A woman’s place is in the House
She had to chain herself to a grille in the Commons to do it — but suffragette Muriel Matters eventually convinced the PM that . . .
MiSS Muriel Matters’s name is apt: she certainly does matter. On October 28, 1908 the adelaide- born activist made an astonishingly bold move in the campaign for women’s suffrage, as cited on the blue plaque on her Hastings house: ‘Muriel Matters, 1877-1969. First woman to “speak” in the House of commons.’
the word ‘speak’ is in inverted commas because the year 1908 was a decade before women were allowed to vote, let alone stand for Parliament.
this was still the really bad old days of the suffragette movement, when powerful men weren’t listening and women had to resort to increasingly desperate gestures to be noticed.
the Ladies’ Gallery in the House of commons was a demeaning place: airless, cramped, high up; a claustrophobic cage behind a metal grille (designed by Pugin) which made it almost impossible for the visiting ladies to see or hear anything.
that evening, Muriel Matters chained herself to it, with two heavy padlocks, then loudly uttered the words: ‘ Mr Speaker, members of the il-Liberal government.
‘We have sat behind this insulting grille for too long . . . You are discussing a domestic question, and it is time that the women of England were given a voice in legislation which affects them as much as it affects men. ‘We demand the vote!’ What happened next, vividly recounted in this highly readable biography, was almost farcical.
the attendants grabbed her, then discovered the chains and unbreakable padlock. One reached round to silence her, but a woman in the gallery leapt on to his back and dragged him to the floor.
Frantic men in tailcoats arrived with wrenches to unscrew the grille, and Muriel was carried off still attached to a panel the size of a door.
as she left the building, she called to a passing MP: ‘We must do something vulgar to attract your vulgar attention!’
She became known as the Heroine of the Grille. She was sent to Holloway Prison for a month, where she wore a brown serge uniform and spent 22 hours a day in an unheated cell. (More than 1,000 suffragists would spend time behind bars between 1905 and 1914.)
it’s astonishing to be reminded just how far women have come in one century — although perhaps not quite as far as Muriel might have hoped.
in 1912, she wrote in an article: ‘a woman teacher, equally qualified and doing the same work as a man teacher, draws lower wages simply because she is a woman.’ ahem, BBc in 2017.
South australia, where Muriel was born, granted women the vote in 1894. Emboldened by her progressive upbringing, she sailed to London as a young actress in 1905, but soon turned her talents to being an eloquent campaigner for women’s freedom (any trace of an aussie accent having been ironed out by her elocutionist).
Her wing of the suffrage movement was less militaristic than the Pankhursts’: less hurling stones through windows,
more touring the country talking to people, trying to change their minds.
She and a few friends travelled in a wooden gypsy caravan pulled by a carthorse they nicknamed ‘Asquith’ after the detested Prime Minister — ‘going agypsying’ they called it.
The caravan, with ‘VOTES FOR WOMEN’ painted on the side, pulled up outside villages and Muriel got out and spoke right there in the fields. Boys threw apple cores at her; men blew whistles to drown her out. In Whitstable, she was pelted with fish entrails.
With her wide blue eyes and ‘magical voice’, Muriel confounded the media portrayal of suffragettes as ugly spinsters and had the ability to control an unruly crowd with the power of her delivery.
She insisted that women did not belong only in the home, to be treated as ‘half idiots and half angels’.
And said to the men: ‘If you won’t help us, we are going to leave you to stew in your own gravy.’
Wainwright reminds us of the strength of feeling against women’s suffrage in those days — there was even a Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League.
Liverpool MP Colonel Richard Chaloner spoke for many when he said of women: ‘If you bring them down off the pedestal and put them on an equality with men, you will kill the best spirit of chivalry and put the Government into the hands of women who are not fitted to it by nature and temperament.’
Let’s hope he’s turning in his grave to avoid Angela Merkel in one direction and Theresa May in the other.
Among the excellent illustrations in the book is an anti-women’s suffrage poster, which seems utterly shocking now.
It’s a coloured drawing of the inside of a head: ‘A woman’s mind magnified.’ It contains a pretty hat, a love letter, an attractive man, a wedding ring, a frilly dress, a dog, a crying baby and a box of chocolates.
AFTER the recent commemorations of the utter horrors of Passchendaele, it’s scant comfort — but comfort nonetheless — to be reminded that at least one good thing came out of World War I.
In 1918, Asquith changed his tune: ‘Some years ago I ventured to use the expression: “Let the women work out their own salvation.”
‘Well, they have worked it out during this war. How could we have carried on the war without them?’
On February 6, 1918, some women finally gained the vote in law.
Muriel Matters was a small but vital cog in the great wheel that ground uphill to make that moment come to pass.