Comment The meeting that changed US history... and it happened here
AFORTNIGHT ago much of America celebrated the centenary of women finally gaining the vote – August 18, 1920, when Tennessee became the decisive 36th state to ratify the US Constitution’s 19th Amendment.
With some property-owning women in the Northern colonies having been voting before the United States was created – then having that right removed by the new all-male state legislatures – it took a long, sometimes bitter, battle, but one absolutely worth commemorating.
Some perspective: that eventual 19th Amendment was first introduced to Congress in 1878, seven years before one of the most militant and admirable leaders of the final struggle was even born. I refer to Alice Paul, around whom PBS America’s excellent recent TV documentary, The Vote, was structured.
Paul was joint founder in 1916 of the National Woman’s Party – with her equally radical contemporary, Lucy Burns – and its leader for decades. She/they instigated countless laws furthering women’s equality, secured equal rights guarantees in both the UN Charter and 1964 Civil Rights Act, and drafted the Equal Rights Amendment, which could theoretically have been the US Constitution’s 20th.
It doesn’t sound outlandish for a supposed democracy – equality of rights under the law shall not be denied by the US or any state on account of sex. Yet, introduced in 1923, it took 49 years for Congress to approve it, then a further 49 for Virginia to become, in January this year, the required 38th state to ratify it.
Now, in football parlance, it seems likely to be ruled ‘aaet’ – after ‘after extra time’ – a sad, if in no way diminishing, postscript to Alice Paul’s long and exceptional campaigning career.
Back quickly then to that career’s start, for her suffragette epiphany, her radical realisation, owed everything to her brief stay in her early twenties in Birmingham. No, not the Alabama one. Our Birmingham.
Alice – I’ve persuaded myself she’d excuse the familiarity – came from New Jersey, near the Quaker state of Philadelphia. Bright eldest daughter of a successful businessman/ gentleman farmer and collegeeducated mother, she was raised as a Hicksite Quaker – same Orthodox Quaker emphasis on simplicity, perseverance and social improvement, less on the Bible, much more on gender equality.
Despite, or possibly because of, a first degree in biology, she was increasingly attracted to applied social work. This prompted a Master’s thesis entitled ‘Towards Equality’, followed in 1907 by a one-year fellowship at the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Selly
Oak.
Recently founded by George Cadbury as – still, I believe – Europe’s only Quaker study and training centre, Woodbrooke also had links almost from the outset with the University of Birmingham, and Alice would certainly at least have attended lectures there.
But here’s the tricky bit. We know from numerous accounts that the totally transformative event in Alice’s early life was attending a Women’s Suffrage meeting in Birmingham.
There she listened to the seemingly charismatic Christabel Pankhurst – also still in her 20s – lucidly putting the case for militant action for women’s suffrage, and dealing simultaneously with a predominantly male, hostile, abusive audience. Following which, Alice met her personally and was, apparently then and there, “converted, heart and soul” to the militant Suffragette cause.
But where exactly in Birmingham? And could that key meeting and Alice’s Pauline/ Damascene conversion have happened in ‘my’ University of Birmingham, a highlight of its early Edgbaston years?
Most accounts, unsurprisingly, are vague, obviously embellished, or demonstrably inaccurate. One ‘hard’ fact, though, is that both Christabel Pankhurst and her mother, Emmeline, did speak and were heckled at a
Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) meeting at Birmingham Town Hall on November 20, 1907.
That had to be it, surely. Besides, that is the date actually given in Tina Cassidy’s recent full, if florid, Paul biography – plus details of her four-mile bike ride in long, heavy skirt. After all, why would Christabel be chatting to, say, a university student seminar when the Town Hall was available? However, there is another American thesis account. Evidently concerned at Christabel’s earlier hostile reception, Sir Oliver Lodge, distinguished physicist and Birmingham University’s first Chancellor, later invited her “back to give a second speech, apologised and required all students to attend and listen.”
So, I’m personally satisfied the two did meet meaningfully at ‘my’ Uni. Regarding Alice’s conversion to the Suffragettes’ militant campaign methods, there is no doubt whatever. Delaying her planned return to the US, she joined the Pankhursts and became a serious and dedicated militant. She marched, protested, physically attacked leading politicians, smashed Parliamentary windows, got arrested (seven times), imprisoned (three times), sentenced to ‘hard labour’, went on hungerstrike, was forcibly fed through her nostrils (55 times) – all before even starting on amending the US Constitution. Exceptional woman!
Chris Game, Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham