Women's Suffrage in the British Empire

Citizenship, Nation and Race

Ian Christopher Fletcher, Philippa Levine, Laura E. Nym Mayhall, Ian Christopher Fletcher, Philippa Levine, Laura E. Nym Mayhall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135639990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Grande-Bretagne

This edited collection examines the campaign for women's suffrage from an international perspective. Leading international scholars explore the relationship between suffragism and other areas of social and political struggle, and examine the ideological and cultural implications of gendered constructions of 'race', nation and empire. The book includes comprehensive case-studies of Britain, India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Palestine.

Part I

Re-thinking suffrage discourse

1 The South African War and the origins of suffrage militancy in Britain, 1899–1902¹

Laura E. Nym Mayhall

Englishmen understand the hardship for the Outlander, who is placed on an unequal footing with the Boer. But they do not realise that the self-same exclusion can press hardly on their sisters at home. They are conscious they wish well to their sisters, and are blinded to the fact that they are not doing to them as they would be done by. Perchance, out of this turmoil and strife of arms to gain a peaceful right, our brothers will learn to appreciate better the right reasonableness of the claim of their sisters at home.²

In the historiography of women’s suffrage in Britain, silence persists around the events of 1899–1902, years during which the British Empire went to war against the Boers, the mainly Dutch settlers of South Africa. While key issues dividing suffragists for decades had been resolved by 1899, notably the exclusion of married women from consideration for enfranchisement had ended with passage of the 1894 Local Government Act, British involvement in an imperial war seemingly brought the suffrage campaign to a halt. By and large, historians have accepted leading suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s 1925 recollection that “the war naturally caused an almost complete suspension of work for Women’s Suffrage.”³ Yet a wide array of evidence suggests that the great majority of women active in the organized suffrage movement believed in the necessity of continuing to press their claim.⁴ Furthermore, the war motivated male and female activists involved in a range of progressive causes other than suffrage to consider critically how they might reconcile their opposition to the war with support for Britain and its empire.⁵ The South African War, in fact, marked a significant turning point in the struggle for women’s parliamentary enfranchisement in Britain. Much as the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica had shaped public and parliamentary discussion of the 1867 Reform Act, an imperial war against the Boer republics at the turn of the century affected further franchise reform in Britain until the First World War.⁶

Division among progressives over British justification for the war brought into high contrast two competing understandings of citizenship circulating at the turn of the century. Women suffragists entered the war ostensibly in agreement with a model of citizenship exemplified by such prominent feminists as Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Josephine Butler, who had urged the expansion of voting rights to certain women on grounds of the services those women could render the Empire.⁷ Yet the range of opposition to the war among suffragists and other progressives pushed into being a nascent conception of citizenship and its obligations, one in development over the decade of the 1890s, but to which the war would give full articulation. This model drew upon a legacy of masculine radical argumentation for the people’s moral right to participate in the nation’s political life and refined an evolving understanding of the relationship between popular consent and legitimate government. For many suffragists who would later embrace militancy, the war provided a compelling example of where and when resistance to “constituted authority” had become necessary.⁸ The war in South Africa brought these two models of citizenship, the social-service and the radical-independent, into conflict and pushed the campaign for women’s parliamentary enfranchisement in new directions, highlighting women’s demand for self-representation.⁹

The South African War and the Uitlander franchise

As late as 1890, South Africa existed primarily as “a geographical expression,” composed of two British colonies (Natal and the Cape Colony), two independent republics (the Transvaal and the Orange Free State), and numerous autonomous African polities, including Zulu, Xhosa, and Bosotho Kingdoms. Since the 1880s, however, economic and political power had shifted decisively to the British. Discovery of diamonds in Kimberley in 1868, and gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886, accelerated the processes by which indigenous groups were brought under the control of European land- and mine-owners.¹⁰ South African political events assumed new importance in British domestic politics in 1881, when Britain was forced as a consequence of its humiliating military defeat at Majuba Hill to grant the Transvaal “complete self-government, subject to the Suzerainty of Her Majesty.”¹¹ The newly restored Transvaal Republic then established an elective Volksraad and president, limiting the franchise to those white men resident in the republic fourteen years or more. This legislation enfranchised Boer men, descendants of the Dutch settlers who had been moving inland to evade British control since the early nineteenth century, and left without voting rights those white men characterized as alien, known as Uitlanders, most of whom had come to South Africa in pursuit of gold and diamonds. The Uitlanders were a motley crew. Migrants from England, Scotland, Ireland, continental Europe, Australia, and North America, most spoke English, but few were vocal about their political status in South Africa in the decade of the 1880s.

The Uitlanders’ grievances grew in importance in British domestic politics after 1895 when the Transvaal entered diplomatic relations with Germany, Britain’s major imperial rival in the region. Over the next four years, a strategic campaign, combining pressure from British mining interests and British officials in South Africa, promoted Uitlander grievances as responsible for the deepening crisis in the Transvaal. In March 1899, the British High Commissioner, Alfred Milner, orchestrated events in the region to highlight the political disabilities of British subjects. He arranged for presentation to the British parliament of a petition, signed by over 21,000 British Uitlanders, requesting intervention on behalf of their franchise rights, to coincide with delivery of an official report from the British mining community in South Africa, indicating that their interests would not be separated from the Uitlanders’ cause. Uitlander enfranchisement thus presented itself as a logical solution to the unfolding crisis.¹²

Formal negotiations over the citizenship rights of British subjects in South Africa took place during the summer of 1899, with Milner and Paul Kruger, president of the Transvaal Republic, meeting in conference at Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, between 31 May and 5 June 1899. The two men debated terms for the enfranchisement and naturalization of British subjects in the Transvaal, stimulating a public debate in Britain over the possibility of war. When Kruger eventually succeeded in persuading the Volksraad to reduce the residence requirement for Uitlanders from fourteen to seven years, Milner abruptly began to argue that the real issue was British paramountcy in South Africa. Public sentiment in Britain in favor of war increased with the publication of Milner’s “helots” dispatch in June. In private correspondence with colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain, Milner had urged that action be taken to redress “the spectacle of thousands of British subjects kept permanently in the position of helots, constantly chafing under undoubted grievances, and calling vainly to Her Majesty’s Government for redress.”¹³ Despite the emotive appeal of the “helots” dispatch, opponents of British intervention in the Transvaal interpreted Milner’s change of position as evidence that the franchise controversy merely provided the means to an end: British supremacy in South Africa. Historians largely concur with this assessment.¹⁴

My concern here, however, is less with the causes of the war than with the rhetorical purposes to which the Uitlander franchise was put by the British government, and how that rhetoric resonated in late-Victorian political culture. From April through October 1899, war was rationalized in the press and in parliament in the language of liberal political rights.¹⁵ Public discussion of the possibility of war highlighted issues central to the construction of Britain as a liberal imperial power: freedom versus slavery; the franchise rights of white men; the inevitability of progress; and the legitimacy of using force to secure freedom. Freedom and its ideational opposites, slavery and tyranny, were mobilized in support of Britain’s war effort. For supporters of the war, the importance of the Uitlander franchise paralleled the necessity of protecting indigenous Africans from enslavement at the hands of the Boers.¹⁶ Tyrannical Boers, enslaved Africans, and British helots all required liberating, by force if necessary.

Liberal feminists, social service, and racial citizenship

Within months of the commencement of hostilities in South Africa in October 1899, the leaders of two seemingly irreconcilable feminist movements, Millicent Fawcett and Josephine Butler, emerged together as important voices on the relationship of organized women to the war. The irony of their unity on this question was lost on few British feminists. Fawcett had distanced herself from Butler in preceding decades over the question of feminist involvement in the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts.¹⁷ For her part, Butler’s involvement in the international repeal movement left her little time for more traditionally conceived political struggles.¹⁸ In 1899 the two leaders found themselves on the same side of one issue – support for British prosecution of the war in South Africa – with long-term implications for their positions on women’s citizenship.

Fawcett and Butler knew that they held a minority position among suffragists in their support for British prosecution of the war. Ray Strachey, Fawcett’s first biographer, noted that “among the pro-Boers were many of Mrs. Fawcett’s old friends, many of her fellow workers in the women’s cause and some of her husband’s old colleagues,” and that her support for the government’s position on the war led many to attack her as a Jingo.¹⁹ And while Josephine Butler privately expressed reservations about the war, she ultimately saw it as a moral test of Britain’s imperial resolve. To her son, Butler wrote in December 1899: “If there is blame it seems to me to lie further back – with Rhodes’ ambitions to wealth … and also perhaps with the want of knowledge of South African facts, history and character on the part of Chamberlain and the government … However this is not the moment for criticism. It is too grave a moment, and those who fight and those who stay at home must stand shoulder to shoulder.” A few days later, she revealed the biblical framework within which she placed the war: “I have often asked myself if this may be the beginning of ‘the great Tribulation’ of the latter days.”²⁰

In 1900, Butler published Native Races and the War, for which she received much criticism. In this book, she defended the war on the grounds that successful prosecution of the war would allow the British to save the native peoples of South Africa from the depredations of the Boers.²¹ She viewed publication of her book as a bridge across which she and Fawcett could meet. In June 1900, she sent a copy to Fawcett, with a note explaining:

I am not sure if you will care for the whole of the book. I was impelled to address the latter part a little to my ‘Abolitionist’ friends who have gone so woefully astray. I can count on the fingers of one hand those few in England (of our Abolitionist Federation) who are not strong pro-Boers; and our Continental allies of course are largely the same. And the Women’s Liberal Federation grieves me much. Mrs. Leonard Courtney says the Boers ‘only ask to be let alone’ – a modest request. Thieves and burglars also ask only to be let alone.²²

Butlers characterization of the Boers as “[t]hieves and burglars” cast the British Empire as “the law,” protecting those who supported, and punishing those who violated, “the principles of British rule.”²³

For Fawcett, the war represented an opportunity for women to demonstrate their fitness for citizenship by their willingness to perform services for the nation/Empire in its hour of need.²⁴ Fawcett’s support of the war took two form...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I. Re-thinking suffrage discourse
• PART II. Local feminisms in an imperial state
• PART III. Tracking the transnational