Normal Women, page 49
From 1905, the WSPU campaign became more violent: breaking windows, arson, planting bombs and handcuffing themselves to railings, campaigning under the motto ‘Deeds Not Words’. In June 1908, over 250,000 people attended the ‘Women’s Sunday’ demonstration organised by the WSPU at Hyde Park – the largest political rally of the century in London. When Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith refused to meet them, the suffragettes smashed windows in Downing Street and tied themselves to railings. The WSPU newspaper had a circulation figure of 20,000 subscribers in 1909.62 In 1910, after a parliamentary bill for votes for propertied women ran out of time, 300 women marched on the Houses of Parliament and were met by policemen, who were said to have been deliberately drafted in from working-class areas and instructed to beat and abuse genteel women. The government denied this. A journalist reported the reaction of one of the demonstrators, Miss H: ‘One policeman . . . put his arm round me and seized my left breast, nipping it and wringing it very painfully, saying as he did so, “You have been wanting this for a long time, haven’t you?”’63
In 1913, Emily Wilding Davison ran in front of the king’s horse at Epsom race course, perhaps trying to pin suffragette colours to the reins, and was trampled and died. The increasingly violent tactics of the WSPU, particularly its 1912–14 bombing and arson campaign, alienated it from the public and from some of its members. Five people were killed during the bombing campaign (including one suffragette) and at least 24 were injured (including two suffragettes). The WSPU invented the letter bomb, and twice bombed the home of the chancellor, David Lloyd George, in 1913. Emmeline Pankhurst herself was sentenced to three years in prison for her role in the attack.
Many suffragettes imprisoned for violence undertook hunger strikes and were force-fed. Mary Richardson described the torture she experienced in 1914:
They fed me five weeks by the nose and at the end of that . . . it would not pass into the throat even though they bent it and twisted it into all kinds of shapes. Instead, it went up to the top of my nose and seemed to pierce my eyes . . . Then they forced my mouth open by inserting their fingers and cutting my gums . . . and the lining of my cheeks . . . when I was blind and mad with pain, they drove in two large gags. Then the tubes followed and they pressed my tongue down with their fingers and pinched my nose to weaken the natural, and also the purposeful, resistance of my throat.64
In an attempt to prevent women dying in prison, Parliament introduced the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Act, or, as it was known, the ‘Cat and Mouse’ Act. Hunger-striking women were released until they recovered from their ordeal and then re-imprisoned.
Offering violence and experiencing violence from police and bystanders, members began to leave the WSPU and by 1914 it was said to have only 5,000 members, compared to the peaceful NUWSS, which reported 50,000.65 Both groups halted campaigning during the First World War and encouraged women to join the war effort.66 Emmeline Pankhurst and her favoured daughter Christabel organised demonstrations to encourage women to take up war work and were part of the ‘white feather’ campaign by women, presenting the feathers – an accusation of cowardice – to men in civilian clothes.
The post-war Representation of the People Act of 1918 was intended to resolve a number of interconnected problems. Working men without savings or property, who had been conscripted and forced to risk their lives in the high-fatality world war, had to be given the vote at the age of 21, as a reward for their service. But if all the women over 21 were given the vote they would outnumber men. Nobody – not even the pro-vote campaigners – wanted the female population majority to be reflected in the democracy. When the male vote was extended to all men over 21 years, the women’s vote was limited to women over 30 years who owned their own houses. It was votes for older rich ladies – not votes for women. Lord Cecil admitted the compromise in Parliament: ‘The age limit of thirty was introduced, in order to avoid extending the franchise to a very large number of women, for fear they might be in a majority in the electorate of this country. It was for that reason only, and it had nothing to do with their qualifications at all. No one would seriously suggest that a woman of twenty-five is less capable of giving a vote than a woman of thirty-five.’67
The arithmetic suited men who wanted to keep power for men: 8.4 million women joined the register. Women were less than half – 40 per cent – of the electorate, even though they outnumbered men in the country. The compromise satisfied the genteel ladies campaigning for the vote, but it betrayed the working-class women who were still disenfranchised. It solved the conundrum of the ‘queen’s footman’. She was his social superior and although he now had a vote, she had one too.
The first woman to be elected to Parliament by the electorate of carefully restricted women voters was Constance Markievicz (1868–1927), the daughter of an Arctic explorer, in an Anglo-Irish family. She entered political life campaigning for votes for women, driving her own carriage with four matched grey horses. When a man shouted, ‘Can you cook dinner?’, she replied, ‘Yes. Can you drive a coach and four?’
She was jailed for protesting against the visit of King George V to Ireland, and joined the Irish Citizen Army to fight with 70 other women in the Easter Rising against British occupation. She wounded a British army sniper, she may have shot a policeman and she held out for six days in a siege at St Stephen’s Green, Dublin.
She pleaded not guilty to rebellion but was sentenced to death – the sentence commuted to imprisonment for life. She is reported as saying: ‘I do wish your lot had the decency to shoot me.’68
Released from prison under a general amnesty in 1917, Markievicz was back inside in 1918 for protesting the conscription of men for the war. She stood for Sinn Féin from prison and was elected as MP for the Dublin St Patrick’s constituency – then part of the United Kingdom. She took 66 per cent of the vote, which made her the first woman elected to the House of Commons, but she supported the Sinn Féin boycott of the imperial Parliament and refused to take her seat. This was something of a technicality as she was still imprisoned in Holloway.
In the absence of Constance Markievicz, the first elected woman MP took her seat at Westminster in 1918. Hurrah. But actually, it had been her husband’s seat. Waldorf Astor, MP for a safe Conservative seat at Plymouth, inherited his father’s peerage and moved to the House of Lords, recommending his parliamentary seat adopt his wealthy American socialite wife as their MP in his place. Nancy Astor, who had shown absolutely no previous interest in women’s suffrage, was elected. Suffragists and suffragettes celebrated the arrival of an upper-class wealthy Conservative woman to Parliament. Nancy Astor later explained that it was helpful that the first woman MP was a wealthy woman, as it enabled her to hire the best people to support her.69 A third of the women elected between the wars (ten of them) would move into their husbands’ parliamentary seats. Finally, in July 1928, the Representation of the People Act was passed, giving a vote to everyone – men and women – over the age of 21.
At this point it became clear that there was no such thing as women’s politics or women’s issues that united all women. The great terror of the ‘Parliament of women’, a gynocracy which would ruin the nation, feared from the sixteenth century, did not come into being with women MPs. Women voters were divided over almost all issues – even those directly affecting the rights and freedoms of women. Race, class and other inequalities divided sisterhood. There was no such thing as a united women’s vote.
Working-class Protest
Some women’s organisations were egalitarian, like the Women’s Protective and Provident League, founded in 1874 by headmaster’s daughter Emma Paterson, modelled on women’s unions in America. The league worked with female associations of bookbinders, sewing machinists, upholsteresses, spinners at Leeds and the woollen weavers of Dewsbury and Batley. It set up a mutual credit association, the Women’s Halfpenny Bank, in 1879, and became the National Federation of Women Workers in 1906. Lucy Re-Bartlett of the WSPU’s campaign for women’s votes said that there was a new conscience arising in women at home and abroad.70
The crest of the Dewsbury, Batley and surrounding District Heavy Woollen Weavers Association, founded by Ann Ellis. Their slogan: Unity is Strength
[And Cover] Crest from Ben Turner, A Short Account of the Rise and Progress of the Heavy Woollen District Branch of the General Union of Textile Workers, Yorkshire Factory Times, 1917, p. 57 (Public domain)
In 1875, women workers led their first organised strike in West Yorkshire. In February, a rumour had started that the masters were going to cut wages for the ‘shoddy’ workers – those working on reclaimed wool. A young married weaver – Ann Ellis of Skelsey Mill – was appointed by men and women weavers to organise a protest. She formed the Dewsbury and Batley Weavers’ Committee of 13 women to represent 25,000 workers, and on 16 February addressed her first meeting of 9,000 striking weavers in a field near Spinkwell Mills, Dewsbury. According to the Dewsbury News, ‘She had never stood on a platform as she did at present until this strike . . . She would bundle up and go, rather than give in to the masters . . . the women had begun the battle and would have to get on with it.’
The men were clear that this was a unique act of leadership by the women: ‘Coming to the front and taking on labour – and there wasn’t another place in England where they had done that,’ reported the Huddersfield Examiner.
The all-women committee of the striking weavers rejected help offered by the Women’s Protective and Provident League, and by the National Union of Women Workers: they did not want external middle-class women organisers – they wanted to organise their own strike and set their own terms. The male strikers refused to join the men-only Operative Union and got behind the women to lead the strike. One man told the Examiner: ‘The men should be faithful and true to the women . . . a man who won’t back a woman is no man at all.’ Another man said that the women ‘would need cheek’.71
Despite the masters threatening the committee members individually, telling them that their husbands would be sacked, the women refused to negotiate a pay cut, demanding the full rate of pay and nothing less. Ellis said that workers would not be able to live on anything less than full pay – it would not cover their rent, heating and food bills. Workers from surrounding industries and the nearby mines gave money for a strike fund enabling the women workers to stay out on strike for six weeks. Finally, the masters capitulated, reversing the proposed cut in wages and paying the agreed rate, in all but two of the mills.
Elsewhere, male unionists were reluctant to welcome women into the campaigns. One male union member wrote to headquarters in 1889 that women as well as men should be organised locally: ‘Please send an organiser to this town as we have decided that if the women here cannot be organised they must be exterminated.’72
One of the greatest joint actions by women workers, organising themselves, came from the women chainmakers of the West Midlands. These women made light chains in forges attached to their cottages, more than 2,000 of them in Cradley Heath alone. A middleman or middlewoman called a ‘fogger’ would deliver three-metre-long rods of iron to each chainmaker, who would cut the rods into links, and heat and hammer the hot iron into 5,000 links of a chain, working in the forge for up to 12 hours a day. The fogger then collected the finished chains, delivering more rods. After deducting about 25 per cent for providing the service, the fogger paid the employer’s preferred rate for the work. Women usually earned between 4s and 5s a week. The rate was set by Boards of Trade but the employers, who sat on the board for their particular craft, defined the maximum that they would offer, usually fixing women’s wages at about half the male rate.73 Social commentator Robert Sherard described a chainmaker’s forge:
A Cradley Heath chainmaker in 1910
[And Cover] Cradley Heath chainmaker, from The Graphic, 1 September 1910 (Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick/Maitland Sara Hallinan Collection/MSS.15X/1/68/2)
One may come across sheds with five or six women, each working at her anvil; that are all talking above the din of their hammers and the clanking of their chains, or they may be singing a discordant chorus; and at first, the sight of this sociability makes one overlook the misery which, however, is only too visible, be it in the foul rags and preposterous boots that the women wear, or in their haggard faces and the faces of the frightened infants hanging to their mothers’ breasts, as these ply the hammer, or sprawling in the mire on the floor, amidst the showers of fiery sparks.74
In March 1910, the Board of Trade set new wages for women chainmakers, at a minimum rate of two and a half pence an hour, in place of the old payment by weight. It was as high as the employers would go and should have doubled the women’s pay for a 55-hour week. With no intention of paying the new rate, the chainmaker employers began stockpiling old chains and refused to supply rods to chainmakers unless they agreed to work for the old rate. Employers sent out contracts at a low rate of pay and tried to persuade the women chainmakers – most of whom could neither read nor write – to sign them. Three representatives from the National Federation of Women Workers – Julia Varley, who had started work as a 13-year-old mill girl; Mary Macarthur, a draper’s daughter; and Charles Stitch, who had started chainmaking at the age of eight – visited the chainmakers: ‘We went into the forges, talking to the women as they hammered away, awakening their consciousness to their responsibilities, appealing to their pride and their motherhood,’ said Varley.75
When the women chainmakers demanded the new pay rate – as agreed – the masters started a ‘lockout’, not buying new chains, but selling their stockpiles. The standoff lasted for seven months until the weight of public sympathy, and international interest in the treatment of the chainmakers, forced employers to agree to pay the new rate and eliminate foggers from the system. It was a victory for sweated women workers, and for the National Federation of Women Workers.
It became clear that the breadwinner wage – a male supplement – was working not only against the interests of single women but even against those of men, as wherever possible, employers de-skilled jobs and passed them to low-paid women and children. Increased mechanisation and inventions made more and more jobs lighter and low skilled.
It was a woman who explained this rather obvious fact in 1888, when Clementina Black told the Women’s Trades Union Council that when women were ‘employed merely because they were cheaper, all work gradually fell into their hands . . . and that this resulted in lower (wages) to the general injury of men and women alike’.76
In 1888, another women’s strike seized international interest and became a model for the general dock strike the following year. Most British matches in the nineteenth century were made using poisonous white phosphorus, and most of the workers in the industry were women: 1,276 of them and 245 men in 1897.77 The giant match factory of Bryant and May in London’s East End employed more women than anywhere else locally, yet most of the work was done not in the factory but in ‘sweatshop’ conditions in workers’ homes, in order to avoid safety requirements.
The work could be fatal. The poisonous phosphorus in the match-heads, which workers were accidentally eating and inhaling in the crowded factory and sweatshops, caused their jaws to crumble – a condition called ‘Phossy jaw’. Their pay was reduced by fines for minor offences: the company claimed it paid 10s–12s a week to ‘steady workers’ but in 1888 women workers reported they got only 4s a week. They had no union representation at all, and as part-time and casual workers found it hard to organise.
After five women workers – Mary Driscoll, Alice Francis, Eliza Martin, Kate Slater and Jane Wakeling – were suspected of having told radical journalist Annie Besant about the conditions at the factory, three of them were dismissed.78 As a result, 1,400 women workers walked out in protest and a few days later the factory stopped production. Bryant and May management suggested that working-class women would only have taken action if they had been influenced by outside agitators. The chairman told shareholders: ‘You are all pretty well aware what this strike has arisen from. For a considerable time, an agitation has been at work in the East-end of London tending to . . . upset the minds of the workers.’79
‘Pass the poisoning’: Annie Besant’s scathing article told shareholders of the toxic conditions at the Bryant and May factory
Match-workers participating in a strike against Bryant & May, London, 1888 (Chronicle/Alamy)
The delusion of ‘outside agitators’ was designed to comfort shareholders, writhing from an excoriating article by Annie Besant in the newspaper The Link, on Saturday 14 July 1888. She wrote:
Do you know that the women and girls whose labour made the 22½% dividend paid in February last are living, or dying, in Old Ford, Bromley, Tiger Bay, and other districts of East London, on wages varying from 4s to about 13s a week? That sometimes the wage goes even below 4s, and that a girl of sixteen years of age, a fortnight ago, was discharged with 2s 8d to represent the results of a week’s toil? Do you know that it appears even from the miserable shuffles of your secretary, Mr Carkeet, that the ‘average wage’ of the ‘adult female workers’ in your employ is only 11s 2d per week? And consider, the fact that there is an ‘average wage’ of 11s 2d does not help women, who, like the twenty-nine-years-old wife of a dock labourer, the mother of five children, took home 5s 6d last Saturday week . . . How would you like, wife of a clerical shareholder in Bryant and May’s, to keep house for a week on 11s 2d? How would you like to start for your work at half-past five a.m., and reach home again at seven p.m., having been on your feet nearly all the time, and after doing this for five days, with an additional half day on the Saturday, to take home 11s 2d as a reward? And if you did reach the average, but only got the 5s 6d, and had been at the work for fifteen years, might you not say, like my poor friend said to me the other day, ‘I’m most tired of it’?80
