The Suffragette: The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905-1910

by E. Sylvia Pankhurst

In about a fortnight's time my mother joined us. She was surprised to learn that so many arrangements had been made and at first was almost inclined to be appalled at the boldness of our plans. She was afraid that we should never induce more than a handful of women to walk in procession through the public streets, and that the Caxton Hall could not be filled. But the die was cast, and she threw herself into the work determined to do her very best to prevent failure.

A few days after this we heard that Mrs. Drummond was coming from Manchester to help us. Her husband was earning little at the time, and the Union had no money to provide her railway fare, but she had walked miles through the snow in order to collect the necessary funds from her friends. When she arrived, we were all of us growing very weary and overwrought. It seemed almost impossible to stir this great city, filled with its busy millions who appeared to have no time to think of anything but their own affairs. The thoughtless apathy of those whom we met with money and leisure at their disposal, the dull, hopeless inertia of those who agreed that we were right, but would not stir themselves to help, were to us in our anxiety, almost maddening. But Mrs. Drummond, with her practical ways and her inexhaustible fund of good humour, brought with her a spirit of renewed hope and energy. Her first act was to go to the office of the Oliver Company and borrow a typewriter from them. The secretarial duties were thus enormously lightened, and after rattling off the correspondence she was always ready to join us in delivering handbills, canvassing from house to house, or writing announcements of the forthcoming meetings with white chalk upon the city pavement.

At last the day of the opening of Parliament, February 19th, 1906, arrived, and a crowd of some three or four hundred women, a large proportion of whom were poor workers from the East End, met us at St. James' Park District Railway Station. We formed in procession and put up a few simple banners, some of which were red with white letters, and had been made by working people in Canning Town, whilst the rest I had made of white linen and lettered with India ink in the little sitting-room at Park Walk. Our procession had gone but a few yards when the police came up and insisted upon the furling of the banners, but they did not prevent our marching to the Caxton Hall near by. Here we found that a large audience had already assembled, and soon the hall was crowded with women, most of whom were strangers to us. We were told afterwards that amongst the rest were many ladies of wealth and position, who, inspired with curiosity by the newspaper accounts of the disturbances which we were said to have created, had disguised themselves in their maids' clothes in order that they might attend the meeting unrecognised.

Mrs. Pankhurst, Annie Kenney and others who spoke, were listened to with much earnestness and presently the news came that the King's speech, the Government's legislative programme for the session, had been read, and that it had contained no reference to the question of Women's Suffrage. My mother at once moved that the meeting should form itself into a "Lobbying" Committee and should at once proceed to the House of Commons in order to induce its members to ballot for a Women's Suffrage Bill. This resolution was carried with acclamation, and the whole meeting streamed out into the street and made its way to the House. It was bitterly cold and pouring with rain, but when we arrived at the Strangers' Entrance, we found that for the first time that anyone could remember, the door of the House of Commons was closed to women. Cards were sent in to several Private Members, some of whom came out and urged that we should be allowed to enter, but the Government had given its orders, and the police remained obdurate. All the women refused to go away, and permission was finally given for twenty women at a time to be admitted. Then hour after hour the women stood outside in the rain waiting for their turn to enter. Some of them never got into the House at all, and those who did so went away gloomy and disappointed for there was not one of them who had received any assurance that Parliament intended to give women the vote.

Now, after a chance meeting with Mrs. Pankhurst and a second long talk with her and with Annie Kenney, a new recruit had entered our movement. This was Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, the daughter of Mr. Henry Pethick, of Weston-super-Mare, and a member of a Cornish family. As a child at school she had read the story of Hetty Sorrell in George Eliot's "Adam Bede," had seen "Faust," and Marguerite in her prison cell. Later she had learnt from Sir Walter Besant's Children of Gideon of the cheerless struggle to eke out an existence upon starvation wages, which falls to the lot of working-girls. Then and there she had resolved to spend her life in striving to alter these conditions. She determined that as soon as she left school she would go to "the East End," and begin. When the time came she at once acted upon this decision. Without seeking help or advice from anyone, she wrote to Mrs. Hugh Price Hughes, of the West London Mission and asked that she might be received into her sisterhood. When her request had been granted she told her parents of what she had done, and they readily gave their full approval and sympathy.

After four years of useful training and varied experiences in the West London Mission, during which she had had at some times the charge of a Working-Girls' Club and at others had been sent out at night on to the London Streets in order to save and succour the homeless and outcast women there, she and her friend, Miss Mary Neal, took rooms in a block of artisans' dwellings and gathered round them a small colony of social workers. Together they founded the Esperance Working-Girls' Club, to which was attached a co-operative dressmaking establishment, and a holiday hotel at Littlehampton called "The Green Lady." Later on, after her marriage Mrs. Pethick Lawrence built a small cottage near her house at Holmwood called "The Sundial," where the junior members of the Esperance Club were invited during the summer.

Writing of these early years, and of her own decision to take part in the Votes for Women Movement she says:

Out of that part of my life there stand out many memories.... I remember a little girl belonging to the Children's Happy Evening Club, who went mad with grief because her widowed mother lost her work, and was in despair. The dread of being separated in the workhouse was upon the whole family, and the child was taken to the asylum, crying, "Poor, poor mother." I remember a girl about twenty, alone in the world, earning a pittance as a waitress in a tea-shop. She was a quiet, gentle creature, who made no complaint. All the greater was the shock when the girl put an end to her life, leaving a little note, with the words, "I am tired out." These two cries still ring out at times in my memory with their terrible indictment against life as men have made it.... We recognised the fact that we were only making in a great wilderness a tiny garden, enclosed by the wall of human fellowship. As we saw more and more of the evil plight of women, we realised ever more clearly that nothing could really lift them out of it until the power had been put into their hands to help themselves.... Suddenly a light flashed out. News came of the arrest and imprisonment of Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney. Here at last was action.

So it was that Mrs. Pethick Lawrence had prepared herself to take part in the great Votes for Women Movement.

We had now decided to organise our London Committee on a more formal basis. Mrs. Lawrence was asked to become one of its members and I well remember her coming to my little room in Park Walk to take part in the formation of the new Central Committee. It was the first time I had seen her, and I can never forget how much I was attracted by her dark expressive eyes, and the quiet business-like way in which she listened to what was being said, only interposing in the debate when she had something really valuable to suggest. It was later that I noticed the untrammelled carriage and the fine free lift of the head.