Suffrage Days

Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement

Sandra Holton, Sandra Stanley Holton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134837861
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This is a history of the suffrage movement in Britain from the beginnings of the first sustained campaign in the 1860s to the winning of the vote for women in 1918. The book focuses on a number of figures whose role in this agitation has been ignored or neglected. These include the free-thinker Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy; the founder of the women's movement in the United States, Elizabeth Cady Stanton; the working class orator, Jessie Craigen; and the socialist suffragists, Hannah Mitchell and Mary Gawthorpe. Through the lives of these figures Holton uncovers the complex origins of the movement and associated issues of gender.

1
FROM ‘SURPLUS WOMAN’
TO INDEPENDENT PERSON
Elizabeth Wolstenholme and the early
women’s movement

We have only a limited knowledge of the early life of Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy (1833–1918). Much of this conies from a short article written in 1895 by ‘Ellis Ethelmer’, a pseudonym often used by Ben Elmy, whom she married in 1874. The picture it paints is thus based on intimate knowledge and is one to which, presumably, she had lent her approval.¹ It is a representation which provides, then, a valuable insight into the identity she built for herself. Here the young Elizabeth Wolstenholme is depicted as typical of those ‘surplus women’ around whom early discussion of ‘the woman question’ often centred in the mid-nineteenth century. Women, that is to say, who had shown themselves superfluous to the needs of society, in failing to find a husband, and in being otherwise without the means to maintain their middleclass status. By her late twenties, however, this account shows that Elizabeth Wolstenholme had, through her own example, done much to challenge the assumptions which lay behind such an understanding of the place of women in society. She had recreated herself as an ‘independent person’.² From this position she began a long career as a ‘woman emancipator’. In old age she celebrated, in her own writings, the emergence of those she dubbed ‘insurgent women’, the ‘militant suffragettes’ of the Women’s Social and Political Union, formed by her friend, Emmeline Pankhurst, alongside whom she spent her last years of active campaigning.³

Her presence illustrates some of the continuities between certain currents within mid-nineteenth-century radicalism, out of which the women’s movement grew, and the militant suffragism of the twentieth century. An appreciation of such continuities has been lost, at least in part, because of the way figures like Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy were ‘written out’ of the history of the suffrage movement. One who worked closely with her at the turn of the century has argued: ‘The work of Mrs Elmy has never been sufficiently recognised, because she was frowned upon by the official suffragists, though she had quite the most able mind and memory of any nineteenth century woman.’⁴ To understand why she was frowned upon by some among the leadership of the women’s movement requires exploring the story of her personal life, and mapping her friendship circles, as well as a survey of her career as an activist. And this in turn brings a fresh perspective on the history of the women’s movement.

Sylvia Pankhurst, daughter of Emmeline and herself a militant, came to know Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy well, and recalled a ‘tiny Jenny-wren of a woman, with bright bird-like eyes, and a little face, childlike in its merriment and its pathos, which even in extreme old age retained the winning graces of youth’.⁵ This fond characterisation reflects the affection which its subject inspired in many. But it belies a personal history of continual, and occasionally painful and dangerous, confrontation with notions of conventional femininity in order to create new opportunities and ways of being for women. The challenging appearance of the militant suffragette has sometimes been read as reflecting a brash new form of popular politics, or as symptomatic of a serious social malaise. But it served also to represent the final release of women from that dependent, passive identity which had informed notions like that of the ‘surplus woman’.

The material reality that had supported this notion was the demographic imbalance between the sexes revealed by the 1851 Census. This had established that unmarried women far outnumbered potential husbands, a situation neither new in itself, nor one which necessarily had to mean hardship for women. But new aspirations to gentility grew in the early decades of the century, requiring that middleclass women no longer join in family enterprises or work for a living. In consequence, few received the education and training necessary to enter middleclass occupations. Many of these occupations were anyway closed to them, as were the universities. And middleclass men in turn became less ready to marry as the financial means required to support new notions of gentility grew. By the mid-nineteenth century, then, the failure of a middleclass woman to secure a husband-provider for her adult life, or the death of her provider, be he father, husband or brother, brought social marginality and economic vulnerability, if not extreme hardship. Many women fortunate enough to enjoy the security of wealth found themselves condemned to a limited life of entertaining, visiting and letter-writing, pursuits which by convention took precedence over the only acceptable ‘work’ they might find for themselves, as voluntary labourers in the field of philanthropy and social service. Those without either a provider or wealth of their own had to support themselves as best they might, within the constraints that prevailing notions of respectability and femininity had placed upon them.

Not all middleclass women, then, were leisured or wealthy or purely domestic in their pursuits. Many had to work for a living, and many established alternatives to married life, sometimes in the distinctive female communities which became a feature of later nineteenth-century society. Teaching offered one of the very few respectable occupations in which a middleclass woman might earn a living and establish herself as an independent person. It was by this means that Elizabeth Wolstenholme dealt with her lot as a ‘surplus woman’. With only limited capital, some education, and greater natural abilities she pursued an occupation which also allowed her to prepare other young women for alternatives to a dependent or ‘superfluous’ future. By the early 1860s, when she was in her late twenties, she had already won for herself considerable standing in the Manchester region where she spent most of her life, and had helped establish supportive organisations of like-minded women. Her professional concerns brought her into contact with the earliest sustained efforts to establish a women’s rights movement.⁶

She was among the first to join the Kensington Society formed in 1865, as a corresponding member.⁷ This debating society brought together women with a special interest in improving education and work opportunities for their sex, but it also provided the forum in which the question of women’s suffrage was revived. In the previous two decades, it had been an issue taken up only by the most radical, notably by Chartists like the Quaker, Anne Knight. Even within such circles it had proved controversial, and impossible in that period to sustain as an organised demand. From this point in her life Elizabeth Wolstenholme becomes more visible to us, not simply because she now began to acquire a greater public presence, but also because of what her choice of friends and associates may tell us about her own outlook and interests.

The women’s rights movement in the latter part of the nineteenth century was built upon kinship and friendship circles among middleclass women. The Kensington Society itself arose out of the activities and interests of the Langham Place circle, an informal grouping of women which had gathered around two friends, Barbara Leigh Smith (1827–91) and Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829–1925). Philippa Levine has recently suggested that ‘the feminism of these women was more a lifestyle than merely a form of organised political activism’,⁸ and certainly it encompassed a wide range of activities, concerns, and needs among the women who made up its membership. The circle gained its name from a club for women established by Barbara Leigh Smith and Bessie Rayner Parkes in Langham Place, where a register for women’s employment was maintained. A wider audience was reached through a periodical, the English Woman’s Journal, in which a wide range of issues affecting women was discussed. Individual women had been making the case for improvement in women’s status and opportunities for over two centuries. In the late eighteenth century the ideas of the French Revolution had prompted the English Jacobin, Mary Wollstonecraft, to write her classic work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In the early nineteenth century advanced radicals, notably the Owenite socialists and some of the Utopian communities of the 1830s–40s, had attempted to address these questions in short-lived social experiments, and William Thompson, prompted by the experience of his companion, Anna Wheeler, had produced another classic text, in his Appeal on Behalf of One Half the Human Race….

But it was mid-nineteenth-century, middleclass radicalism which initially provided the organisational basis for a sustained movement for women’s rights. Barbara Leigh Smith and Bessie Rayner Parkes shared family backgrounds of religious dissent and political radicalism. Both were from Unitarian families with a long involvement in reform movements. Their fathers and grandfathers had been part of the same intellectual and political currents which had formed the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft on the rights and wrongs of women. They, too, had been notable radicals, sympathising with the American and French revolutions, opposing the slave trade, and advocating greater democracy in Britain. Barbara Leigh Smith had also been introduced, through the friendship circle of her aunt, Julia Smith, to a group of radical women, again Unitarians, though together with some Quakers, who had begun to advocate women’s rights in the 1840s. This was a circle that one otherwise sympathetic observer felt carried ‘radicalism to a romantic excess’.⁹

One of the principal humanitarian concerns shared by this circle was the abolition of slavery, and this question brought them into contact with reformers in the United States. When the World AntiSlavery Convention met in London in 1840, it was confronted by a divided American movement, and a delegation from the section led by William Lloyd Garrison which included women. Abolitionism did not prompt the same degree of public fervour for women’s rights among British women radicals as it did among their American counterparts. But the refusal of the convention to acknowledge the standing of American women delegates brought a sympathetic response from British women radicals. Anne Knight wrote to women abolitionists back in America that their example had ‘lighted a flame’ among British women who previously had ‘thought not of our bondage’.¹⁰ Out of this experience, friendship networks between British and American women abolitionists were established, which, as we shall see later, were to prove a valuable link between the suffrage movements in both countries.

The world of male middleclass radical politics provided further important training for many who came to the fore of the early women’s movement. Mary Howitt, another Quaker radical and writer associated with this circle, warned a friend: ‘Thou shalt find us desperate Radicals, Anti-Corn Law League, universal suffrage people.’¹¹ Barbara Leigh Smith, like many other pioneers in the suffrage movement, gained her first experience of active campaigning in the Anti-Corn Law League of the 1840s, the first organisation to encourage middleclass women’s participation in the political process. Such interests were encouraged by her father, who would allow his children to join the company when radical political colleagues, like John Bright, one of the leaders of the League, visited their London house. Elizabeth Wolstenholme was just too young to have taken an active part in the campaigns of the League, but even so, forty years on, she too could still remember ‘watching with deep emotion the great Manchester procession in celebration of the repeal of the Corn Laws’.¹²

Such kinship and friendship circles among middleclass women provided, then, valuable links back to earlier generations of radicals, as well as a forum for challenging ideas concerning the position of women. But more than this, they promoted the creation of purposeful networks, as one circle rippled out to bring contact with others, thereby extending links with male reforming elites and providing the foundations for an organised women’s movement. Such informal circles provided, too, an experience of sexual solidarity, and the emotional and moral support which was needed to sustain the unconventional and often controversial undertakings involved in any campaign for women’s rights at this time. The intense ‘romantic friendships’, like that between Barbara Leigh Smith and Bessie Rayner Parkes, were often the most valued experiences of women’s lives in this period and provided yet further bonds.

Anna Jameson, one of the most popular writers of her day and a particular influence on Barbara Leigh Smith, put forward through her lectures and writings in the 1850s a fresh perspective on the emancipation of women. She argued for a ‘communion of labour’ between men and women, in public as well as in private life, for the duty and rights of women to carry the roles they undertook in the domestic sphere out of the home, into a wider sphere beyond. Such arguments not only undermined the prevailing notion of quite separate spheres for men and women, they also established a bridge between women’s rights demands and more generalised movements for social reform. And they claimed for women particular qualities, knowledge and aptitudes as essential to any proper reordering of society, something additional to and differing from the masculine contribution which determined public life at that time. To be sure, such arguments rested on a notion of sexual difference that continues to provoke controversy among feminists to this day. But it was an argument which insisted on the common humanity of men and women in the possession of a moral sense and the capacity to reason, while also claiming the public value and significance of womanly roles and duties.¹³ In this idea, such advocates of women’s rights were drawing on a different experience and understanding of domestic life from our own. Domestic life was not then so folly characterised by the privacy and separation from community life it now represents, and many of the day-to-day tasks of middleclass women, especially their philanthropic activities, were of considerable social, not merely personal, significance. Whereas present-day historians have often emphasised the constraints and restrictions imposed on women in this period, Victorian women’s rights activists themselves frequently saw opportunities to improve the position of women by expanding these accepted roles.

But nor were women’s manifest wrongs ignored or neglected. Anna Jameson also guided Barbara Leigh Smith into her first organised campaign, to reform the marriage laws as they affected women. Anna Jameson had herself been a victim of these laws, when she was left penniless by the death of her estranged husband in 1854, although it had been her earnings as a writer which had largely supported their family. Under English common law a married woman was defined as a ‘feme covert’. By this doctrine of coverture, a woman who married lost the civil standing of the ‘feme sole’. Her legal personhood was subsumed under that of her husband, and was only regained if she became widowed. One consequence of this was that her husband became the owner of any property which she brought with her into the marriage, and of any wealth which she subsequently acquired, including earned income, unless this property had been protected through the establishment of a trust prior to marriage. Though a new companionate ideal of marriage had been developing over the previous two centuries, the legal basis of marriage retained these remnants of an older patriarchal ideal, producing what has most aptly been described as ‘a curdled mixture of domestic contradictions’.¹⁴ As we shall see, the position of the married woman became a central concern also for Elizabeth Wolstenholme, and shaped her approach both to the citizenship of women, and to women’s suffrage (for the first was a larger issue altogether than the second). The Married Women’s Property Committee, established by Barbara Leigh Smith in 1855, has been seen as signalling the ‘real beginning for the women’s movement’.¹⁵ It also attracted the interest of male reformers in the recently instituted Social Science Association, an organisation which became a valuable forum for raising a variety of women’s rights issues in the years to come.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, this campaign also took on a significance for the personal lives of those involved. Barbara Leigh Smith wrote to Bessie Rayner Parkes of her own strong desire for a husband and children, but asked ‘Where are the men who are good? I do not see them.’ In her turn Bessie Rayner Parkes confided in her journal her own feelings on refusing a proposal of marriage: ‘A single woman is so free, so powerful.’ To her mind only ‘an intense love’ might make marriage an option, ‘but that alone in the present state of society’.¹⁶ Many in these circles were at this time attracted by the ideas of socialist thinkers such as Fourier, who rejected conventional marriage in favour of free sexual union. Barbara Leigh Smith was herself the child of such a union. Her close friend, George Eliot (the pseudonym of Marian Evans), also lived as the common-law wife of another writer, Henry Lewes. In the midst of her campaign to reform the marriage laws, Barbara Leigh Smith proposed a similar union between herself and the already-married publisher, John Chapman. But her father, to whom she was very close, rejected any such scheme, and Barbara Leigh Smith appears not to have questioned either the double standards or the patriarchal authority represented by such an intervention. Elizabeth Wolstenholme was to meet equally stern opposition when she, in her turn, sought a free union some years later.

Meanwhile, the campaign for married women’s property rights ran aground in 1857, when some of the worst abuses in the law were removed by a new Matrimonial Causes Act. But even before this Barbara Leigh Smith and Bessie Rayner Parkes had begun to expand their examination of women’s situation. Above all, they insisted on the importance of work ‘for every human being regardless of sex’, defining work not simply as paid employment but as ‘the productive application of talent’.¹⁷ Together they founded the English Woman’s Journal, in 1858, which Bessie initially edited, through which their ideas and interests found a broader audience, out of which grew the Langham Place circle of women seeking to improve the social position of their sex.

Concern to expand women’s opportunities for employment also led to a related campaign for improved educational provision. When Bessie Rayner Parkes published her ‘Remarks on the Education of Girls’ it prompted a diatribe in the Saturday Review against ‘strong-minded’ women w...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PLATES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. FROM ‘SURPLUS WOMAN’ TO INDEPENDENT PERSON: ELIZABETH WOLSTENHOLME AND THE EARLY WOMEN’S MOVEMENT
• 2. ‘THE REVOLT OF THE WOMEN’: SEXUAL SUBJECTION AND SEXUAL SOLIDARITY
• 3. A ‘STRANGE, ERRATIC GENIUS’: JESSIE CRAIGEN, WORKING SUFFRAGIST
• 4. ‘THE GRANDEST VICTORY’: MARRIED WOMEN AND THE FRANCHISE
• 5. AMONG THE ‘INSURGENT WOMEN’: HANNAH MITCHELL, SOCIALIST AND SUFFRAGIST
• 6. ‘A MERRY, MILITANT SAINT’: MARY GAWTHORPE AND THE ARGUMENT OF THE STONE
• 7. WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE AMONG THE BOHEMIANS: LAURENCE HOUSMAN JOINS THE MOVEMENT
• 8. ‘ON THE HORNS OF A DILEMMA’: ALICE CLARK, LIBERAL QUAKER AND DEMOCRATIC SUFFRAGIST
• 9. MEN, WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE AND SEXUAL RADICALISM, 1912–14
• 10. WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR
• 11. LAST WORDS: WOMEN’S SUFFRAGISTS AND WOMEN’S HISTORY AFTER THE VOTE
• NOTES
• NOTES ON FURTHER READING