Literature of the Women's Suffrage Campaign in England

Carolyn Christensen Nelson

• Publisher: Broadview Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781460403716
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

During the British women's suffrage campaign of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women wrote plays to convert others to their cause; they wrote essays to justify their militant actions; and they wrote fiction and poetry about their prison experiences.

This volume is a diverse collection of these writings, focused on the women's suffrage campaign in England and written primarily during the brief period between the New Woman writers of the 1890s and the modernists of the twentieth century. Many of these works have not been reprinted since they were first published.

This important collection includes essays reflecting a variety of opinions and political positions; excerpts from autobiographies by women involved in the movement; suffrage poetry; the song that became the official song of the British suffrage movement; several one-act plays that were written and performed specifically to advance the suffrage cause; and short stories and excerpts from novels about suffrage.

CHAPTER ONE

THE ARGUMENTS

THE CASE FOR AND AGAINST WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE

The first essays, pamphlets, and tracts presenting a case for the enfranchisement of women began to appear in England in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1869 John Stuart Mill published an important theoretical argument for the social and economic emancipation of women and for their political rights, The Subjection of Women, which had been written years before, in 1861. Even earlier, in 1851, Mill and Harriet Taylor had published an essay, “Enfranchisement of Women,” which formulated many of the arguments that would later be developed more fully in The Subjection of Women. Another early argument for women’s suffrage, “Female Suffrage,” written by Lydia Becker, a nineteenth-century suffrage activist, appeared in the Contemporary Review in March 1867. Becker makes a rather conservative argument. She does not ask for the enfranchisement of all women or for the seating of women in the House of Commons, yet at the time her proposals were considered to be radical.

Both Mill and Taylor were interested in changing laws and customs that restricted women’s choices in marriage, education, and the professions. Mill met Taylor, a married woman with two children, in 1831. She became an important influence on his thinking, and for many years they worked together collaboratively, finally marrying in 1851 after the death of Taylor’s husband. Their essay, “Enfranchisement of Women,” is one of the earliest published arguments in favour of women’s suffrage and certainly the earliest made by well-known public figures. How many of the ideas found in the essay are Taylor’s and how many are Mill’s is not certain, but Mill gave all the credit to Taylor. In 1866, as a Member of Parliament, Mill introduced into the House of Commons the first suffrage petition, signed by 1,499 women; it sought to extend the franchise to all male and female householders. In 1867 he attempted to include a franchise for women in the Second Reform Act, which extended male suffrage, but his amendment was defeated.

The opposition to women’s suffrage was well-organized. In 1908 the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League was formed, as was a separate organization for men, the Men’s Committee for Opposing Female Suffrage. In 1910 the two groups merged as the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. The organization had its own publication, The Anti-Suffrage Review, and its membership included many titled aristocrats. In June 1889 Mary (Mrs. Humphry) Ward, a well-known novelist and a member of the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage, along with many other prominent or well-connected women, published “An Appeal Against Female Suffrage” in the Nineteenth Century. First among the signatories of the “Appeal” was Lady Stanley of Alderley (1807-95). Married to Edward John Stanley, a Member of Parliament, Lady Stanley was active in the Liberal party and promoted the cause of women’s education. Other signatories to the “Appeal,” as they signed their names, were Lady Randolph Churchill, Mrs. Leslie Stephen (mother of Virginia Woolf), Mrs. Lynn Linton, Mrs. Alma-Tadema, Mrs. Matthew Arnold, and Mrs. Arnold Toynbee.

In the July 1889 issue of the Nineteenth Century, Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Mary Margaret Dilke responded to the “Appeal,” each with a separate “Reply.” Both Dilke and Fawcett had been actively involved in women’s suffrage for a long time; Fawcett was one of the early leaders of the movement. In 1897 she became president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) which united all the earlier suffrage organizations and was the largest suffrage organization in England. The NUWSS supported the franchise for women on the same terms as men, although Fawcett’s “Reply” did not take this position in 1889 when she distinguished between married and unmarried women. Another response to the June article, “An Appeal Against Female Suffrage,” appeared in the Fortnightly Review in July 1889 entitled “Women’s Suffrage: A Reply.” Appended to it were the signatures of hundreds of women, including women in education, medicine, art, literature, music, and business, who were “in favour of the extension of the parliamentary franchise to women.”

In the early twentieth century, individual writers, particularly men, also published numerous pamphlets and books in opposition to women’s suffrage. Each writer tried to provide a convincing case for excluding women from political life, but they did not all speak with one voice, as is clear from the various excerpts represented below. Some feared that enfranchising women might encourage them to leave their domestic sphere for a more public political life. Men also realized that, because women outnumbered men, women with the vote could pass laws that gave them the same rights as men, for example in cases such as divorce or inheritance. Some writers even believed that the enfranchisement of women would lead to national and racial decline. The misogyny of many of these writers is clearly evident in their statements about women, particularly in their dismissal of women’s intelligence and contributions to the nation.

HARRIET TAYLOR AND JOHN STUART MILL

FROM “ENFRANCHISEMENT OF WOMEN”

[Westminster Review 55 (July 1851): 289-311]

Most of our readers will probably learn from these pages for the first time, that there has arisen in the United States, and in the most civilized and enlightened portion of them, an organised agitation on a new question—new, not to thinkers, nor to any one by whom the principles of free and popular government are felt as well as acknowledged, but new, and even unheard of, as a subject for public meetings and practical political action. This question is, the enfranchisement of women; their admission, in law and in fact, to equality in all rights, political, civil, and social, with the male citizens of the community….

That women have as good a claim as men have, in point of personal right, to the suffrage, or to a place in the jury-box, it would be difficult for anyone to deny. It cannot certainly be denied by the United States of America, as a people or as a community. Their democratic institutions rest avowedly on the inherent right of everyone to a voice in the government. Their Declaration of Independence, framed by the men who are still their great constitutional authorities—that document which has been from the first, and is now, the acknowledged basis of their polity, commences with this express statement:—

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

We do not imagine that any American democrat will evade the force of these expressions by the dishonest or ignorant subterfuge, that “men,” in this memorable document, does not stand for human beings, but for one sex only; that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are “inalienable rights” of only one moiety of the human species; and that “the governed,” whose consent is affirmed to be the only source of just power, are meant for that half of mankind only, who, in relation to the other, have hitherto assumed the character of governors. The contradiction between principle and practice cannot be explained away. A like dereliction of the fundamental maxims of their political creed has been committed by the Americans in the flagrant instance of the negroes; of this they are learning to recognise the turpitude. After a struggle which, by many of its incidents, deserves the name of heroic, the abolitionists are now so strong in numbers and in influence that they hold the balance of parties in the United States. It was fitting that the men whose names will remain associated with the extirpation, from the democratic soil of America, of the aristocracy of colour, should be among the originators, for America and for the rest of the world, of the first collective protest against the aristocracy of sex; a distinction as accidental as that of colour, and fully as irrelevant to all questions of government.

Not only to the democracy of America, the claim of women to civil and political equality makes an irresistible appeal, but also to those radicals and chartists¹ in the British islands, and democrats on the Continent, who claim what is called universal suffrage as an inherent right, unjustly and oppressively withheld from them. For with what truth or rationality could the suffrage be termed universal, while half the human species remain excluded from it? To declare that a voice in the government is the right of all, and demand it only for a part—the part, namely to which the claimant himself belongs—is to renounce even the appearance of principle. The chartist who denies the suffrage to women, is a chartist only because he is not a lord; he is one of those levellers² who would level only down to themselves.

Even those who do not look upon a voice in the government as a matter of personal right, nor profess principles which require that it should be extended to all, have usually traditional maxims of political justice with which it is impossible to reconcile the exclusion of all women from the common rights of citizenship. It is an axiom of English freedom that taxation and representation should be co-extensive. Even under the laws which give the wife’s property to the husband, there are many unmarried women who pay taxes. It is one of the fundamental doctrines of the British constitution, that all persons should be tried by their peers: yet women, whenever tried, are tried by male judges and a male jury. To foreigners the law accords the privilege of claiming that half the jury should be composed of themselves; not so to women. Apart from maxims of detail, which represent local and national rather than universal ideas; it is an acknowledged dictate of justice to make no degrading distinctions without necessity. In all things the presumption ought to be on the side of equality. A reason must be given why anything should be permitted to one person and interdicted to another. But when that which is interdicted includes nearly everything which those to whom it is permitted most prize, and to be deprived of which they feel to be most insulting; when not only political liberty but personal freedom of action is the prerogative of a caste; when even in the exercise of industry, almost all employments which task the higher faculties in an important field, which lead to distinction, riches, or even pecuniary independence, are fenced round as the exclusive domain of the predominant section, scarcely any doors being left open to the dependent class, except such as all who can enter disdainfully pass by; the miserable expediencies which are advanced as excuses for so grossly partial a dispensation, would not be sufficient, even if they were real, to render it other than a flagrant injustice. While, far from being expedient, we are firmly convinced that the division of mankind into two castes, one born to rule over the other, is in this case, as in all cases, an unqualified mischief; a source of perversion and demoralization, both to the favoured class and to those at whose expense they are favoured; producing none of the good which it is the custom to ascribe to it, and forming a bar, almost insuperable while it lasts, to any really vital improvement, either in the character or in the social condition of the human race.

These propositions it is now our purpose to maintain. But before entering on them, we would endeavour to dispel the preliminary objections which, in the minds of persons to whom the subject is new, are apt to prevent a real and conscientious examination of it. The chief of these obstacles is that most formidable one, custom. Women never have had equal rights with men. The claim in their behalf, of the common rights of mankind, is looked upon as barred by universal practice. This strongest of prejudices, the prejudice against what is new and unknown, has, indeed, in an age of changes like the present, lost much of its force; if it had not, there would be little hope of prevailing against it. Over three-fourths of the habitable world, even at this day, the answer, “it has always been so,” closes all discussion. But it is the boast of modern Europeans, and of their American kindred, that they know and do many things which their forefathers neither knew nor did; and it is perhaps the most unquestionable point of superiority in the present above former ages, that habit is not now the tyranny it formerly was over opinions and modes of action, and the worship of custom is a declining idolatry. An uncustomary thought, on a subject which touches the greater interests of life, still startles when first presented; but if it can be kept before the mind until the impression of strangeness wears off, it obtains a hearing, and as rational a consideration as the intellect of the hearer is accustomed to bestow on any other subject.

In the present case, the prejudice of custom is doubtless on the unjust side. Great thinkers, indeed, at different times, from Plato to Condorcet,³ besides some of the most eminent names of the present age, have made emphatic protests in favour of the equality of women. And there have been voluntary societies, religious or secular, of which the Society of Friends is the most known, by whom that principle was recognized. But there has been no political community or nation in which, by law, and usage, women have not been in a state of political and civil inferiority. In the ancient world the same fact was alleged, with equal truth, in behalf of slavery. It might have been alleged in favour of the mitigated form of slavery, serfdom, all through the middle ages. It was urged against freedom of industry, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press; none of these liberties were thought compatible with a well-ordered state, until they had proved their possibility by actually existing as facts. That an institution or a practice is customary is no presumption of its goodness, when any other sufficient cause can be assigned for its existence. There is no difficulty in understanding why the subjection of women has been a custom. No other explanation is needed than physical force.

That those who were physically weaker should have been made legally inferior, is quite conformable to the mode in which the world has been governed. Until very lately the rule of physical strength was the general law of human affairs. Throughout history, the nations, races, classes, which found themselves the strongest, either in muscles, in riches, or in military discipline, have conquered and held in subjection the rest. If, even in the most improved nations, the law of the sword is at last discountenanced as unworthy, it is only since the calumniated eighteenth century. Wars of conquest have only ceased since democratic revolutions began. The world is very young, and has been just begun to cast off injustice. It is only now getting rid of negro slavery. It is only now getting rid of monarchical despotism. It is only now getting rid of hereditary feudal nobility. It is only now getting rid of disabilities on the ground of religion. It is only beginning to treat any men as citizens, except the rich and a favoured portion of the middle class. Can we wonder that it has not yet done as much for women? As society was constituted until the last few generations, inequality was its very basis; association grounded on equal rights scarcely existed; to be equals was to be enemies; two persons could hardly co-operate in anything, or meet in any amicable relation, without the law’s appointing that one of them should be the superior of the other. Mankind have outgrown this state, and all things now tend to substitute, as the general principle of human relations, a just equality, instead of the dominion of the strongest. But of all relations, that between men and women being the nearest and most intimate, and connected with the greatest number of strong emotions, was sure to be the last to throw off the old rule and receive the new: for in proportion to the strength of a feeling, is the tenacity with which it clings to the forms and circumstances with which it has even accidentally become associated.

When a prejudice, which has any hold on the feeling, finds itself reduced to the unpleasant necessity of assigning reasons, it thinks it has done enough when it has re-asserted the very point in dispute, in phrases which appeal to the pre-existing feeling. Thus, many persons think they have sufficiently justified the restrictions on women’s field of action, when they have said that the pursuits from which women are excluded are unfeminine, and that the proper sphere of women is not politics or publicity, but private and domestic life.

We deny the right of any portion of the species to decide for another portion, or any individual for another individual, what is and what is not their “proper sphere.” The proper sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest which they are able to attain to. What this is, cannot be ascertained, without complete liberty of choice. The speakers at the Convention in America have therefore done wisely and right, in refusing to entertain the question of the peculiar aptitudes either of women or of men, or the limits within which this or that occupation may be supposed to be more adapted to the one or to the other. They justly maintain, that those questions can only be satisfactorily answered by perfect freedom. Let every occupation be open to all, without favour or discouragement to any, and employments will fall into the hands of those men or women who are found by experience to be most capable of worthily exercising them. There need be no fear that women will take out of the hands of men any occupation which men perform better than they. Each individual will prove his or her capacities, in the only way in which capacities can be proved—by trial; and the world will have the benefit of the best faculties of all its inhabitants. But to interfere beforehand by an arbitrary limit, and declare that whatever be the genius, talent, energy, or force of mind of an individual of a certain sex or class, those faculties shall not be exerted, or shall be exerted only in some few of the many modes in which others are permitted ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Significant Dates in Women’s Struggle for Emancipation and Suffrage
• Biographical Information
• Suffrage Organizations
• Chapter 1: The Arguments
• Chapter 2: Women in the Campaign Tell their Stories
• Chapter 3: Suffrage Poetry and Songs
• Chapter 4: Suffrage Drama
• Chapter 5: Suffrage Fiction
• Bibliography