many felt they had to hide their political allegiances from their proprietors. It’s not clear how many of Britain’s 366,000 shopgirls – now constituting the third-largest group of female workers, after domestic servants and factory workers – were active suffrage supporters. Certainly, the movement tried to reach out to them. The Cambridge Women’s Suffrage Association opened a committee room and shop in Benet Street, and organised a young people’s suffrage society with drawing-room meetings and garden parties aimed at shop assistants and elementary-school teachers. The Bristol NUWSS held joint events with the Women’s Co-operative Guild and the shop assistants union. The Birmingham WSPU appointed Nell Kenney as their organiser. Nell and her older sister Annie were among the most prominent working-class women in the movement. Both had worked in textile mills and Nell had also worked as a shop assistant. In a November 1907 report for Votes for Women, she wrote, ‘I am visiting most of the influential people in Birmingham and surrounding districts’. Like other groups, hers was also holding frequent drawing-room, open-air and factory-gate meetings, as well as addressing different religious groups and women’s co-operative guilds.51

  Intriguingly, the Pankhurst family themselves had twenty years of personal experience of shopkeeping. Partly in order to finance their political activities, Emmeline Pankhurst had run fancy-goods shops selling enamelled photo frames, milking stools and art furniture on the Hampstead Road in London, and then at 30 King Street in Manchester. She had dragged in her sister and later her daughters Christabel and Sylvia to help her; none of them liked shopwork. As Christabel later wrote, ‘Sylvia’s artistic gift might adapt her better than me to some phases of the undertaking, especially as her task was mainly to design and paint in a studio, but she, too, was not born for business’.52 In spite of this personal experience of the daily challenges of shopwork and running a small business, and efforts by the wider movement to attract their support, the Pankhursts showed little interest in fighting for shopgirls to be included in the vote. This was a tactical move. Both suffragettes and suffragists were arguing for women to be enfranchised on the same terms as men as set down by the 1884 Reform Act. The Act had extended the vote to adult men who were householders or renting lodgings to the value of £10 a year. This excluded an estimated 40 per cent of British men, including most male shop assistants. Women suffrage campaigners passionately believed that only by demanding that the existing law be extended to include women would they have any hope of smuggling their Bill through Parliament; they knew that thousands would be excluded as a consequence.

  Since the vast majority of shopgirls were young and had no hope of meeting the property threshold, they would certainly be excluded. Margaret Bondfield was unimpressed and drove a characteristically hard bargain. She was neither a suffragist nor a suffragette – not because she didn’t support the cause but because she believed it didn’t go far enough. Having moved on from the shop assistants union, she was now chair of the Adult Suffrage Society. Ahead of its time, this Society demanded that the vote be extended to all adults regardless of wealth or property. She felt that the suffragettes were selling out the working classes – men and women alike – and went head-to-head with them in a public debate. Sylvia Pankhurst watched her in action, describing her lyrically if rather waspishly: ‘Miss Bondfield appeared in pink, dark and dark-eyed with a deep, throaty voice which many found beautiful.’ But she didn’t engage, on that occasion at least, with Bondfield’s broader argument that the women’s vote should simply be part of a much more radical move towards universal suffrage for men and women of all ages and classes, including shopgirls. Instead, Pankhurst belittled her line, stating that ‘Miss Bondfield deprecated votes for women as the hobby of disappointed old maids whom no one had wanted to marry’.53

  On 1 March 1912 the WSPU ratcheted up their ‘Deeds not Words’ campaign by some margin. Hundreds of suffragette supporters launched the extraordinary, chaotic two day campaign nicknamed the ‘War of the Windows’. Dressed in their team colours of white, purple and green, they rushed through the streets of London, from the Strand to the West End, smashing and breaking shop windows of famous stores with stones and toffee hammers, while suffragettes in provincial centres followed suit.54 Among them were Kate and Louise Lilley, daughters of the suffrage-supporting owner of Lilley and Skinner. The militants targeted famous names such as Burberry’s, Barkers, Swan & Edgar, Harrods, D.H. Evans and Regal Corset, but also scores of smaller shops, causing damage to more than 270 premises. They distributed handbills printed by the Women’s Press to the gathering crowds, justifying their violent actions; they accused store owners of passivity, of not using their political clout. ‘You, a prosperous shopkeeper, have had your windows broken,’ the handbill began, and then explained why: ‘You as voters and businessmen have enormous influence’. The suffragettes called on the shopkeepers to use this leverage to encourage MPs to support women’s right to vote. The suffragette leaflet also contained a threat, warning the proprietors that if they didn’t get behind the proposed Conciliation Bill, they might lose their all-important female consumers: ‘You can get on very well without Mr Asquith or Mr Lloyd George, but you can’t get on without the women who are your good friends in business.’55

  The fallout from the window attacks was dramatic for the suffragettes – and considerably less dramatic for the proprietors. Over two hundred suffragettes were arrested and many were charged with window smashing,56 resulting in three months’ imprisonment for some.57 Store owners were left scratching their heads, for their windows had been smashed by the very women whose journals and political activities many were directly funding. In business terms, it didn’t make sense to respond with equal ferocity. So the proprietors simply shrugged their shoulders, repaired their windows, paid a little more lip service to the political aims of the movement and went on advertising.

  One proprietor had got off more lightly. Harry Gordon Selfridge’s very public support for the WSPU meant that his expansive display windows were largely spared. He had literally tied his colours to the mast, one of the first to fly purple, white and green flags when Mrs Pankhurst was first released from prison in 1909. However, one of his former shopgirls would test his support to its limits.

  Gladys Evans joined Selfridges in 1908, having worked in shops from the age of fifteen. Her father was a wealthy stockbroker and one of the proprietors of Vanity Fair magazine. She was a suffragette. While at Selfridges, she devoted all her spare time to the furtherance of the cause, selling the magazine Votes for Women in all weathers. In November 1910, she was among those beaten and arrested by police in the notorious Black Friday confrontation, when hundreds of WSPU members protested against the deliberate stalling tactics of Prime Minister Asquith and his Commons supporters. She emigrated to Canada in 1911 but returned the following year with a steely determination to step up the fight. When she heard about the imprisonment of her fellow suffragettes following the window-smashing attacks, she was radicalised further. In July 1912, she and three others followed Asquith to Dublin, where he was due to speak on Home Rule. The group lay in wait for his carriage as it crossed O’Connell Bridge and, as it drew near, threw through its window a hatchet wrapped in a message that read ‘symbol of the extinction of the Liberal Party for evermore’. It missed Asquith but injured one of his travelling companions. Gladys and the others then headed for the Theatre Royal where Asquith was due to speak the next day. Determined to sabotage the event, they launched a burning chair from an interior balcony into the orchestra pit and also succeeded in setting fire to the cinematograph box and causing a minor explosion.

  The women were detained at the scene and soon appeared at a Dublin court charged with ‘having committed serious outrages at the time of the visit of the British Prime Minister’. Gladys was found guilty of conspiring to do bodily harm and damage property. She and another of the four were sentenced to f
ive years’ penal servitude, the first time any suffragette had received such a severe penalty. She went on hunger strike in protest and, in another first, became the first suffragette to be force-fed in Ireland.58 Back at Selfridges, 253 employees signed an open letter addressed to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, ‘respectfully’ requesting ‘a remission of the sentence’ on the grounds that ‘the offence for which the prisoner was convicted was her first offence against the law’ and noting ‘her high character, to which we can all testify’. Her offence was ‘committed with no criminal intent, but from a political motive, namely as part of an agitation to obtain the enfranchisement of women’.59 In the end, Gladys was released early from prison on health grounds by authorities anxious to prevent her from dying and thereby becoming a political martyr.

  For all this, enfranchisement remained an elusive prize. In their fury, suffragettes ramped up their militancy. In the first seven months of 1914 there were 104 acts of arson carried out by suffragettes, including the burning down of Great Yarmouth’s Britannia Pier and the destruction of the Bath House Hotel in Felixstowe. The most infamous attack on property came when Mary Richardson slashed the Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery.60 Nonetheless, a few days after the declaration of war in August 1914, the suffragettes called a halt to their militant actions and set out to support the war effort. It was the social upheavals of war that finally brought about change. The 1918 Representation of the People Act gave the vote to all men over twenty-one and to all women over thirty who were householders, wives of householders, occupants of property worth £5 a year or graduates of British universities. Most shopgirls and thousands of other young women would have to wait another decade before Bondfield and the Adult Suffrage Society achieved their goal of universal suffrage – votes for all adults.