A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  Other suffragists were opposed to the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, whose younger sister Millicent sympathised with the campaign, believed that the acts were the only effective medical means of stopping married men from infecting their unsuspecting wives. More significant was the opposition from Mill and Helen Taylor. Both were initially sympathetic to the movement for repeal, but wished to keep the issue separate from that of suffrage. For Mill in particular, the moral-crusade aspect of the campaign for repeal jarred with his secular liberalism. Mill was appalled at what he saw as the ‘fanaticism’ of some anti-CDA activists, including Butler, who described the struggle over the acts in apocalyptic terms. He was also repulsed by what he felt was the unnecessarily prurient detail in which some repealers discussed sexual matters. Mill went so far as to campaign to have anti-CDA campaigners removed from the executive of the NSWS.33

  These divisions were significant not just in their impact on the short-term success of the women’s suffrage movement but also in the way they prefigured later tensions. Was Victorian feminism a moral crusade or a political campaign? Was the transformation of a patriarchal society the fulfilment of divine providence as well as natural justice? What was most important, securing the vote, gaining educational and employment rights, or altering the laws relating to sex, marriage and divorce? These questions would come to the fore during the most intense period of suffragette militancy, 1912–14. For the moment, the campaign against the CDAs helped foster the development of women’s political organisations and brought women further into the sphere of public life. The moral campaign against prostitution eventually scored some victories in the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 and the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act of 1886, though the repeal campaign’s increasing association with repressive ‘moral purity’ movements, such as the National Vigilance Association, disquieted libertarians such as Butler and feminists like Elmy.34

  The Victorian campaign for women’s suffrage culminated in the attempt of William Woodall, a Liberal MP, to tack a women’s-suffrage amendment on to Gladstone’s Representation of the People bill on 10 June 1884. But Gladstone himself was unsympathetic to the issue of votes for women, declaring it to be ‘One of those questions which it would be intolerable to mix up with purely political and Party debates. If there be a subject in the whole compass of human life and experience that is sacred, beyond all other subjects, it is the character and position of women.’35 In a letter to Samuel Smith, MP, published in 1892, he revealed his fear that granting a woman the vote would invite her ‘unwittingly to trespass upon the delicacy, the purity, the refinement, the elevation of her own nature, which are the present source of its power’.36

  Woodall’s amendment was defeated by 156 votes, 104 of which were of reported ‘friends’ of suffrage who had not wished to vote against Gladstone. The efforts of the NSWS suffered a further setback when payments to election canvassers were banned as part of the Corrupt Practices Act of 1883. Suddenly, the large numbers of otherwise unoccupied middle-class women looked like a good human resource for the main political parties. Auxiliary leagues of women supporters were formed, including the Conservative Women’s Council of the Primrose League in 1885 and the Women’s Liberal Association in 1886. These associations drew members and funds from the NSWS. As a clear indicator of the impasse the suffrage movement had reached, no bills for female enfranchisement were debated in Parliament between 1886 and 1892.

  Richard Pankhurst lived with his parents until 1879 when, at the age of forty-four, he married Emmeline Goulden, the twenty-year-old daughter of Robert Goulden, a Manchester manufacturer, amateur actor and, for a time, owner of the Prince of Wales Theatre in Salford. The Gouldens shared Pankhurst’s passion for radical causes: Mrs Goulden subscribed to the Woman’s Suffrage Journal. Emmeline accompanied her mother to MSWS meetings, and it was through her work for the Society that she met and fell in love with Richard Pankhurst. The couple had five children: Christabel, Estelle Sylvia, Henry Francis Robert (who died aged just four), Adela Constantia Mary and Henry Francis. Though all but the last of these births came in the first six years of her marriage, they did not restrict Mrs Pankhurst’s political activities. She was elected to the committee of the MSWS, co-opted into the married women’s property committee, and campaigned on behalf of her husband when he unsuccessfully stood for Parliament in 1883.

  Though it failed, Richard Pankhurst’s candidacy in Manchester had raised his public profile, and in 1885 he was invited by the Rotherhithe Liberal and Radical Association to stand as their candidate in the general election of that year. Mrs Pankhurst again campaigned on her husband’s behalf, but to no avail: his defeat was sealed by the opposition of Irish voters, who had been instructed by the Irish nationalist leader Charles Parnell to vote against all government candidates, whether they were in favour of Home Rule or not.

  But the Rotherhithe election introduced Dr Pankhurst into the vibrant radical socialist culture of late Victorian London. The following year, the family relocated to the capital. Mrs Pankhurst opened a fancy goods shop, ‘Emerson’s’, which she hoped would provide her with financial independence and allow her husband to concentrate on his political career. However, the shop soon proved only an additional drain on Dr Pankhurst’s resources. As his daughter Sylvia drily recalled:

  The estate agent had told Mrs Pankhurst that the Hampstead Road was a rising neighbourhood; undoubtedly it was, but that part of it had not yet risen so far as to support the elegant establishment Mrs Pankhurst intended … squalid market stalls were pitched in the gutter, butchers loudly shouted: ‘Buy! buy! buy!’ on Saturday nights, whilst ill-dressed women, their baskets laden with vegetables, jostled each other upon the densely thronged pavements.37

  The first years after the move were overshadowed by a family tragedy. Their son Frank became ill while the Pankhursts were away on one of Richard’s many business trips to Manchester. He died of diphtheria in 1888, probably brought on by the defective drains at the Pankhursts’ London home. Emmeline’s shop was closed and the family moved to a new, more sanitary home in Russell Square. It was here, in 1889, that Emmeline gave birth to her last child, named Henry (Harry) Francis in memory of his dead brother. Harry’s birth and the closure of the shop signalled Emmeline’s return to active politics. The Pankhursts’ Russell Square home became a centre for radical activity: their guests included William Morris, the author, designer and visionary socialist, Tom Mann, the leader of the great London dock strike of 1889, and Annie Besant, the crusading radical journalist who helped organise the Bryant & May matchgirls’ strike in 1888. Besant was a doughty campaigner not only for the rights of women workers but also for birth control, freedom of speech and freedom of conscience, and had a reputation as a dynamic public speaker, a talent aided by her wonderful speaking voice and good looks: the Irish journalist T. P. O’Connor recalled her ‘full and well-shaped figure, her dark hair, her finely chiselled features … with that short upper lip that seemed always in a pout’.38

  The matchgirls’ strike was a seminal moment in the rise of the ‘new unions’ and in women’s economic organisation. The girls’ working conditions had been abysmal: they worked fourteen-hour days for terrible wages – often reduced further by a system of fines for ‘offences’ such as going to the toilet – and many suffered from health problems linked to working with yellow phosphorus, especially ‘phossy jaw’, a form of bone cancer that led to horrific facial disfigurement and then death. Within three weeks of going on strike, with the help of the Liberal press, the newly formed matchgirls’ union – the first women-only union – had forced Bryant & May to re-employ the strikers and abandon its system of fines.

  Dr Pankhurst’s rather old-fashioned radicalism was increasingly influenced by the emerging socialist movement and by William Morris in particular. As he told a conference sponsored by the Fabian Society in June 1886: ‘Let Mr Morris … train up among his socialistic young fellows a handful of men to go to
parliament in that spirit [the spirit of the Irish nationalists] and they would do noble work.’39 Morris’s uniquely British reading of socialism was deeply influential, arguably because it fitted better with domestic traditions of radicalism and religious nonconformity than did classical Marxism. As Hannah Mitchell recalled, his brand of socialism was particularly appealing to the Christian Socialists of the ‘Labour Churches’, first established in Manchester in 1891:

  The Labour Church attracted a type of Socialist who was not satisfied with the stark materialism of the Marxist school, desiring warmth and colour in human lives: not just bread, but bread and roses too. Perhaps we were not quite sound on economics as our Marxian friends took care to remind us, but we realized the injustice and ugliness of the present system. We had enough imagination to visualize the greater possibility for beauty and culture in a more justly ordered state. If our conception of Socialism owed more to Morris than to Marx, we were none the less sincere, and many found their belief strengthened by the help and inspiration of the weekly meetings held in these Northern towns.40

  Yet Morris was an unlikely revolutionary. Three years before his ‘conversion’, as he called it, to revolutionary socialism, his firm, Morris & Co., had been commissioned to decorate the throne room in St James’s Palace. In 1883 he had joined H. M. Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation (SDF), the first organised British Marxist party. This was no act of youthful hotheadedness on Morris’s part. He was nearly fifty (eight years older than Hyndman), and with a considerable professional reputation as a designer and artist at stake. The SDF certainly gained a lot more than did Morris by the association.41 It was then, and remained, a tiny political organisation, never mustering more than a few hundred supporters. There were connections with the campaign for women’s suffrage through the involvement in the SDF of Helen Taylor, while Mrs Pankhurst, along with Sylvia, attended SDF meetings. Sylvia’s memory of these was not particularly positive:

  The Socialist movement was then so impecunious that its meetings were generally held in the meanest of mean streets in miserable premises, and frequently over foul-smelling stables. The chairman had scarcely finished speaking when Mrs Pankhurst rose up and insisted on leaving the hall. Outside she told us that she had found a bug on her glove, and therefore could not bear to remain any longer.

  Equally, Hyndman struck an unimpressive figure as a popular leader: he ‘always seemed to me like an old-fashioned china mantelpiece ornament – the head and chest disproportionately large and prominent for the lower limbs, and everything from the back view small and unfinished’.42

  For the Pankhursts, though, more important than the intellectual influence of William Morris was their connection with the emerging Independent Labour Party, and in particular Keir Hardie. The illegitimate son of a Lanarkshire farm servant, Hardie had known genuine poverty in his youth. He was fired from his job as a bakery delivery boy for being late for work when he was tending his dying brother. Having successfully formed and led a coalminers’ union in Lanarkshire, he stood for election as a socialist MP for mid-Lanark. He came last in the contest, but, undeterred, in 1888 went on to form the Scottish Parliamentary Labour Party. The president of the party, Robert Cunninghame Graham (known as the ‘gaucho laird’ for his extensive travels in South America), became the UK’s first socialist MP, and Hardie himself gained election to the Commons as an Independent Labour candidate for West Ham in 1892. In the Commons, he refused to observe the official dress code of black frock-coat, black silk top-hat and starched collar, dressing in tweed suit, red tie and deer-stalker hat. In 1893, he founded the Independent Labour Party in Bradford and rose to further prominence by controversially attacking the monarchy in a speech in 1894, in which he lambasted the royal family for refusing to allow a message of condolence to the victims of the Pontypridd mining disaster to be attached to an address of thanks for the birth of the future Edward VIII.

  Sylvia Pankhurst first met Hardie in 1893 when she was just eleven. Her later description of the meeting was clearly coloured by the love affair that subsequently developed between the two: ‘There he was; his majestic head surrounded by ample curls going grey and shining with glints of silver and golden brown; his great forehead deeply lined; his eyes two deep wells of kindness, like mountain pools with the sunlight distilled they always seemed to me … I felt that I could have rushed into his arms.’43 Hardie was a staunch supporter of women’s suffrage but, unlike many leading figures in the Labour movement, viewed the ‘adult suffragist’ position – that the only desirable electoral reform was universal adult enfranchisement – as impracticable in the short term. As he presciently observed: ‘If the workers were prepared to lay every other reform on the shelf, and begin an agitation for adult suffrage they might, if specially fortunate, be successful and get it about the year 1929.’44

  Hardie’s public commitment to women’s suffrage was relatively unusual among British socialists at this time. Indeed, his close association with the ‘genteel’ Pankhursts and advocacy of the ‘middle-class’ cause of votes for women often brought him criticism from within the ranks of the ILP. This reflected a broader ambivalence within the British socialist movement as to the status of women. Some socialist organisations appeared far in advance of most mainstream parties. The Fabian Society, whose members included such literary luminaries as H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, had declared itself in favour of women’s suffrage from its inception, making it one of the first British political organisations, if not the very first, to do so. One of its early political tracts, published in 1884, declared that the ‘sexes should henceforth enjoy equal political rights’.45 This policy was reflected in the very high number of Fabian members who were women, just under a quarter of the total membership in 1906.46

  However, other socialist organisations were less welcoming. Ernest Belfort Bax, a leading member of the Social Democratic Federation and later of the Socialist League, in his book The Fraud of Feminism, asserted the physical and mental inferiority of women, using the ‘evidence’ of a leading member of the medical profession, Sir Almroth Wright, to demonstrate that menstruation and the menopause rendered women periodically insane and therefore unfit to exercise political functions.47 James Ramsay MacDonald, who later overtook Hardie as the leading figure in both the ILP and the Labour movement as a whole, described the suffrage cause as a ‘very great menace’.48

  Especially within the trade unions, chauvinistic attitudes of this kind supported male economic self-interest. Female ‘sweated labour’ threatened the incomes of male workers, as well as attacking firmly established ideals about the role of the man as the breadwinner and provider for his family. There were resonances with the Chartist rhetoric of J. R. Stephens in the frequent refrain of male trade unionists that they sought better conditions for their members so that women could be returned from the factory floor to their rightful place in the home. Hannah Mitchell noted that her male socialist counterparts did not appear to think that domestic workers, too, needed to lose their chains: ‘I soon found that a good deal of Socialist talk about freedom, was, Well, just talk and these Socialist young men expected Sunday dinners and huge teas with home made cakes, potted meats and pies, exactly like their reactionary fellows.’49 She noted with irritation that when she was first imprisoned for suffragette activity, her husband had posted bail for her, against her wishes, so that she could come home and cook his dinner.50

  According to Henry Broadhurst, secretary of the parliamentary committee of the TUC, ‘It was [male unionists’] duty as men and husbands to use their utmost efforts to bring about a condition of things, where their wives would be in their proper sphere at home, instead of being dragged into competition for livelihood against the great and strong men of the world.’ However, as Clementina Black, secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League, noted in a speech to conference in 1887, male trade unionists were noticeably less eager to interfere in the case of trades like needlework and match-making:

  Why not? There is no need
to ask. Men do not work at these trades and suffer nothing from the competition of women. The real point to be complained of is the low rate of payment earned by the women; and the way to prevent the employment of women in any trade they are unfit for is for men to join in helping them to combine in order that they may receive the same wages for the same work. If employers have to pay women the same prices as men, there would be no temptation to them to employ women to do what they are less fit to do than men. But the women are not represented here to speak for themselves, and protest against the attempt of one class of workers – especially a class whose interests are concerned – to impose restrictions upon another class of workers.51

  But the comfortable world of the ‘labour aristocracy’, dominated by men like Broadhurst who enjoyed a cosy relationship with the British establishment, was being increasingly shaken by more militant union activity. Much of it, like the matchgirls’ strike, was led by unskilled women workers. The same year as the Bryant & May strike, 1888, there were strikes by women cigar workers in Nottingham, by blanket weavers in Yorkshire and by cotton and jute workers in Dundee.52 These workers were beginning to learn the lesson taught by the old-established male-dominated unions: that political influence was the route towards raising workers’ standard of living. As Selina Cooper, the millworker, trade unionist and radical suffragist, noted: ‘Those well-organized industries had the ballot box as a lever to raise their standard of life, but the women workers, however well they combined, had no such lever to help them in their demands for the redressing of their grievances.’53 Working-class women, as well as the middle-class suffragists, were becoming increasingly aware of the importance of securing the vote.