A Song of their Own

The Fight for Votes for Women in Ipswich

Joy Bounds

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780750955577
• eBook ISBN: 9780750956963
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What did women from the Ipswich area have to do with getting the vote? Surely it was only in London that suffragettes chained themselves to railings, held enormous processions, went to prison, and burnt down buildings. But women were also making their voice heard in towns and villages across Britain. This book shows how much women in and around Ipswich were involved, right up to the outbreak of the First World War. In the face of great opposition, persistent heckling and even physical violence, these women held meetings, fairs and put on suffrage plays. Controversially, they shut themselves in to avoid the census and resisted tax. At a time when women had very little power inside or outside the home, it is the story of how ordinary women supported each other to demand a say in the affairs of this country.

1

THE LADIES’ PETITION 1866

The long path to universal suffrage

In 1866, sixteen women from Ipswich signed the first ever petition asking parliament to grant them the vote. Nationally, the petition attracted 1,499 signatures. By today’s standards this was very small – even by the end of the nineteenth century such petitions might attract half a million signatures – but during this period there were few women’s organisations or societies campaigning for ‘Votes for Women’. In fact we may wonder how a petition on such a topic was achieved in just a few weeks, with signatures from many places across the country.

At that time, no woman could vote in either a national or local election, or be elected to Parliament. The signatories of what became known as ‘The Ladies’ Petition’ might have been horrified if they had known how long it would be before all women gained those rights – sixty-two years. It was only in 1928 that Britain could finally claim to be a full democracy, with a Parliament which was elected by both men and women.

By the time of that first petition in 1866, some men were enfranchised. The year 1832 had marked the first great Reform Act after years of agitation by both men and women. This Act established for the first time that the vote was not just for the richest landowners and most prominent men in society; it paved the way for the election of a wider cross section of politicians from the industrial cities. Even so, the electorate only rose slightly from 435,000 to 650,000 voters – about 7 per cent of the population. Women were disappointed to be excluded, since they were increasingly active in public life. Educated, middle-class women sat on local Health and School Boards, and were involved in the social development of their areas.

The limited enfranchisement of men soon led to more radical action, with the Chartists* demonstrating, petitioning and agitating for further reform. The newly formed trade unions, Friendly Societies and Co-operative Movement, in which women were also active, fought to show that working people were ‘deserving’ of the vote. Chartism was not as strong in Suffolk as in the industrialised North, but even so, in the late 1830s, thousands of people packed into Ipswich Town Hall to hear about the Charter, followed by large meetings in Suffolk’s smaller towns and villages.1

It was within the context of this growing pressure for further reform that some women decided to be more specific about their need for suffrage. During the recent 1865 general election campaign there had been talk of further enfranchisement of men, and women wanted to be part of it. They were encouraged by the election of supportive MPs like Henry Fawcett and John Stuart Mill, who had mentioned issues of women’s suffrage in his election address.2

The Petition

The Ladies’ Petition was instigated by the Kensington Society, a debating society in London set up in 1865 by a group of middle-class women who specifically wanted to increase opportunities for women. It grew out of Langham Place, a club where unaccompanied women could go to rest and get something to eat, and where there were various meetings and events. The campaigning English Woman’s Journal was published from there. Some of the most radical women of the time were members of both the Langham Place Group and the Kensington Society. These were women who were already leading action on women’s inequality in society or who would later do so. Their leader was Barbara Bodichon (née Leigh-Smith), a dynamic woman who with another member, Emily Davies, was campaigning for women’s access to further education. Other members were Suffolk’s Elizabeth Garrett, who had fought to become a doctor, and her older sister, Louisa.

Educated, able and ambitious women had very few opportunities at this time. The professions were closed to them and, because women could not access higher education, they could not become properly qualified to teach, or progress beyond being governesses. A number of women were carers or nurses but it was not until 1860 that Florence Nightingale would start to train nurses and bring professional standard to that role. A married woman had only just gained the right to keep her property, earnings, inheritance and even her children (though only until they were 7 years old) if she was separated from her husband. There were virtually no rights or protections for working-class women, and double standards as regards sexuality were rife. Some women were beginning to feel that if they had the vote, they might be able to redress some of these issues.

ELIZABETH GARRETT ANDERSON (1836–1917), as she became known on her marriage in 1871, came to live in Aldeburgh, Suffolk as a child. Her life spanned the whole period of women’s fight for the vote – she died just a year before the first women were enfranchised. Her father, Newson Garrett, was a successful businessman and maltster, and built up his coal and coke business at the complex of buildings which now includes the famous Snape Maltings Concert Hall. His grandfather had founded the successful agricultural machinery works at Leiston.

Newson Garrett was unusual in that he wanted his daughters to be educated, and five of the six were sent away to school. However, afterwards there was nothing to do but return home and await a suitable marriage. Elizabeth’s letters to her friend Emily Davies, who unlike her brothers had not been allowed to go to school at all, show her immense frustration with her life. In 1859, she decided she wanted to become a doctor. She had to fight hard against her parents to achieve her ambition, although they fully supported her later.

As a woman, she was unable to gain acceptance to any English medical school, and therefore trained as a nurse at a Middlesex hospital. Discovering that the Society of Apothecaries did not ban women from taking their medical exams, she did so and, in 1865, was awarded the certificate which enabled her to practice as a doctor.* So she became the first woman doctor trained in England. Throughout her long professional life, she was active in developing the treatment of women’s ill-health.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson achieved many other successes in her life, from which women would long continue to benefit. Her story is interesting, not only because it is that of a Suffolk woman who with others instigated and signed the first suffrage petition, but also because it illustrates many aspects of what was causing women to feel such anger and frustration in the mid-nineteenth century. Although her priority was women’s medicine, Elizabeth always supported the suffrage movement and her daughter Louisa became a prominent suffragette in the militant campaigns of the early 1900s.

Elizabeth is the most famous of the Garrett sisters but she was not the only one to play a significant role in the suffrage campaign. Her elder sister, Louisa (1835–1867), worked with the others on the Petition. She died only a year afterwards. Agnes (1845–1935) was also an active speaker and campaigner in the cause of suffrage. In 1875 she and her cousin, Rhoda Garrett (who spoke at an Ipswich suffrage meeting in 1871), set up the first all-woman design and decoration company. They did the interior design for the houses of their family and many of the independent women they associated with, also for Elizabeth’s hospital for women. The contribution of the second youngest sister, Millicent, is considered later.

Encouraged by a speech in the House of Commons, on 27 April 1866, by Conservative minister Benjamin Disraeli, in which he said that women should have the right to vote*, new Liberal MP John Stuart Mill agreed to present a petition to parliament if a hundred signatures could be found. A small working-group was set up which included Louisa and Elizabeth Garrett, Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon. The group called itself the Women’s Suffrage Committee and met in Elizabeth Garrett’s London drawing room. Within two weeks, 1,499 women from all over the country had put their name to a petition for the Extension of the Elective Franchise to All Householders without Distinction of Sex.

Of the 1,499 signatories, almost half came from London, Manchester and Leeds. Forty-eight were Suffolk women, of whom sixteen were living in and around Ipswich. It is interesting to note that there were four signatories in Essex, none in Norfolk or Huntingdonshire and one in Cambridgeshire. This is not necessarily because Suffolk had more highly politicised women than neighbouring counties. Rather, as Ann Dingsdale points out in her study of the Petition, it reflects where the networks of the petition’s initiators happened to stretch.3 In addition, some women may have wanted to sign, but were unable to do so. A woman from Kent wrote:

I doubt if I ever knew a woman who dared do so much as sign a petition without the approbation of the man, husband or other, who determined the amount of cash in her purse and whose temper governed her.4

The high number of Suffolk signatories is no doubt due to the fact that Elizabeth Garrett and her older sister Louisa were two of the instigators of the petition. Although they were living in London at the time, clearly they persuaded their family and friends at home to sign. Nineteen women from Aldeburgh signed the petition, including several from the Garrett family. This is an extraordinary number for a tiny town. Although it is now famous for its musicians, artists and intellectuals, in the middle of the nineteenth century Aldeburgh was deeply rural and conservative. In fact, after nineteen of its female inhabitants signed the petition, there seems to have been no further suffrage activity in the town for about forty years. Other members of the Kensington Society also had links to women in the Ipswich area.

The Ipswich women who signed

Along with the sixteen women from Ipswich that signed the petition, three were from Westerfield. About half of the signatories lived in Fonnereau Road and nearby Berners Street. These were some of the streets of Ipswich where the upper and middle classes lived at that time, and one can imagine such women taking the petition to their friends to sign. Several of the women who signed were single women and widows who were heads of their own households, yet had no say in the government of the country. There appear to be no signatories from the neighbouring towns of Hadleigh, Stowmarket, Felixstowe, or Woodbridge, though there might well have been interested women in those places if they had known about it.

Information given here about the women who signed has been gained from a study of the Petition itself;5 from census records (the Petition was signed halfway between the census of 1861 and that of 1871, making it more difficult to locate women who may have moved during that period); from Ipswich street directories; and from studies by Ann Dingsdale6 and suffrage historian Elizabeth Crawford.7 Such records reveal a little about the domestic situation of the signatories, but in most cases we do not know what led them to be sympathetic towards the Petition.

MARIA ANN ALEXANDER was about 53 years old when she signed the Petition. She lived at No. 16 Museum Street, Ipswich, with her husband, a wool, wine and spirit merchant, and their three children. This was a big, three-storey Georgian house, which probably included the business premises, very near to the town centre.

ELIZABETH BARKER was a widow aged 68 at the time of the Petition, living at No. 30 Berners Street, Ipswich, with a servant. She was the head of the household. Berners Street was built in the 1830s to create a way from the main street to the hospital at the top of the hill. Number 30 no longer exists, but if it was similar to its neighbour, it would have been a detached, double-fronted two-storey house.

ELIZABETH BOWMAN ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Ladies’ Petition 1866
• 2 Stirring up Ipswich
• 3 Hope and Disappointment
• 4 ‘No Vote, No Census’
• 5 The Busy Year Continues
• 6 And Still no Vote
• 7 A Final, Local Militant Act
• Afterword
• Appendix One About the Local Women
• Appendix Two The Main Suffrage Organisations
• Bibliography
• Copyright