Lady Constance Lytton

by Lyndsey Jenkins

  revolves around the wilful acts of heroic individuals bent on making themselves forces of change … history is made when change is wrested from the established order by its overthrow. Such change has to be willed by, and requires sacrifice from, those individuals heroic enough to resist tyranny and in this way render themselves forces of history.2

  Lady Constance Lytton is one of those forgotten martyrs and heroic individuals.

  We should not overlook her flaws. She was undoubtedly sincere in her wish for solidarity, but she could be embarrassingly patronising and naive. Marie Mulvey-Roberts, an expert both on Constance Lytton and on her grandmother Rosina, points out that her fellow prisoners are described almost as if they were children: prisons are her ‘hobby’ and cleaning is a ‘craft’, in a way which is almost self-indulgent.3 Moreover, the Jane Warton episode demonstrates the difficult line the suffragettes were treading in their public relations. Many, like Constance, believed that the process of campaigning for the vote, as well as the vote itself, could promote broader social change, like prison reform. But with hunger striking, as with many of their more militant and violent actions, there was a real risk of the focus shifting away from the cause they were fighting for and onto the fight itself.

  But as her confidence grew and her commitment deepened, it is remarkable just how far she set aside her class and upbringing to align herself with the ordinary women and their struggle. After joining the suffragettes, Constance was only Lady Constance Lytton if there was something the suffragettes might gain from her title. The rest of the time, she was desperate to prove that she was just one of the gang. Constance ignored the rules and stood shoulder to shoulder with the oppressed and miserable. Having grown up in a society so defined by class and gender, her willingness to defy expectations and stick to her principles is truly admirable.

  Of course, she could never truly know what it was like to be a working-class woman: to experience the grind of delivering a child every year and watch some of them die; to live in cramped conditions with never enough to eat; to tolerate the everyday dangers of the factory or the mill; to accept early widowhood and early death as inevitable and even preferable to old-age drudgery and the shadow of the workhouse. There is no comparison between a week in disguise and a life in poverty. But Constance did what she could to bridge the divide. The other suffragettes knew this and loved her for it. ‘Our reverence for her is as deep as our love,’ Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence told Betty after Constance’s stroke.4 ‘Jane Warton’ may be all but forgotten today except among a select group of historians and feminists, but her escapades were one of the most dramatic set-pieces of the entire suffrage campaign, and made Constance a beloved heroine. As the scholar Barbara Green puts it, ‘She refused the right to speak for other women and instead earned the right to speak.’5

  Yet because both her family and the suffragettes idolised her, albeit in different ways, it is difficult to uncover and know the ‘real’ Constance. She has been hidden behind her own myth. I have sometimes felt, like Adela Smith, that ‘it is as difficult to write of Con as it is to grasp running water’.6 She is such a mass of contradictions: painfully shy but publicly outspoken; usually gentle but sometimes violent; frequently frightened but often brave.

  It is in her letters, not her autobiography, that we see more of what Constance was ‘really’ like. That is not surprising, since they were written for private perusal not public consumption. Prisons and Prisoners gives only a glimpse of the sense of humour, the kindness and the deep humanity that defined her. It represents her public persona, not her private self. The truth is, she was neither the Francis of Assisi of her siblings’ imagination, nor the shrieking harridan portrayed in the press, nor even the model suffragette, obedient to the leaders and fanatical about the cause, that she constructs in Prisons and Prisoners. She was all these things but she was also much more.

  Constance gave her life to the cause twice over. Once when she gave up everything to devote herself entirely to the WSPU and twice when her efforts paralysed and ultimately killed her. It was an extraordinary sacrifice from an otherwise ordinary life. But Constance herself was always extremely modest about her contribution. Her story, however dramatic, is only one of many astonishing tales from the suffragette movement. In that sense, Constance was just what she wanted to be: a typical suffragette.

  Some years after her suffragette adventure, Constance wrote this note to herself:

  In this women’s war they gave themselves to destroy property but never to acquire it; and their bodies to the hunger strike in prison, but never to take the life of another, or to do any injury to life. Some died, some were driven mad, many suffered in this fight; but all who took part in it were privileged to see and know many things to which their eyes were shut before, and they experienced the joy of doing their part in removing the shackles from women and children.7

  Constance gave everything she had to this ‘women’s war’. She certainly suffered for it, but she found joy in it too. That was her greatest privilege of all.

  NOTES

  1 Constance Lytton to Miss Robins, 19 April 1914, 9/21/35 LSE Library Collections.

  2 Sandra Stanley Holton, ‘The Making of Suffrage History’, in June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton, Votes for Women, p. 21.

  3 Barbara Green, Spectacular Confessions, p. 63.

  4 Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence to Betty Balfour, 14 May 1912, in Betty Balfour (ed.), Letters of Constance Lytton, p. 233.

  5 Barbara Green, Spectacular Confessions, p. 68.

  6 Quoted in Betty Balfour (ed.), Letters of Constance Lytton, p. 268.

  7 In her unpublished notebook, quoted in Betty Balfour (ed.), Letters of Constance Lytton, p. 240.

  SOURCES

  In the 1970s, as second wave feminism gained a foothold, and women looked back at their pioneering foremothers, a landmark BBC series on the suffragette movement, Shoulder to Shoulder, dedicated an entire episode to Constance. The nieces felt that the programme had accurately portrayed her gentle character and sympathetic nature, though they didn’t approve of the actor’s red hair at all. For dedicated fans of the suffragettes, and those who want to see this story dramatised, Shoulder to Shoulder can be found on YouTube.

  Unpublished Work

  Cobbold, Hermione, Memory Lane: Tales of Long Ago, 1905–1930

  Lytton, Victor, Set in Remembrance

  Marion, Kitty, Autobiography, Women’s Library, LSE Library Collections

  Myall, Michelle, ‘“Flame and Burnt Offering”: A Life of Constance Lytton, 1869–1923’, PhD thesis, University of Portsmouth, 1999

  Woodhouse, C. M., unpublished and untitled biography of Victor Lytton

  Archive Collections

  The Balfour Papers, National Archives of Scotland

  The Kenney Papers, University of East Anglia

  The Lytton Papers, Knebworth House

  Letters of the Militant Suffragettes, Women’s Library, LSE Library Collections

  Letters of Constance Lytton, Women’s Library, LSE Library Collections

  The Suffragette Fellowship Collection, Museum of London

  Home Office Records of the Jane Warton episode: HO 144/1054/187986, National Archives, Kew

  Newspapers

  Votes for Women

  Daily Chronicle

  Daily Express

  Daily Mail

  Daily News

  Daily Telegraph

  Evening Dispatch

  National Review

  The Realm

  The Times

  Online Sources

  www.ancestry.co.uk

  www.maryneal.org

  www.oliveschreiner.org (Olive Schreiner letters online)

  www.oxforddnb.com (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

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  — —, As Time Went On (London: Longmans & Co., 1930)

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  INDEX

  Actresses’ Franchise League 1

  Afghanistan 1, 2, 3, 4

  Ainsworth, Laura 1

  Albert, Prince Consort 1, 2

  Alexandra, Queen Consort 1

  Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett 1

  Anderson, Louisa Garrett 1, 2

  Anderson, Mary 1, 2, 3

  Garrett, Millicent 1

  Anglo-Afghan War 1, 2

  Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other, Men, An (Thompson) 1

  arson 1, 2

  Asquith, Herbert 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and Bill of Rights 1

  and Conciliation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

  and hunger strikes 1, 2

  and voting rights 1

  Asquith, Margot 1, 2, 3

  Astor, Nancy 1, 2, 3

  asylums 1, 2, 3, 4

  Aveling, Edward 1

  Balfour, Arthur 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7