TheWelsh women who took the long road to get the vote
Tomorrow, thousands will take part in Women’s Marches across the globe to ‘assert the positive values that the politics of fear denies’. Women from Wales also took to the roads in 1913 to make a potent political point, as Neil Evans reports...
IN THE summer of 1913 many Welsh women took to the roads. They were usually quite well-off, professional women themselves or married to professional men, and could afford to travel by train or sometimes even by car or carriage.
They were walking to make a political point. They wanted the vote and they were using a peaceful way to campaign for it.
The times were tense – Ireland was deeply divided over the issue of Home Rule and by 1914 would be on the verge of civil war. Huge strikes had erupted across the country.
In Wales we remember the coal strike in the Rhondda (especially Tonypandy), the rail strike at Llanelli where troops fired on and killed people, and the Cardiff dock and seamen’s strike which was conducted against a background of a burning warehouse and a riot against Chinese laundries.
Militant suffragettes had escalated their violence from smashing windows and blowing up pillar boxes to actions which could have cost human lives. Fortunately, they never did. Militant women were always in the headlines and seen by the press as conducting a sex war.
In Wales they heckled and disrupted Lloyd George at the Eisteddfod of 1912 in Wrexham and in his home village of Llanystumdwy when he was opening the village institute. In the summer of 1913 there were fears they would burn down the Eisteddfod pavilion in Abergavenny. Extra insurance was taken out and guards posted.
But for every member of the militant suffragettes, the Women’s Social and Political Union led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, there were probably 25 members of the constitutional, pacific National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett. They were known as suffragists rather than suffragettes.
The problem for the peaceful advocates of votes for women was to grab newspaper headlines. Their meetings were reportedly briefly in the press but they never captured the news agenda with daring and spectacular stunts. Such societies had existed for around 40 years in Britain and had achieved little. How were they now to seek centre stage when it was already occupied by the militants, by strikers and by Ireland?
The answer they came up with was a peaceful march to London, to be conducted over a few weeks and ending with a huge demonstration in Hyde Park on July 26. Women would come from the furthest reaches of Britain, march to the larger towns and cities, and there would join with others until all the streams converged on London. It would be a visible demonstration of how big and broad-based their support was.
Along the way they would hold meetings to spread the word to areas of the country which had not had the opportunity to hear it. They called themselves pilgrims. There was an ancient tradition of taking to the roads for a religious cause and that gave them respectability.
Not all of them, by any means, would march all the way. The older travelled much of the way by car or carriage; the younger often used their bicycles. We forget how much women’s liberation could be achieved by those with the means to buy a bike and get on it. Some marched for a few days, returned home to attend to domestic duties, and then rejoined the march. It was not exactly a route march and there was some mockery of this.
That missed the point. The women were stressing that they were ordinary people and not Amazonian suffragettes. (Many vile and spiteful postcards of militant suffragettes were published in the period.) They were respectable in their light-coloured dresses and sashes resplendent in the colours of the constitutional movement. These were red, white and green in contrast to the white, green and purple of the militants. They were showing that they could attend to the domestic duties expected of them at the time and exercise the vote.
In South Wales women gathered from several locations. The meeting
WHO IS NEIL EVANS?
to give them a rousing send-off was in Cardiff. It was Cardiff’s new civic centre, near the splendid City Hall and the Law Courts. That symbolised women claiming their places in public life. Many wore their gowns to show that they were graduates or students. Others wore their nursing uniforms. Women who had achieved so much in their own lives – it was being silently suggested – deserved to have a place in public life.
Prominent in the photographs of the scene in Cathays Park was Mrs Henry Lewis of Greenmeadow, the leading figure in the Cardiff Suffrage Society. She was from a landowning family with industrial interests and lived in a huge gothic mansion which dominated Tongwynlais.
She was a Conservative when it came to party politics. The NUWSS was not aligned with any party and took its supporters from all parties. All the political parties were split on the issue of votes for women, so there was no simple divide between left and right.
Conforming to the conventions of the day, she used her husband’s name in public, while in private she was Mabel. She had made the red dragon banner which the Cardiff Society carried in demonstrations.
According to the ideas of the time, women were not supposed to take part in public life and instead concentrate on being homemakers. But many turned those ideas around and argued that to run a home and educate children you needed an education yourself.
Moreover, the skills developed in running a household were transferable to the wider society. Who better to supervise the administration of a workhouse or hospital than a woman with her special experience? Who better than a woman to formulate policy on housing, education and child welfare?
Even before 1913 the suffragists of Cardiff had held public meetings in the city and taken part in rallies in London. But now they were faced with a new challenge. Would they