Votes For Women

Sandra Holton, Dr June Purvis, June Purvis, Sandra Holton, Dr June Purvis, June Purvis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134610648
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Votes for Women provides an innovative re-examination of the suffrage movement, presenting new perspectives which challenge the existing literature on this subject.
This fascinating book charts the history of the movement in Britain from the nineteenth century to the postwar period, assessing important figures such as;
* Emmeline Pankhurst and the militant wing
* Millicent Garrett Fawcett, leader of the constitutional wing
*Jennie Baines and her link with the international suffrage movements.

1

THE MAKING OF SUFFRAGE HISTORY

Sandra Stanley Holton

INTRODUCTION

This chapter analyses early models of suffrage history, so as to explore the legacy within and against which the current generations of suffrage historians have defined their agendas for research.¹ I argue that two distinct founding schools of suffrage history, both feminist in perspective, were evident by 1914. These I categorise as the ‘constitutionalist’ and the ‘militant’ schools. Two main inheritors of these schools are distinguished, and termed the ‘new-feminist’ and ‘masculinist’ schools, within each of which I will identify several varieties, owing differing debts to the two founding schools.² Gendered perspectives characterise each of these schools, and by pursuing such a categorisation I seek an alternative way of thinking about suffrage history so as to incorporate gender and cultural contestation within that process, to look at the political-cultural formation of suffrage history, rather than the particular formal-political cast of any one school of interpretation.³

In distinguishing ‘masculinist’ from ‘feminist’ histories I do not intend, then, merely to be derogatory toward the former, though clearly such terms have rhetorical content that reflects my own political beliefs and social values. My principal aim, however, is to suggest an analytical framework for understanding some of the main differences in the varying schools of interpretation now to be encountered in suffrage history, to indicate some of the continuities and disjunctures in the historiography of this field, and to question any claims to greater rationality and objectivity presumed by many of the masculinist school.

THE CONSTITUTIONALIST SCHOOL OF SUFFRAGE HISTORY

Constitutionalist histories were produced from within the movement from the early 1880s, and drew on a heritage of radical understandings of the libertarian origins of the British constitution in the social, political and legal organisation of Ancient British and Anglo-Saxon societies.⁴ They tended to gloss over dissent and division because they were primarily polemical in intent. They adopted a measured tone of quiet confidence that the women’s suffrage demand was part of the progressive movement of history. They also increasingly adapted their constitutionalist rhetoric to the new languages of race, and laid claim to, or assumed, the place of female Britons as the natural leaders of the international movement.⁵ This was an essentially Whiggish and Anglocentric interpretation in which women of white, Anglo-Saxon descent were to lead the march, onward and ever upward, toward ‘civilisation’ and away from ‘barbarism’.

Until very recently these ‘official’ histories have remained almost entirely ignored by the current generation of women’s historians, largely, no doubt, because they make exceedingly dry reading, and are written from a stance with which few today might sympathise. Their writers took a long view of the past with regard to the position of women, sometimes going as far back as the Ancient Britons. Through such perspectives on the national past they sought to legitimate the demand for women’s suffrage in terms of the cultural and political heritage of the ‘freeborn Briton’.⁶ They argued that women had earlier been included within the unwritten British constitution, most especially in terms of their position under Saxon law and governance. They provided evidence that British women, or at least women among past elites, had, in earlier ages, engaged in battle, held property in their own right, and voted for and participated in parliament. The last remnant of the earlier political recognition of women was the right of female succession to the British throne. Their demand was couched, then, in terms of the restitution of the lost rights of ‘British freewomen’.

Such appeals to the ancient origins of the British constitution were a longstanding part of the rhetoric of British radicalism. Earlier radical movements had emphasised the Norman conquest and the imposition of ‘the Norman yoke’ (in the form of feudalism) as the key event in undermining the Saxon foundations of the British polity. Suffragists, however, offered a different perspective on such radical constitutionalism. Charlotte Carmichael Stopes’s British freewomen, for example, adopted a different periodisation and chronology with regard to women’s history. The feudal system was seen as not entirely destructive of the pre-existing constitutional rights of women, which lived on to some extent in ‘church and cloister’. It was the gradual erosion of the feudal system and the enunciation in the seventeenth century by Sir William Blackstone of the legal doctrine of coverture that began, Charlotte Carmichael Stopes argued, ‘the Long Ebb’ in the position of women. Such decline was finally completed, by such accounts, in the 1830s, with women’s express exclusion for the first time from the franchise in the 1832 Reform Act, an exclusion compounded by the voting provisions of the Municipal Corporations Act of 1834, and the ending of dower rights in this same period. From this vantage point on British history, suffragists were able to argue that women’s enfranchisement also promised a return to the true basis of British democracy.

In consequence of this reading of British history, it was not uncommon for the constitutionalist history-writing of suffragists completely to ignore the ideas of the Enlightenment or of the French Revolution in explaining the origins of their movement. Mary Wollstonecraft rarely received acknowledgement in such accounts until the early twentieth century, as we shall see. In part this reflected a tendency for British radicals to distance themselves from Jacobinism, especially after the Terror, so that figures like Mary Wollstonecraft might come to stand for an un-British form of political extremism. Equally, her unconventional private life also made Mary Wollstonecraft an unlikely icon for a movement still bent on establishing the respectability and reasonableness of its demand. This is not to say that her work went unread by nineteenth-century suffragists. For many, especially among the Radical–Liberal suffragists who continually challenged for the leadership of the movement from its beginnings, her ideas remained a source of inspiration and hope. None the less, in their history-writing suffragists were more likely to identify their cause with earlier British movements of middle-class and popular radicalism: the Anti-Corn Law League, the anti-slavery movement and Chartism, for example.

Constitutionalist suffrage histories also inflected their sense of national identity with the language of racial superiority and imperial destiny. ‘Freeborn Britons’ were bearers of a particular legal and cultural contribution to the historical process, in a constitutional form of government based on a parliament which was, at least in part, elected by ‘the people’. By the end of the nineteenth century suffragist historians had also begun to incorporate into their work the new ‘scientific’ discourses of racial difference, discourses that allowed them to place the ‘English’ (together with the United States movement, as each of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ origin) at the head of an ‘ethnological’ ordering of national movements for women’s rights.⁷ Some such sense also informed the ‘imperial feminism’ of this time, most especially on behalf of the women of peoples under British rule.⁸

Such a view of British history, and of its radical heritage, also shaped the forms of suffrage agitation. The petition to parliament was central to this, especially once recourse to the courts had proved a failure. Aimed initially at collecting evidence of opinion among women from influential social and political elites, this method was gradually adapted to the changing nature of British political life. As increasing numbers of working-class men were enfranchised under the 1867 and 1884 Reform Acts, the collection of petitions was also expanded so as to demonstrate more extensive, popular support. Similarly, that other long-established ‘constitutionalist’ practice, of holding major public meetings at key points in parliamentary politics, increasingly sought to attract working-class audiences. Leaders of the suffrage movement also began to seek out speakers who knew something of working-class life and politics. Equally, by the late 1870s, the suffrage meeting was beginning to move out of the middle-class drawing room and the town hall, to the village green and the town square. None the less, suffrage agitation remained essentially orderly and reasonable, still intended largely to educate public opinion, and to demonstrate to members of parliament a growing body of support at constituency level.

The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (henceforth, National Union), which was formed in 1897 by a reunification of long-established suffrage societies, carried the constitutionalist perspective into the twentieth-century agitation, while among its members were a number who were to continue to write suffrage history from the constitutionalist perspective. The suffrage movement had never been politically homogeneous, however. From the beginning of the campaigns in the mid-1860s there were continual tensions between Radical–Liberal suffragists and more moderate bodies of opinion, tensions that eventually led to organisational division. The first book-length history of the suffrage movement, Helen Blackburn’s Women’s Suffrage of 1902, was written from the perspective of the moderates. Starting out from the same perspective on British history presented some years before by Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, Helen Blackburn restated the case for women’s suffrage in terms of a restitution to women of the place held by women within the ancient origins of the British constitution. She celebrated the dogged patience and trust in the methods of pressure-group politics on the part of suffragists, recounting the history of the movement in terms of its societies, committees, petitions and public meetings. Helen Blackburn also made central to her story the career of Lydia Becker (1827–1890), before her death the editor of the Women’s Suffrage Journal and parliamentary secretary of the original National Society for Women’s Suffrage. In consequence, her narrative is one that entirely ‘writes out’ the perspective and the campaigns of the Radical–Liberal suffragists, among whom Lydia Becker might originally have been counted, but from whom she had become alienated in her last years. Hence, Helen Blackburn downplays, where she does not completely ignore, the role of Radical suffragists like Clementia Taylor and Elizabeth Wolstenholme in helping to found the movement. Similarly, the suffragist origins of the campaign for repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1870 is also ignored, alongside the connections which Radical suffragists saw between the two issues. Division between moderates and Radical–Liberals over the exclusion of married women in the demand is also completely ignored, though it was one of the main issues that eventually fragmented the movement in the late 1880s.⁹

In turn, Helen Blackburn’s history was reticent about the relation between the suffrage movement and party politics – the campaigns appear to have happened in a sphere quite divorced from the wider political arena. Yet they were, of course, necessarily shaped to some extent by the fortunes of Radical politics more generally. The demonised figure of William Ewart Gladstone, the Liberal leader for almost the whole of the nineteenth-century campaigns, is used to displace the need to recognise the extensive and increasingly bitter divisions within British radicalism in these decades, from which members of the suffrage leadership were unable to remain aloof. While Gladstone’s opposition did considerable damage to the cause of women’s suffrage at a number of key points, such a simplistic explanation prevented discussion of the relationship, for example, between the fortunes of the suffrage cause and that of Irish home rule, or the impact of the growing socialist movement of the 1890s on Radical suffragist opinion.¹⁰

There was no sustained counter to this constitutionalist perspective, or to the accounts of the moderate faction, until the advent of a ‘militant’ approach to suffrage campaigning in the early twentieth century. By that time some significant changes had already begun to occur within constitutionalist histories, perhaps most notably in W. Lyon Blease’s The emancipation of English women (1910). Though this work also looked some centuries backward for the origins of the women’s movement, it placed particular importance on the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft. Also, it viewed women’s suffrage as a natural progression in the development of English political institutions by reference to the liberal legacy of the Enlightenment, rather than by reference to the ancient origins of the British constitution. Like Millicent Garrett Fawcett in her subsequent histories and her current statements to the press, W. Lyon Blease acknowledged the importance of the advent of militant methods to the advance of the cause. He also, like her, explained militancy as a consequence of the failings of the Liberal government in its apparent ‘ignorance of the meaning of liberty’ and of ‘the first principles of statesmanship’.¹¹

Such perspectives were also to colour Ray Strachey’s classic, The cause (1928), the last major history written from the constitutionalist perspective by a participant in the movement. The cause bore many of the marks of the constitutionalist view of history: it was fundamentally Whiggish, for example, in presenting the women’s movement as part and parcel of the social and political progress of the nineteenth century.¹² But Ray Strachey also insisted that the main impetus for the women’s movement came from the ideas of the French Revolution. She emphasised the importance of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the rights of woman as a work in which ‘the whole extent of the feminist ideal is set out’. She also established the links between the suffrage movement and other radical movements, including Chartism, the Anti-Corn Law League and the anti-slavery campaigns. Unlike Helen Blackburn’s history, she acknowledged the role of the middle-class Radical–Liberal circles of the 1860s in raising issues of women’s rights, in social reform and in the new field of ‘social science’. The cause placed considerable emphasis on the legal disabilities of women, especially of wives under coverture. It also reflected the influence of some of the new economic and social history that had begun to appear in the early twentieth century, much of it by women historians. Hence, Ray Strachey emphasised the importance of the changes that accompanied the Industrial Revolution to the formation of a women’s movement.¹³

But The cause also shows some evidence of the influence of the militant interpretations that had begun to appear prior to the First World War, and that had continued on in the form of memoirs. Ray Strachey’s chapters on the twentieth-century campaigns provided, in consequence, an account that acknowledged both the constitutionalist and the militant contributions, though her references to the...