The war between the sisters!
Smashed windows, lobbed bombs . . . a fascinating book casts new light on the bitter rivalry between the women who fought for the vote
AuSeFuL mnemonic for remembering the difference between suffragists and suffragettes is ‘ Millicent: non-militant’.
Millicent Fawcett and her suffragist crowd were the peaceful ones who trundled around Britain in horse-drawn caravans, waved embroidered banners, dropped leaflets from hot-air balloons and used the art of gentle persuasion.
The suffragette Pankhurst lot were the ones who went around smashing shop windows, bombing pillar-boxes and slashing paintings in the National Gallery.
reading Jane robinson’s lively new book on the subject — published in this 100th anniversary year of the representation Of The People act of 1918 that at last gave women the vote — is an excellent way of fleshing out those sparse bits of general knowledge.
Suffragists, she tells us, were rude about suffragettes, calling them ‘a dictatorship movement of the sort that drives democracy out’. Suffragettes were rude back, saying that suffragists were ‘staid, so willing to wait, so incorrigibly leisurely’.
robinson brings all these straightbacked edwardian ladies to life, telling the story of the centrepiece of the suffragist movement: the Great Pilgrimage of 1913, in which thousands of suffragists walked all the way to London from far-flung corners of Britain for a mass rally of 50,000 in Hyde Park.
The aim was to draw the world’s attention (and that of stubborn prime minister Herbert asquith) to the growing swell of opinion in favour of the women’s vote — and to prove women had the ability to turn the world upside down without violence.
THeIrpeaceful protest proved to be the prototype for others, from the Jarrow March of 1936 to the Greenham Common peace camp of the eighties.
Did the pilgrimage do any good? Well, trying to get asquith to change his mind was like banging your head against a brick wall, and it would take a four-year World War to bring about the act of Parliament for which the campaigners yearned.
But it was their suffragist training that gave women the confidence to step into men’s jobs when the war started; and by their war efforts in factories and hospitals they ‘worked out their own salvation’, as asquith himself put it. On a sunny morning in June 1913, the Great Pilgrimage began — the Watling Street Pilgrims setting off first, for their five-week walk from Carlisle. It was thanks to a sensible piece of sartorial advice for the pilgrims — that skirt hems should be taken up four inches to prevent them getting caked in mud — that skirt lengths began their slow progression up the leg from that moment on. Some pilgrims wore their smart new Burberry raincoats (‘airy, light and porous . . . the ideal coat for the Pilgrimage’, according to Burberry’s own advertisement). Lady rochdale, umbrella, strode carrying out her side-byside rolled with emily Murgatroyd, a weaver at a cotton mill since the age of ten. In those classridden days, this pilgrimage was the first coming-together of women from all walks of life — though the wealthier ones did enjoy the luxury of posting their dirty laundry home and picking up parcels of nice clean blouses en route. started The Land’s next, then end the Pilgrims Great North road Pilgrims, then the North Wales Pilgrims, and so on, until the Brighton and Kentish Pilgrims stepped out in the final week, all fixing their compasses on Hyde Park. One of the less literate pilgrims spelled ‘ suffrage’ wrong in her diary — ‘sufferage’. robinson mistake as coins a useful this word spelling to describe how some of them suffered for their cause. Vast swathes of the public couldn’t tell a ’gist from a ’ gette, and classed them all as ‘pantomime villains’ who deserved to be beaten up or pelted with rotten tomatoes, stones and rubbish. were disaffected and In Birkenhead children, pelted men, with reminding but coal the by — Pilgrims women not by us that there were vociferous female as well as male ‘antis’, who believed that women should shut up and (as one poem went) be satisfied with ‘The right to brighten earthly homes / With pleasant smiles and gentle tones’. To a woman, they picked themselves up, dusted themsiste
selves down, rearranged their sashes, and started all over again. They wore body armour in the form of pieces of cardboard which they moulded to the body in the bath and then allowed to dry, so they fitted snugly. The more ‘sufferage’ they endured, the stronger their sense of sisterhood grew.
LUcKIly,there were just as many kind and supportive locals across the country who gave them hot baths, as well as crumpets for tea and beds for the night. By the day of the Hyde Park rally on July 26, the atmosphere in london was celebratory.
From the gates at all four corners of the park, thousands of pilgrims poured in. Seventy- eight speakers stood up on platforms, announcing that ‘ the tide had turned’. An hour later, bugles sounded and the resolution was proposed: ‘ This meeting demands a Government measure for the enfranchisement of women.’ It was passed unanimously.
A page later, I was banging my head against a brick wall, reading Asquith’s pompously anticlimactic reply to the suffragists’ post-rally letter demanding that he take notice. ‘I feel bound to warn you,’ he wrote, ‘that I do not see my way to add anything material to what I have lately said in the House of commons as to the intentions and policy of the Government.’ In other words: ‘Nice try, but no cigar.’
The suffragettes continued with their usual business of windowsmashing and raiding Downing Street — all of which, the suffragists believed, did more harm than good to ‘the cause’, blackening the reputation of campaigners. Everyone was so busy smashing things up or not smashing things up that none of them noticed that ‘the war to end all wars’ was creeping up behind them.
During that cataclysm of a war, women really proved their worth. By 1915, the slogans on their banners had changed to: ‘Shells Made by a Wife may Save a Husband’s life’. And indeed they did.
Suffragists and suffragettes alike did astonishingly demanding war work, including running hospitals on the Western Front.
The great suffragist Katherine Harley — who had come up with the idea of the Great Pilgrimage — was killed in 1917 by a shell while caring for refugees in Serbia.
‘We can’t give these suffragists and their militant sisters much in return,’ Robinson writes, ‘except a promise to use the vote they fought so hard to win and, wherever it’s necessary, to keep on fighting.’