Feminism and Feminists After Suffrage

Julie Gottlieb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317402435
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

What happened in women's history after the vote was won? Was the suffragette spirit quashed by the advent of the First World War, and due to the achievement of women's partial (1918) and then equal (1928) suffrage thereafter, by having to wait to be reclaimed by the Women's Liberation Movement only in the late 1960s?

This collection explores how individual feminists and the feminist movement as a whole responded to the achievement of the central goal of votes for women. For many, the post-suffrage years were anti-climactic, and there is no disputing that the movement was in numerical decline, struggling to appeal to a younger generation of women who knew nothing of the sacrifices that had been made to secure their citizenship rights and new freedoms. However, feminists went in new and different directions, identifying pressing issues from pacifism to religious reform, from local activism to party politics. Women also organised around causes that were not explicitly feminist or were even anti-feminist, and this book makes the important distinction between women in politics and women's feminist activism. The range of feminist activism in the aftermath of suffrage speaks for the successes and mainstreaming of feminism, and contributors to this volume contest the narrative of a terminal feminist decline between the wars.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's History Review.

Introduction: ‘flour power’ and feminism between the waves

Julie V. Gottlieb

Did feminist militancy cease when the Pankhursts called a halt to the activities of the WSPU in 1914? Was the suffragette spirit quashed with the advent of the First World War, and due to the achievement of women’s partial (1918) and then equal (1928) suffrage thereafter, having to wait to be reclaimed by the Women’s Liberation Movement in the atmosphere of ‘flower power’ in the late 1960s? Indeed, there is some compelling evidence to suggest that during the 1930s this legacy was a living one, even among young women who were coming to terms with their political identities and resisting through direct action the keenly felt backlash against sexual equality. A rather unusual incident in Ilfracombe, an otherwise sleepy seaside town in North Devon, illustrates well the persistence of feminist consciousness and even of militancy. On 19 February 1937, an organised gang of local ‘spinsters’ in Ilfracombe ‘took war into the enemy camp’ and stormed a smoking concert being held at the Bachelors Club at the Royal Clarence Hotel. Wearing masks and armed with bags of flour and water pistols, they led the raid on the hotel at 9.30 in the evening, taking entirely off guard members who were seated comfortably smoking, drinking, and enjoying the performance of an artiste. The women, one of whom was reported to be carrying a banner, ‘flung their bags of flour right and left’ until many of the bachelors were covered head to foot, and then from atop tables and chairs they fired their water pistols at the flour-covered bachelors. Scuffles ensued when some of the bachelors caught hold of some of the spinsters but the men failed to maintain their grip, their hands pasty with the flour and water mixture. One of the women assailants eventually requested to be photographed with the men, and refused to leave until this was granted. The ring leader was identified as Miss Dinah Hewett, described in the local paper as an ‘Ilfracombe blonde’ (together with her photo portrait showing a young, attractive woman, fashionably attired with pearl earrings and a neck kerchief). She had organised it all with a friend, because ‘We were determined to force an entry, although the men said we should not. We showed them that we women can be really tough when put to the test.’¹ Their actions to close down the Bachelors Club were relatively spontaneous but they also intended to solicit the support of Miss Marjorie Graves, ex-MP, to champion their cause once she was adopted as the Conservative candidate for the North-West Devon Division.

There was an immediate ripple effect to the actions of the Ilfracombe spinsters, and both men and women armed for a copy-cat confrontation in near-by Plymouth. Clearly the local papers that reported these incidents did so tongue in cheek, the parodying narrative tone consistent with that evident in so much of the press coverage of feminist political mobilisation earlier in the century. There was an escalation in violence with the Plymouth incident when Miss Jessie Lugg mustered a force of spinsters, described as ‘25 Amazons’, to wreak the first meeting of the Plymouth and District Bachelors Club, formed by Stocker P. Moss of the Royal Naval Barracks. Lugg said:

The Ilfracombe girls doused their beer with flour but we are prepared to use more drastic measures than that. Arrangements have been made for a stock of foreign eggs and over-ripe tomatoes. That’s the kind of artillery to turn loose on those fellows. We may use flour also, but if we do it will be liberally mixed with pepper.²

Perhaps it was not a mere coincidence that women sought to arm themselves for sex war with weapons sourced from the kitchen. While it would be gratifying to see these ‘homemade’ bombs as the first shots in what might have mushroomed into a women’s revolution, the next time the press checked the temperature of this story it was to report that Dinah Hewett, by now described as ‘an Ilfracombe business woman’ who had led the ‘spinster march’ on the Bachelors Club two years earlier, had ‘quietly married’ Mr Henry Coleman of Barnstaple. When the members of the now defunct Bachelors Club heard of their nuptials, her new status sounding the death knell of her putative political ambitions as one of her generation’s women leaders, they sent a wedding present of flour and rice.³

At one level, these incidents were elaborate pranks, the repackaging of suffragette tactics by the Bright Young Things. They were also inextricable from the local context, which we do not know enough about. However, on another level, there was a much more serious side to it, the Devonshire spinsters expressing women’s frustration with the fruits of franchise extension, and in this case young women who had not had to fight for the vote. Clearly buoyed by the relatively new freedoms in social life—public smoking and drinking, the move towards unisex leisure activities, unchaperoned courtship and the more abstract but no less instrumental legislative leaps forward with the spat of progressive legislation on women’s issues in the 1920s—the young women of Ilfracombe and Plymouth were free from social constraints and from custom in mounting their invasions. Even if they, many of them still in their early twenties it would appear, made no objection to being characterised as spinsters, they did represent a new breed of women. Only three years later it would be their collective ‘woman power’ that was mobilized in an attempt to win another world war. This new generation was aware of occupying an improved position, exemplified by Hewett’s intention to lobby the support of a woman MP. Miss Margery Graves had held a seat for the Conservative Party from 1931 to 1935, one of only thirty-six women to sit in the House of Commons between the wars. These women also clearly understood how men’s claim to male-only spaces and sex-segregated clubability was the thin end of the wedge of male supremacy.

Further, the Devonshire spinsters referenced the political technology of the pre-war suffragettes, including the banners, action shots of militant acts, and flour bombs. The suffragette legacy lived on outside the efforts of the Suffragette Fellowship, one of the few organisations that was the direct progeny of the Edwardian movement. It is difficult to read if the Ilfracombe spinsters regarded their protest in a humorous vein, as the press patently did, but the self-conscious historical referencing is much easier to decipher. Both protagonists and press identified strong resonances with the pre-war women’s movement, and here too suffragette-style tactics were proven to be able to achieve the desired publicity for the cause. This exercise of ‘flour power’ might well suggest that inter-war feminism was not, as has long been its reputation, half-baked nor that it failed to rise(!).

Even if on the Devonshire coast in the late 1930s feminism did make waves, on its own this case is probably not compelling enough to contest the legacy of the inter-war period as an interregnum in the story of the organised feminist movement, as a period of relative stillness between the First and Second Waves. However, the historiography took a decisive new direction from the 1980s, and since then historians have questioned or recast the decline thesis, tracing feminist ideas and ideals through political organisations, associational life, and individual life stories.⁴ Each contribution to this special issue on ‘Feminism and Feminists after Suffrage’ contains a literature review that plots the evolving scholarship over time and demonstrates the heightened interest in inter-war feminism and gender politics. More and more historians have come to understand that reports of post-suffrage feminist decline have been exaggerated, and the volume of scholarship on inter-war feminism attests to this evolved understanding.⁵

This special issue engages with the debates about the status of feminism between the wars.⁶ We are each interested in offering answers to the following questions: was feminism a failure after the vote was won? Was feminism a mitigated success or even a real success? Was inter-war feminism comparatively irrelevant or has the neglect in the historiography been responsible for its relative invisibility? Why did so few feminists succeed in political life in the inter-war years? Do the achievements of partial women’s suffrage in 1918 and equal suffrage in 1928 represent important turning points in women’s history and in the history of feminism? What explains the splintering of British feminism into the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ varieties, and was this split in fact significant or merely a conceptual imposition? How aware were women (and men) of feminist politics and feminist ideas in the period? What accounts for the obsession with the ‘Women Question’ —in press, in print, in intellectual life and in popular culture—in these post-suffrage years? We also wanted to consider how the study of inter-war feminism was particularly timely in view of heightened public consciousness with the commemoration of suffragette milestones such as the centenary of Emily Wilding Davison’s suicidal act on 8 June 2013, the host of events being organised to mark 100 years since the start of the First World War, and in anticipation of the centenary of women’s suffrage in 2018.

Through different perspectives and various case studies an overarching thesis emerges, namely that feminist activism, while scaled back and while showing signs of disorientation and spiritual anti-climax, continued. It continued and the movement(s), its leaders, and its personnel, adapted to changed circumstances. Gullace shows how Christabel Pankhurst’s Women’s Party (1918) succeeded in developing a hybrid Conservative Feminism but failed to make it electorally viable; in fact, not one of the leaders of the pre-war suffrage movement would succeed in winning a Parliamentary seat. Sharp looks at the ways in which the German women’s movement reacted and regrouped in the aftermath of women’s suffrage, revealing significant similarities between the German and British examples. Feminists, the majority of those who self-identified as such now in their later middle age, responded with enterprise and innovation to the political and socio-economic exigencies of their troubled times, especially as the optimism of the 1920s was darkly clouded over by the assaults on women’s status and on democracy more generally by the 1930s. As DiCenzo shows, feminist publishing remained robust in quantity and quality, even as a sense of lost promise came more and more to set the tone. As Thurlow demonstrates, some prominent British feminists ably reconciled their equalitarian demands with religious observance and leadership. As ever, the biographical approach remains particularly popular, illuminating the political through the personal, which is the very stuff of women’s history. For example, both Logan’s study of Margery Fry’s important contribution to prison reform, and my diptychal case study of Kathleen Courtney and Maude Royden and how they experienced their ‘conversions’ from feminist internationalist pacifism to support for the war effort in the Second World War, seek to illuminate socio-political processes through the private and personal.

Most of us would agree that within this diminished movement there was still energy, and that in the broader population so many feminist ideas and goals had become normative, as exemplified by the choices made by the spinsters of Ilfracombe. The permeation of feminist ideas was also exemplified by, as Beaumont demonstrates, the nature of women’s work in the YWCA, and as Breitenbach and Wright illustrate, in the quieter but no less feminist-inspired social work that women performed in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Binard provides a point of contrast with other articles in this issue through her study of three women anti-feminists; their need to take an antagonist stand provides the readiest proof of the mainstreaming of feminist and equalitarian principles after suffrage. At local, national and international levels, feminists took advantage of the opportunities for political engagement that accompanied women’s expanded citizenship and social rights. This special issue contributes to and extends the current historiographical position on a reconfiguration of inter-war feminism after suffrage.

Notes

[1]   Bachelors Women Raid: ‘battle’ at club function, Western Morning News, 20 February 1937.

[2]   Girls Rally for Attack: bachelors warned at Plymouth, Western Morning News, 24 February 1937.

[3]   Spinster Recants: Ilfracombe wedding ends anti-bachelor feud, Western Morning News, 19 May 1938.

[4]   For the earlier incursions into this debate, see Joanna Alberti (1989) Beyond Suffrage: feminists in war and peace, 1914–1928 (New York: St Martin’s Press); Brian Harrison (1987) Prudent Revolutionaries: portraits of British feminists between the wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press); Susan Kinglsey Kent (1993) Making Peace: the reconstruction of gender in interwar Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press); Cheryl Law (1997) Suffrage and Power: the women’s movement 1918–1928 (London: I.B. Tauris); Martin Pugh (1999) Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1914–1999 (Basingstoke: Macmillan); Dale Spender (1983) There’s Always Been a Women’s Movement this Century (London: Pandora) and (1984) Time and Tide Wait for No Man (London: Pandora).

[5]   A recent contribution to this debate is (2013) Julie V. Gottlieb & Richard Toye (Eds) The Aftermath of Suffrage: women, gender and politics, 1918–1945 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan).

[6]   Many of the contributors took part in an international conference on ‘The Aftermath of Suffrage: what happened after the vote was won?’ at the University of Sheffield in June 2011.

Christabel Pankhurst and the Smethwick Election: right-wing feminism, the Great War and the ideology of consumption

Nicoletta F. Gullace

This article examines the roots of Christabel Pankhurst’s Women’s Party in the Women’s Social and Political Union’s adoption of right-wing feminism during the Great War. It explores the blending of radical-right and imperialist ideology with a feminist agenda that combined a demand for women’s rights with an anti-Bolshevik economic policy based on the power of female consumers. This blending of feminism and nationalism won Christabel the ‘coupon’ endorsement of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: ‘flour power’ and feminism between the waves
• 2. Christabel Pankhurst and the Smethwick Election: right-wing feminism, the Great War and the ideology of consumption
• 3. Overcoming Inner Division: post-suffrage strategies in the organised German women’s movement
• 4. Political Life in the Shadows: the post suffrage political career of S. Margery Fry (1874–1958)
• 5. ‘The Injustice of the Woman’s Vote’: opposition to female suffrage after World War I
• 6. Women as Active Citizens: Glasgow and Edinburgh c.1918–1939
• 7. ‘Our Freedom and Its Results’: measuring progress in the aftermath of suffrage
• 8. ‘The Women’s Movement Took the Wrong Turning’: British feminists, pacifism and the politics of appeasement
• 9. Fighting for the ‘Privileges of Citizenship’: the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), feminism and the women’s movement, 1928–1945
• 10. The ‘Great Offender’: feminists and the campaign for women’s ordination
• Index