In praise of dangerous women
The Scotswomen who fought for peace and justice during WWI remain largely unsung. But those dangerous females were following a long, eloquent tradition that continues to ring out boldly through our streets.
TEN days ago, hundreds of women – joined by many men – converged on Glasgow’s George Square in protest against the so-called rape clause. Organised by two young women, the rally raised the profile of a powerful Scottish campaign against the new UK Government policy which prevents women from claiming tax credits for more than two children unless they can demonstrate that a third child was conceived as a result of rape or in the context of a coercive relationship.
The campaign has been built on the collaboration and persistence of female politicians, feminist organisations and activists working together to challenge one of the more extreme manifestations of the Government’s austerity regime, which constitutes a huge transfer of resources away from poor women and the people they care for. Before the event, organiser Ceris Aston urged people to “join us, raise your voice and let’s tell the UK Government that we’re not giving up” – a call echoed by Alison Thewliss MP, who first raised the issue in Westminster. “We will fight this appalling policy every step of the way,” she told the George Square crowd: “We will not rest until our voices are heard.”
In January, more than five million people participated in the Global Women’s March: the biggest single-day protest in history. In the wake of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the declared intention was to make a bold but peaceful statement that women’s rights are human rights. Wherever women marched that day, in 673 different locations across all seven continents, there were massed ranks of pink “pussy hats”, witty banners, passionate speeches, laughter and tears, songs and dreams. The event was a global declaration that the way things are is not the way things have to be. A dangerous world needs dangerous women – those who break the mould of compliance, shatter the deadly silence of conformity, confront injustice and claim alternative possibilities for themselves and their communities. Women’s protest is about changing the world.
A new play opening this Friday, presented by the National Theatre of Scotland, Perth Theatre and Stellar Quines, and inspired by real events, tells the story of three women fighting for peace during the First World War. The 306: Day is about dangerous women. Scotland has produced more than its fair share of dangerous women: they have been on the streets and making a noise for centuries, protesting against the Clearances or slavery, campaigning for education and equal pay, the right to vote and the right to live free from violence and abuse.
A century ago, on a wet December evening in 1917, as the incessant slaughter and grind- ing hardships of the First World War were extracting an ever greater toll from the working-class families of Glasgow, groups of protesting women marched from Govan and Bridgeton, from Partick and Maryhill, carrying placards and singing songs through the city streets. They converged on George Square, distributing illegal leaflets and holding banners aloft bearing slogans including “Peace Is Victory” and “Stop The War” – not quite “Trump is a bawbag”, but their message was just as direct and extremely provocative at a time when the government’s policy was for total military victory and the unconditional surrender of Germany. The Women’s Peace Crusade (WPC) was on the march.
Unhindered by the large police presence, a rabble from the pro-war Scottish Patriotic Federation attacked the women (who defended themselves by brandishing their brollies), insulting them, seizing and ripping their banners. Meanwhile, two WPC leaders, Helen Crawfurd and Agnes Dollan, had inveigled their way into the Council Chambers. From the gallery they rose to their feet, interrupted the ongoing Corporation meeting, scattered leaflets down and addressed the City Fathers on the pressing need for an immediate declaration of peace, now that the new Bolshevik government in Russia had renounced any part in an imperialist war. The women were promptly apprehended, evicted from the Chambers and arrested. According to Red Clydeside leader Willie Gallagher, events in George Square that night fanned revolutionary fervour in the city as “angry murmurs grew into a roar of rage”.
THE Women’s Peace Crusade was a remarkable grass-roots war resistance movement which began in Glasgow in the summer of 1916, revived the following year in the wake of the February Russian Revolution, and spread like wildfire across the working-class industrial heartlands of Scotland, the north and midlands of England, and Wales, calling for an immediate negotiated end to the war. Helen Crawfurd was one of the main instigators of the Crusade. Originally from the Gorbals, where her father William Jack was a master baker, and brought up with six siblings in a warm, fervently religious home, she spent her childhood in Ipswich before the family returned to Glasgow in 1894, when she was 17. They joined the parish church of Anderston Brownfield, and she seemed destined for a life of mission work – especially when the elderly minister, Rev Alexander Crawfurd, persuaded her to marry him in 1898. She had stood up for herself from an early age, and her sense of injustice was sharpened by the appalling poverty and slums she saw in the city – particularly the hardships endured by women. “I had always resented any suggestion of the inferiority of women,” she wrote in her unpublished autobiography, “but I had tremendous faith in women and felt they could do much to change the existing conditions if awakened and organised and permitted to participate in the making of laws.”
The seeds of socialism were sown in her by Keir Hardie’s campaigning journalism, and she channelled her evangelical fervour into a desire for social change. But it was the militant suffrage movement which drew Crawfurd into political activism and she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1910. In the week before she made up her mind to participate in a mass WSPU raid, she prayed for a message from her husband’s sermon. It was about Christ chasing money changers out of the temple. “This I took as a warrant that my participation in the raid was right. If Christ could be militant, so could I,” she later wrote.
Indeed, she relished that militancy, throwing herself into the cause as an effective public speaker, arrested and hunger striking right up until summer 1914 and the mass protests outside Perth prison, where suffragettes were being forcibly fed.
But her loyalty to Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst was shattered that August by their strident support for military mobilisation and the war. Crawfurd believed the war was a cynically dishonest exercise of capitalist imperialist expansionism and, newly widowed, she threw herself into passionate socialist anti-war activism, joining the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and quickly becoming a leading speaker at out-
door demonstrations. As munitions workers crowded into the city, private landlords saw this as their opportunity to increase rents at a time of food shortages and other hardships. Socialists accused them of blatant profiteering, and Crawfurd became secretary of the Glasgow Women’s Housing Association. She and Agnes Dollan supported their ILP comrade Mary Barbour at the forefront of a mass non-payment campaign, which spread across working-class areas of Glasgow and beyond. The Rent Strike of 1915 culminated in Barbour leading her army of 20,000 protesters through the streets of Glasgow and to the victory of government capitulation and the Rent Restriction Act. Crawfurd seized the opportunity, at packed Rent Strike meetings, to preach the socialist anti-war message. Dollan and Crawfurd set up a Glasgow branch of the Women’s International League – an organisation which emerged out of the 1915 Women’s Peace Congress in the Hague. They held meetings and produced peace education materials. But Crawfurd’s militant soul rebelled against having to submit publications to the censor (as required by Dora – the Defence of the Realm Act). In the wake of the successful Rent Strike, she and Dollan were keen to organise war resistance which was dramatic, direct, rooted in the realities of local women’s lives – and overtly socialist. In June 1916, supported by feminist peace activists from across Britain, including Sylvia Pankhurst and Charlotte Despard, they launched an intensive campaign in Glasgow neighbourhoods, using Rent Strike methods to inform, rouse and rally war-weary women in support of a negotiated peace. Some 20 open-air meetings were held across the city, and thousands of signatures collected for a national Peace Petition. The 1916 Women’s Peace Crusade culminated on Sunday, July 23 in a 5,000-strong demonstration on Glasgow Green.
IT was in the summer of 1917 that the Crusade really took off as a national mass movement. A pro-war visit to Russia by Emmeline Pankhurst incensed Helen Crawfurd, and galvanised her determination that women should speak for themselves. In letters to the socialist press, she wrote: “For nearly three years the war has gone on, and we women have been afraid, afraid to trust our own judgement, afraid to speak, afraid to act … We believed our Government until it has so often been convicted of dishonesty that we are forced to think and act for ourselves … Shall we remain silent any longer?” From 12,000 protesters on Glasgow Green, rallies, marches and demonstrations spread through cities and towns across Britain, acting in the face of surveillance, hostility and intimidation. Women rose up, occupied public space, and spoke for themselves against the horror and injustice of war. The drama and strategy of the WPC (like that of the militant suffrage campaign) performed a subversive kind of femininity. It challenged accepted authority, contradicted the notion of loyal, self-sacrificing women supporting the war effort – and told a dangerously dissenting story.
That story of Scottish women-led movements putting their bodies on the line to protest against carnage at the Front and the draconian policies of a militarised state has remained mostly untold for a century. Prevailing images of women’s roles during the 1914-18 conflict may include ladies handing out white feathers to “conchies” (conscientious objectors), nurses as angels of mercy, or plucky girls stepping into the breach to take on the jobs of men in factories and forests (and thus supposedly earning the “right” to vote), but wartime realities were much more complex.
Eunice Murray, a prominent liberal women’s rights campaigner from Cardross, kept a diary through those years. She supported the war, but with a heavy heart and a sharply observant pen. Reflecting on her voluntary munitions work, she wrote: “What an unnatural occupation this shell making is. We are a vast army of women intent upon making as many and as good shells as we can with which to kill our brothers, when we should be striving to live in amity and peace with one another. One has to be very careful, however, of expressing these sentiments.”
In recent years, Scottish historians and activists have contributed to a revival of interest in researching and highlighting the diverse ways that women responded to the experience of the war years. The Remember Mary Barbour Association has successfully campaigned for a lasting memorial to “a great Govan hero”.
Last year, Glasgow Women’s Library hosted learning groups, an exhibition and re-enacted a rally at Glasgow Green to commemorate the WPC centenary. Now, a new piece of theatre tells the story of three women who follow different paths of speaking and silence, of dissent and resistance, as they struggle in their own ways to survive the impacts of war in their lives. Directed by Jemima Levick, written by Oliver Emanuel and with music by Gareth Williams, The 306: Day is set in 1917. In Glasgow, Nellie Murray is one of thousands of young women working in a munitions factory. Her husband is languishing in prison, on hunger strike as a conscientious objector (CO), and Nellie belongs to the No Conscription Fellowship – an organisation founded by pacifist socialists Lila and Fenner Brockway to provide practical and moral support to the reviled COs. But Nellie is also an anti-war agitator who believes in the collective power and potential of women, so the Women’s Peace Crusade is right up her street and she tries to rally her factory friends in the anti-war cause. “We need to get organised and take what’s rightfully ours,” she says.
“Women have been quiet for too long.” All the women in this drama have to contend with circumstances which make it hard to speak out, and harder still to imagine building a different kind of world.
It was seeing working-class women silently bearing the unbearable hardships of poverty, oppression and loss that Helen Crawfurd claimed was the motivation for her lifelong mission to stir the spirit of revolt.
She and her comrades in the Women’s Peace Crusade generated a potent resistance movement, defiantly claiming and occupying public space on the frontline of the struggle for a people’s peace.
As women in Scotland and around the world continue that proud tradition of protest, we stand shoulder to shoulder with our dangerous foresisters.
The 306: Day is a co-production with National Theatre Scotland, Stellar Quines, and Perth Theatre, with support from Red Note Ensemble. The show opens at the Station Hotel, Perth, on May 6 before touring. Booking details nationaltheatrescotland.com.