Suffrage and Women's Writing

June Hannam, Katherine Holden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000672848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Kreatives Schreiben

This volume examines different types of women's creative writing in support of the demand for the parliamentary vote, including autobiographies, memoirs, letters, diaries, novels, and drama.

The women's suffrage movement became far more visible in the Edwardian period. Large demonstrations and militant actions such as destruction of property were widely reported in the press and reached a wide audience. Eager to get their message across, suffrage campaigners not only took collective action but also used women's creative talents—whether as artists, musicians, or writers—to win hearts and minds for the cause. Through a close reading of contemporary texts, the chapters in this book reveal the diverse nature of the suffrage movement and its ideas, and the complex relationship between the personal and the political. The contributors also highlight the significance of women's writing as a means to advance the suffrage cause and as a key element of suffrage propaganda.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's Writing.

“MY PART IN A CHANGING WORLD”: WOMEN’S STRUGGLE FOR THE VOTE AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SUBJECT

Mary Joannou

ABSTRACT

This essay is concerned with some 20 autobiographies by participants in the women’s suffrage movement with differing backgrounds and beliefs. Their writings reveal similarities and differences between autobiographical subjects. The author addresses the importance that some autobiographers attached to pain, the problems attendant on its representation, and their determination to make women’s pain count politically. The autobiographical accounts of Helena Swanwick, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Edith Picton-Turbevill and other suffragists are contrasted to the suffragette autobiographies of Emmeline Pankhurst and her supporters, with their emphasis on law-breaking, imprisonment and patriotic support for the war effort. The struggle for the vote was the apogee of some women’s lives, while for others a mere stepping stone; their life achievements lay elsewhere—in the peace movement, the theatre, social reform, music, religion, the police service or journalism. However, the autobiographical subjects look back on the excitement of the suffrage struggles as life-changing—the crucible in which their subsequent political understanding was shaped. In paying critical attention to the writings of militant and non-militant, Christian and secularist, socialist and fascist alike, the author shows how these autobiographies create a variegated, complex and diverse picture of the “cause”, its fault lines and its supporters.

This essay is concerned with some 20 autobiographies written by participants in the women’s suffrage movement.¹ I examine the autobiographical writing of women of differing social backgrounds and political persuasions in relation to some feminist theoretical accounts of autobiography which help to illuminate both the usefulness of the genre to supporters of the movement and why this has been a genre of writing historically important to women. I also explore some of the objectives and priorities of different activists, the tensions which arose from them in the Edwardian and post-Edwardian suffrage movement, and how those tensions inform their later autobiographies.

As is customary, I use the word “suffragist” to describe supporters of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), founded in 1897, and others who worked for the vote by constitutional means. The word “suffragette” is used to denote supporters of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), started in 1903, the Women’s Freedom League, formed in 1907, and others who resorted to militant action.² However, many varieties of suffragism were to be found across the country. Women altered their loyalties and started and joined new local and regional groups. Some organizations were set up nationally to bring together those with shared professional, occupational, political or religious interests. This was the case for the Women Writers’ Suffrage League, of which one of my autobiographical subjects, Cicely Hamilton, was a member, and the Church League for Women’s Suffrage, to which another, Margaret Wynne Nevinson, belonged.

While the rights of men to tell their own life stories have historically been uncontentious, women’s attempts to do likewise have been fraught with difficulty. Concluding her memoir, published alongside her biography of her deceased husband in 1656, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle asks: “Why hath this lady writ her own life?” Anticipating a question that could have been addressed to anyone having the temerity to write her own autobiography in a society in which the personal life of a woman was regarded as being of lesser consequence than that of a man, she responds thus:

[…] tis no purpose to the readers, but it is to the authoress because I write for my own sake, not theirs; neither did I intend this piece for to delight, but to divulge; not to please the fancy, but to tell the truth.³

By 1935, it appears that little had changed in this respect. The suffragist Helena Swanwick, a pioneering journalist with the Manchester Guardian and a British representative at the League of Nations, still felt the need to preface her autobiography with fulsome praise for her late husband and this modest disclaimer of any public significance of her own: “To write, nay more, to offer for publication, a whole book strung on the thread of one’s own personality seems an outburst of egotism requiring apology”.⁴ An alternative reading of Swanwick’s words, however, is that they are an attempt to dissociate herself from the romantic heroism of the autobiographies of some militant suffragettes which celebrate the “willful acts of heroic individuals bent on making themselves forces of change”.⁵

Propelled from obscurity to the limelight by the struggle with which their names are inextricably linked, Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Christabel, Emmeline and Sylvia Pankhurst were, and indeed still are, well known; Helena Swanwick was somewhat less so. All their autobiographies fulfil the “classic” criterion of what constitutes a good autobiography: that this should demonstrate and illuminate the subject’s links to the times in which they live. Yet the conflation of male subjectivity and human identity remained so strong that Margaret Cavendish’s question (“Why hath this lady writ her own life?”) resonates across autobiographies published several centuries later. As Sidonie Smith puts it: “From their position of marginality, women have spoken. They have written public autobiography. Nonetheless, when they engage in the autobiographical project, they did so as interlopers”.⁶

These autobiographical writings about suffrage are remarkable in their range and diversity, and cannot without the grossest distortion be assimilated to any common grid. They indicate similarities between women as well as significant differences. I return later to some of these key differences: the importance that some autobiographies (but not others) attached to pain, the problems attendant on its representation, and the determination of some autobiographers to make women’s pain count politically. There are also differences of emphasis on continuity with the nineteenth-century struggles and on change, as in the WSPU’s innovative and disruptive strategy and tactics. Participation in the struggle was the apogee of some women’s lives, while for others it was merely a stepping stone; their major life achievements lay elsewhere or were still to come in, for example, the peace movement, the theatre, social reform, music, religion, the police service or journalism. However, virtually without exception, the autobiographical subjects look back on the excitement of having worked for the vote as life-changing and acknowledge themselves as beneficiaries of, as well as participants in, the struggle.

Their writings pay tribute to the suffrage struggle as the crucible in which their political understanding was shaped. “The education I received as a political agitator was enhanced a hundredfold by the fact that I received it from Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett, my leader”, wrote the preacher Maude Royden, who edited the NUWSS journal the Common Cause. ⁷ Royden obtained her “suffrage education” working with the poor at the Victoria Women’s Settlement in Liverpool, and is remembered today for her pioneering work for the ordination of women in the Church of England.

As I have argued elsewhere, suffragette autobiography is largely a misnomer insofar as militancy lasted some 10 years, was suspended in 1914 and could hardly constitute the raison d’être of any woman’s entire adult life.⁸ The suffragette narrative, in which the emotional and physical trauma of imprisonment and forcible feeding is related by women who lived through these ordeals (including Lady Constance Lytton, Emily Wilding Davison, and Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst), is deeply embedded in the public consciousness. Indeed, it is widely recognized as representing the ultimate in women’s commitment, courage, idealism and capacity for personal sacrifice for a higher cause.⁹

Yet, as Laura Mayhall has shown, what can be loosely termed the “suffragette trauma narrative” is largely a retrospective construction consolidated during the 1920s and 1930s, and owing much to the activities of the former suffragettes who set up the Suffragette Fellowship for the purpose of memorializing the bravery of the militants and ensuring that their version of the historical record should never be forgotten.¹⁰ This is, however, but one of a number of competing and contested narratives relating to women’s struggle for the vote available to women at the time and to historians in later years. The autobiographical accounts of the public dimensions of the suffrage movement and its impact on the personal lives of women such as Helena Swanwick, Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Edith Picton-Turbevill, who did not believe it right to break the law and had no first-hand experiences of prison, position them outside the dominant narrative of women’s enfranchisement. This is associated primarily with Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and their emphasis on the need for militancy, law-breaking, imprisonment and patriotic support for the war effort between 1914 and 1918. It is by looking at these autobiographies collectively, paying attention to the words of militant and non-militant, avid Christian and secularist, socialist and fascist alike, that I hope to show how they can help us to form a more variegated, complex and diverse picture of the “cause”, its fault lines and its supporters than has hitherto been recognized.

As Leigh Gilmore suggests, the authority of autobiography “is derived through autobiography’s proximity to the rhetoric of truth telling: the confession”,¹¹ judicial and spiritual—that is, the autobiographical subject telling a “truth” which can be externally verified, the disclosure of which is important both to her identity and subjectivity and to the textual production of the autobiographical self. Yet autobiographical inscription is by its nature self-justificatory. The memory, as James Olney notes, “goes backward so that narrative, its twin and counterpart, may go forward: memory and narration move along the same line only in reverse directions”.¹² Thus, the suffrage autobiographers frequently punctuate their narratives with reflections on criticisms of their actions of which they were unaware at the time of the events they narrate. They do this to justify their past behaviour to future generations with no memory of the world without the hard-won freedoms their actions helped to bring about. Autobiographical writing by women attempts to put straight the historical record, but the disclosure of public facts is inseparable from the private subjectivities of the narratorial “I”. Autobiography is a genre in which the self is authorized, but, because the narration of a life can never be restricted to a solitary isolated subject, it is also and always far more than a self-authorizing genre.

The relationship between the individual and organized suffragism was symbiotic: the development of an individual political consciousness predicated on the development of women’s collective political consciousness, and vice versa. As Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield put it, the “narration of a self cannot be understood in isolation from another it acknowledges, implicitly or explicitly, and with which it is in a constitutive relationship”, and such “others” are “an integral part of consciousness, events and the production...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 “My Part in a Changing World”: Women’s Struggle for the Vote and the Autobiographical Subject
• 2 “Women Who Dared to Ask for a Vote”: The Missing Memoirs of the Scottish Suffragettes
• 3 Writing Suffrage in Edwardian Nottingham
• 4 The “Sordid Story” of an Unwanted Child: Militancy, Motherhood and Abortion in Elizabeth Robins’ Votes for Women! and Way Stations
• 5 The Use of Irony as a Subversive Element in Suffrage Theatre
• 6 The American Suffrage Movement and the Novels of Marietta Holley and Elia Peattie as a Means of Cultural Lobbying
• Index