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

by E. Sylvia Pankhurst

I endorse the objects and methods of the Women's Social and Political Union and hereby undertake not to support the candidate of any political party at Parliamentary elections until women have obtained the Parliamentary vote.

All the prominent members of the W. S. P. U. who had not already done so now formally severed their connexion with the political parties to which they had at one time belonged. During the past year a useful little weekly paper entitled Women's Franchise had been started by Mr. and Mrs. Francis as the joint organ of the various Suffrage Societies, and in the month of October, 1907, Votes for Women, the organ of the Women's Social and Political Union, was first issued as a monthly paper, by Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence. Our members at once volunteered to sell it in the streets, and were soon turning themselves into sandwich women and parading about with its contents bills slung from their shoulders, riding on horseback through Piccadilly with its posters hanging from the saddle, selling it from decorated busses and carriages, canvassing for subscribers and advertisers for it and evolving a hundred and one devices to increase its sale. As a result of these efforts both its size and circulation increased rapidly. In May, 1908, it became a penny weekly paper, and in the beginning of the year 1909 its circulation had risen to between 30,000 and 50,000 copies weekly, and it was handed over by Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence to the Union itself as a paying concern.

On October 5th a Woman's Suffrage procession was organised in Edinburgh by the Militant and Non-Militant Women's Suffragist Societies, and some four thousand women from all parts of Scotland assembled under the shadow of Arthur's Seat and, cheered by upwards of a hundred thousand people who had gathered to see them, marched thence to the Synod Hall, where there was held a crowded demonstration which overflowed into the Pillar Hall.

Selling and advertising "Votes for Women" in Kingsway

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was in Edinburgh at the time, and was asked to receive a deputation from the processionists, but, though this was backed by many influential Scotswomen, he refused. When on October 22nd, he spoke at Dunfermline, in his own constituency, the Premier was obliged, as Scotch "heckling" is a recognised institution, to reply to the questioning of women as well as of men. He was asked: "As the Prime Minister believes in Women's Suffrage, would he suggest some fresh methods which we could adopt in order to gain our enfranchisement?"

He replied: "I think women ought to go on agitating, holding meetings and pestering as much as they can, as all other men and women who are interested in public questions have to do." Whatever this piece of advice may have been intended to suggest, it certainly sounded very much like a justification of the policy of "pestering" members of the Government at their meetings.

For six months the Suffragettes had devoted themselves to strengthening and extending their organisation, electioneering, the distribution of literature and the holding of propaganda meetings of which, between May and October, some 3,000 had taken place, including a demonstration in Boggart Hole Clough, Manchester, attended by 15,000 people, another in Stevenson Square, Manchester, attended by 20,000 people, and meetings in Hyde Park each Sunday at many of which the audiences had numbered upwards of 12,000. Nevertheless the question of Votes for Women, which had bulked so largely in the papers whilst the militant tactics had been in full swing, had almost entirely disappeared from the Press during these latter months and anyone who judged from the newspapers alone might well have imagined that the agitation had died down. This fact, together with the Government's continued refusal even to consider the question of granting Votes to Women, was enough, without the Prime Minister's curiously provocative statement, to convince the Suffragettes that the time had come to recommence an active militant campaign, and from this time onward a Cabinet Minister's Meeting was invaded on almost every day until Parliament met in the new year. Again and again members of our Union, with a courage and perseverance which too few people have ever recognised, presented themselves at these meetings, and, having asked their question or made their protest, were rudely set upon by crowds of stewards and flung fiercely and violently out into the street.

Many outsiders preferred to look upon the women who faced this violence as being harder and less sensitive or as differing in some other way from the rest of their sex, but this was not by any means the case. Many of those who bore the worst brunt of the battle were women who had hitherto taken no part in politics, and had always led quiet and sheltered lives. Others had had to fight hard for their livelihood. Indeed they were of all ages and of all classes. Week by week greater numbers of them were joining the Union and coming forward to take a part in this work; but young and old, rich and poor, were treated in the same way. Meanwhile Cabinet Ministers either expressed surprised and horrified disapproval of their behaviour or sought instead to cover them with ridicule. Mr. Sidney Buxton, at his meeting at Poplar on October 12th cynically called to his women questioners, whom the stewards were maltreating, to "behave decorously like men." That old self-styled "friend" of Women's Suffrage, Mr. Haldane, addressing a meeting of women Liberals in Glasgow on January 8th, 1908, devoted the greater part of his speech to condemning the Suffragettes, saying that men did not like to be fought with "pin pricks," and that, though women might "wage war," he should advise them "not to do it with bodkins." At a meeting in his own constituency, shortly afterwards, he insisted that the women who interrupted him should be ejected by the police, and when finally, with bruised and aching limbs and torn and dishevelled clothing, they had all been thrown out of the hall, he treated the whole matter as a joke saying that he was "bachelor-proof against these belles." Mr. Asquith, like the Prime Minister, was forced to reply to a question put to him in his own Scotch constituency, at Tayport, on October 29th. There he said that, if the vote were granted to women it would do "more harm than good," and that in any case, the House of Commons is not elected on a basis of Universal Suffrage, for "children are not represented there." At several meetings, notably those of Mr. Asquith at Nuneaton on November 16th, and of Mr. Winston Churchill in the historic Free Trade Hall, the stewards behaved with so much brutality that the police intervened to protect the women.

But though at these gatherings of Liberal partisans the women were usually flung outside without delay, there were still some occasions on which the audience rallied round them. Incidents of this kind occurred when Mr. Herbert Gladstone, now frequently nicknamed "the prison Secretary," spoke in his constituency in Leeds on November 21st and 22nd. On the first night the audience prevented the ejection of women questioners, and on the second Mr. Gladstone was howled down by both men and women, and next morning the papers stated in startling headlines that the Home Secretary had been "put to flight." Mr. Lewis Harcourt, the first Commissioner of Works, had a similar experience in his constituency, the Rossendale Valley, on October 28th. During the day he declared to a deputation of women that he was opposed to their cause "because he was." At his evening meeting women protested again so vigorously and in such numbers that it was broken up, and his departing audience flocked to hear Mrs. Pankhurst, who was speaking from a waggon outside the hall. On November 22nd Mr. Lloyd George stated to a deputation of the Members of the old non-Militant Glasgow and West of Scotland Association for Women's Suffrage that votes could not be granted to women until the subject of their enfranchisement had been made a test question at a General Election, and disposed of the contention that this had already been done, because over four hundred Members of Parliament out of 670 returned at the last General Election had been pledged to support Women's Suffrage, by saying that these pledges did not count because they had not been made to constituents. As unenfranchised women were no man's constituents, Mr. Lloyd George, therefore, evidently saw no harm in the breaking of promises that had been made to them, and he gave no indication as to how, whilst neither political party was prepared to put votes for women upon its programme, women were to make their franchise a test question at election times, except either by obtaining pledges from individual members or by attacking the Government in power as the Suffragettes were doing. He yet went on to say that he should oppose "very strenuously any legislation that excluded any class of women from its scope, and any measure to enfranchise women that would not give to the working man's wife as much voice in the making of the laws of the country as her husband possessed." This meant, of course, that Mr. Lloyd George would "strenuously oppose" the Women's Enfranchisement Bill to give women the vote on the same terms as those upon which it had already been or might in the future be granted to men, but he did not seem to realise that if he meant what he said and wished to act with honesty, fairness and consistency towards this great question, he ought strenuously to oppose the status quo, which not only refused a voice in the making of the laws which governed her to the wife of the working man but to every other woman beside.