Suffrage Discourse in Britain during the First World War

Angela K. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351896986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria para la literatura comparada

In the first in-depth study of the relationship between the suffrage campaign in Britain and World War I, Angela K. Smith explores the links between these two defining moments of the early twentieth century. Did the opportunities afforded by the war enable women finally and irrefutably to demonstrate their right to full citizenship? Or did World War I actually postpone women's enfranchisement? Although the Suffrage Movement was divided by the outbreak of war, many women continued to campaign for the vote, producing a wide variety of fictional and nonfictional 'suffrage texts'. Whether the writing of these women demonstrated their patriotism, pacifism, or ambivalence, it formed an integral part of their political responses to the war. Through textual/literary analysis of Suffrage magazines, wartime diaries, and a range of topical novels, Smith explores these responses within historical, social, and cultural contexts to understand the impact of the war on the success of the campaign in 1918 and the consequences for the years that followed.

Chapter 1

Writing Suffrage Before 1914

‘You can’t have all the honour and glory of war, and expect to keep your hair tidy too.’¹

In the final years before the outbreak of the First World War, many of the more militant members of the campaign for women’s suffrage already believed themselves to be at war. Having argued, constitutionally, for more than half a century, that women were entitled to equal citizenship with men, they had concluded that a belligerent motion was the only way forward. Real war interrupted the proceedings. Imprisoned suffrage ‘soldiers’ found themselves free again. The very citizenship for which they had already fought so bravely was under threat. As British men flowed over the channel to confront the new enemy, what should British women do at home? Suddenly the old enemy didn’t appear so bad. Should they carry on the fight or switch allegiance? How did the arena of internal political wrangling relate to the external world of international and imperial conflict?

In 1978, Martin Pugh argued that during the First World War, ‘the way was paved for woman suffrage by the virtual disappearance of the campaign.’² He goes on to suggest that the suffrage movement was already divided into a number of branches with a range of very different ideas concerning the best course of action for the winning of the vote. This indeed was true. It is equally true that the advent of the war further split the movement as the various branches adopted alternative strategies for approaching the war effort, and a notable faction opted for the course of pacifism and threw their energies into campaigning to end the war instead of supporting it. However, to suggest that the suffrage movement disappeared is a much more questionable statement. It shifted, it modified, it metamorphosed, but the ardent desire to win the vote that had fuelled it for the decade leading up to the outbreak of the war remained as powerful as ever.

Nearly a decade after Pugh, Sandra Stanley Holton expresses this opposing view:

The suffrage movement had, to a notable extent, remained intact under the impact of war. It had continued to exert significant pressure to ensure the inclusion of women in eventual reform of the franchise. It was to provide the organisational leadership for continuing feminist campaigning in the post-war period.³

This acknowledgement of the work that the suffrage women continued to do during the war years is perhaps more accurate. But Holton’s study, focusing as it does on the years leading up to the war, the ‘great’ years of campaigning for women’s suffrage, does not explore the way in which these women continued their work as the war raged around them. Pugh argues, ‘The fact that neither pro nor anti-suffragists launched any appreciable campaign goes a long way to explaining why in the long history of women’s suffrage the vital 1914–18 period has been neglected.’⁴ Here, he is right, at least partially. There were no significant, overt, public campaigns for the vote during the war, and this period of suffrage history is both vital and neglected. Perhaps because the movement appears to disappear if one does not look closely. However, closer inspection reveals that there was, in fact, a great deal of activity emanating from the various suffrage societies at this time. Alternatively, this period may have been neglected because some historians believe that much of the work to obtain the vote had already been done when the war broke out, that the war just delayed the inevitable. But this reading is too simplistic.

This book sets out to explore the gap, to look beyond the alleged ‘disappearance’ and find out what really happened to the women of the suffrage movement. It does so through literature, written texts, discourses, to find them through their own words, in the books, papers, letters and diaries that they kept during the war period, and to discover whether or not they did continue to campaign for the suffrage, and if they did, then how? How do you win the vote from a field hospital or from an East End soup kitchen? How do you win it while rolling bandages in church halls, caring for the welfare of refugees or, indeed, while fighting the government at every comer to prevent the introduction of conscription? The roles of women in the First World War were many and varied. The suffragists and suffragettes, the activists of the pre-war years did not ‘sit still’ and do nothing when war was declared. They continued to be at the forefront of activity – simply, for many of them, different kinds of activity – for the duration of hostilities. The different focus of these activities did not necessarily mean that they no longer cared about emancipation, although many testimonies do suggest a shift in attitude towards some aspects of the pre-war movement. What was formerly suffrage literature, now becomes war literature and much of it is extremely interesting both in the way that it re-interprets the suffrage movement within an altered arena and in the way that it may continue to campaign, often in a much more clandestine way, and using different weapons to secure government confidence.

In the years leading up to the First World War, a range of suffrage societies articulated various ideologies and adopted different strategies in their work to obtain the vote. Some were constitutional, like the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), others, such as the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), were militant. Some were allied to particular political parties, like the East London Federation of the Suffragettes (ELFS) who worked with the Independent Labour Party (ILP, and others represented particular social or professional groups such as the Women Writers Suffrage League (WWSL). Over the years, they divided and multiplied, but kept two primary things in common: the cause of the vote and the use of words to win it. All suffrage societies used writing, through their weekly papers, through pamphlets, through published speeches, through fiction. This chapter explores the kind of literatures and discourses produced by the suffrage campaign in the years prior to 1914; what was written, how, and to what end. The rest of the book examines what happens to this writing once war has been declared, through the papers of the various societies, through women’s diaries and letters from active service, novels, memoirs and even literary, intellectual periodicals. It investigates the way in which these wartime writings provide evidence that the suffrage campaign did not disappear, and the way that they represent the all-important interface between the war and the campaign before the vote was finally achieved with the Representation of the People Act in 1918.

Perhaps the most publicly prominent of the suffrage societies in 1914 was the notorious WSPU, run by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, and the breeding ground of the militant suffragettes. The WSPU’s campaign of violence and terrorism had been the bane of the government for several years. These women considered that they were fighting a war against the oppression of their sex and were prepared to go to greater and greater lengths to promote their cause. Despite their motto ‘Deeds not words’, words played a big part in the armoury of the WSPU. The Pankhurst women were skilled orators who published their speeches. The ideas of the Union were sold on street comers in The Suffragette, and a number of women writers lent their skills to the Union’s cause in a range of different ways. They were practised publicists, experienced at turning the events of the political world to their advantage, and nothing in the pre-war world gave a better opportunity to do this than the first suffragette martyr.

On 4^th June 1913, Emily Wilding Davison, a radical militant suffragette, stepped in front of the King’s horse at the Derby. She died from her injuries four days later. This dramatic, violent and unexpected act provided the movement with a unique opportunity for publicity. Davison’s collision with the horse was captured on an early film, enshrining her in her own mythology. Her funeral procession through the streets of London, escorted by hundreds of grieving suffragettes, has become an iconic image of the early twentieth century.

Whether or not Davison intended to die is a much debated question. Novelist and suffragette Gertrude Colmore’s 1913 biography, The Life of Emily Davison,⁵ certainly suggests that she did. In a way it doesn’t matter: the political implications are the same. Colmore’s biography, published by the WSPU’s Women’s Press shortly afterwards, operates as a propaganda work, intending to glorify the martyr and thus exult the cause. Davison is romanticised throughout. Early comparisons with Emily Bronte contribute to the overall picture of the law-abiding rebel, a good woman using the only means available to get her message across, inspired by religious faith to great acts of sacrifice. Later comparisons to Joan of Arc, an important symbol, the ‘patron saint’ of the WSPU, to Cromwell and even to St Paul, add further dimensions to the picture.

Colmore attempts to make everything in Davison’s life resonate towards her final act, reading her back through the rhetoric of martyrdom. ‘She had the spirit but not the pose of the martyr. Nothing ever broke her courage,’⁶ Colmore writes emphatically as she works her way through the long list of Davison’s imprisonments, hunger-strikes and subjection to forcible feeding. What she fails to mention is that Davison had a troubled relationship with the WSPU leadership. She was a bit of a wild card. They never knew what she would do next and although Emmeline and Christabel always gave her public backing, her increasingly violent activities caused them some concern. Colmore euphemistically suggests, ‘employment with the Union was not compatible with the position of free lance which she had adopted.’⁷ However, the WSPU did put her death to good use and, as the publication of this text indicates, encouraged the myth of the martyr.

Colmore shifts into the present tense as she reaches the events of the Derby, using this immediacy to create a more dramatic effect. She suggests that Davison had considered suicidal action on several previous occasions, giving the proceeding an inevitability, a fatefulness, which is then translated into a conviction that the vote will be won as a result. Colmore’s narrative uses a range of the devices of fiction: shifting tenses, hindsight, euphemism, literary allusion, interspersed with the military rhetoric favoured by the WSPU, to create a character appropriate to the role of the martyr. She makes sure that the public Emily Wilding Davison stands in the best company, to contribute the maximum to the cause for which she gave her life, whether intentionally or not. This is blatant literary propaganda and illustrates the importance of the written word to the pre-war cause. This text is both fiction and fact in one, a complex political amalgam, laced with passion and melodrama, designed for mass appeal to communicate the message of the Union in a number of different ways.

When war broke out the WSPU elected to take a patriotic line. Unlike many of the other suffrage societies, they determined to support the government and therefore the country, using their publicity machine to produce propaganda for the new cause. The Pankhursts believed that there was nothing to be gained for women by opposing the government at a time of national crisis, and indeed everything to be gained by showing themselves to be on the same side. The Suffragette was reborn as Britannia and the Union lent active support to the government over issues such as the right of women to work in munitions factories.

When Emmeline Pankhurst wrote of ‘War Until the Victory!’ in April 1918,⁸ she intended to inspire the soon-to-be enfranchised women of Britain to support the war effort through the final push. The country was faced with the last big German advance: it was make or break time. Everyone, she argued, must join in the fight to ensure success and the defeat of Germany, ‘The women are just as important as the men in the trenches. They have the power to save the country.’⁹

But fighting talk was nothing new to Emmeline Pankhurst. As the leader of the WSPU, she had always regarded the campaign for Votes for Women as a war waged against a belligerent government, promoted it as such, and used any means available to secure equality and justice. The WSPU was run like an army, especially after 1907 when many of the Pankhursts’ opponents left the Union. Emmeline saw herself as a general leading her troops into action and would tolerate no insurrection. The suffragettes were her army, and her speeches and writings, like those of her daughter, Christabel, were filled with the language of war:

The women who are waging this war are women who would fight, if it were only for the idea of liberty – if it were only that they might be free citizens of a free country – I myself would fight for that idea alone. But we have, in addition to this love of freedom, intolerable grievances to redress.¹⁰

Driven by this ethos, and organised in this quasi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Writing Suffrage Before 1914
• 2. Patriotic Suffragism: Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and the WSPU
• 3. A Different View: Sylvia Pankhurst and the East End
• 4. The Pacifist Voice
• 5. Suffragists and War Work
• 6. ‘That Silly Suffrage’: The Paradox of the First World War
• 7. ‘The Empowering of Individuals’: Feminism, Art and War in The Egoist
• 8. Winning the Peace
• Bibliography
• Index