My own story
by Emmeline Pankhurst · English · Gutenberg #34856 · 572,310 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of My own story
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: My own story
Author: Emmeline Pankhurst
Release date: January 6, 2011 [eBook #34856]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34856
Credits: Produced by Chuck Greif, Martin Pettit, University of
Toronto Libraries and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY OWN STORY ***
Produced by Chuck Greif, Martin Pettit, University of
Toronto Libraries and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team at http://www.pgdp.net
MRS. PANKHURST'S OWN STORY
[Illustration: E. Pankhurst]
MY OWN STORY
BY
EMMELINE PANKHURST
[Illustration: Logo]
ILLUSTRATED
LONDON
EVELEIGH NASH
1914
Copyright, 1914, by
HEARSTS'S INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY CO., INC.
_All rights reserved, including the translation into foreign
languages, including the Scandinavian._
CONTENTS
BOOK I
THE MAKING OF A MILITANT
CHAPTER PAGE
I 1
II 18
III 37
IV 57
BOOK II
FOUR YEARS OF PEACEFUL MILITANCY
CHAPTER PAGE
I 81
II 97
III 116
IV 131
V 149
VI 160
VII 166
VIII 185
BOOK III
THE WOMEN'S REVOLUTION
CHAPTER PAGE
I 205
II 221
III 249
IV 270
V 285
VI 303
VII 323
VIII 339
IX 350
ILLUSTRATIONS
Portrait of Mrs. Pankhurst _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
Mrs. Pankhurst addressing a by-election crowd 74
Mrs. Pankhurst and Christabel hiding from the police
on the roof garden at Clements Inn, October, 1908 120
Christabel, Mrs. Drummond and Mrs. Pankhurst in the
dock, First Conspiracy Trial, October, 1908 126
Mrs. Pankhurst and Miss Christabel Pankhurst in prison
dress 132
Inspector Wells conducting Mrs. Pankhurst to the
House of Commons, June, 1908 140
Over 1,000 women had been in prison--Broad arrows in
the 1910 parade 170
The head of the deputation on Black Friday, November,
1910 178
For hours scenes like this were enacted on Black Friday,
November, 1910 180
Riot scenes on Black Friday, November, 1910 186
In this manner thousands of women throughout the
Kingdom slept in unoccupied houses over census night 194
The argument of the broken window pane 218
A suffragette throwing a bag of flour at Mr. Asquith
in Chester 260
Re-Arrest of Mrs. Pankhurst at Woking, May 26,
1913 312
Mrs. Pankhurst and Christabel in the garden of
Christabel's home in Paris 324
"Arrested at the King's gate!" May, 1914 348
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author wishes to express her deep obligation to Rheta Childe Dorr
for invaluable editorial services performed in the preparation of this
volume, especially the American edition.
FOREWORD
The closing paragraphs of this book were written in the late summer of
1914, when the armies of every great power in Europe were being
mobilised for savage, unsparing, barbarous warfare--against one another,
against small and unaggressive nations, against helpless women and
children, against civilisation itself. How mild, by comparison with the
despatches in the daily newspapers, will seem this chronicle of women's
militant struggle against political and social injustice in one small
corner of Europe. Yet let it stand as it was written, with
peace--so-called, and civilisation, and orderly government as the
background for heroism such as the world has seldom witnessed. The
militancy of men, through all the centuries, has drenched the world with
blood, and for these deeds of horror and destruction men have been
rewarded with monuments, with great songs and epics. The militancy of
women has harmed no human life save the lives of those who fought the
battle of righteousness. Time alone will reveal what reward will be
allotted to the women.
This we know, that in the black hour that has just struck in Europe, the
men are turning to their women and calling on them to take up the work
of keeping civilisation alive. Through all the harvest fields, in
orchards and vineyards, women are garnering food for the men who fight,
as well as for the children left fatherless by war. In the cities the
women are keeping open the shops, they are driving trucks and trams, and
are altogether attending to a multitude of business.
When the remnants of the armies return, when the commerce of Europe is
resumed by men, will they forget the part the women so nobly played?
Will they forget in England how women in all ranks of life put aside
their own interests and organised, not only to nurse the wounded, care
for the destitute, comfort the sick and lonely, but actually to maintain
the existence of the nation? Thus far, it must be admitted, there are
few indications that the English Government are mindful of the unselfish
devotion manifested by the women. Thus far all Government schemes for
overcoming unemployment have been directed towards the unemployment of
men. The work of women, making garments, etc., has in some cases been
taken away.
At the first alarm of war the militants proclaimed a truce, which was
answered half-heartedly by the announcement that the Government would
release all suffrage prisoners who would give an undertaking "not to
commit further crimes or outrages." Since the truce had already been
proclaimed, no suffrage prisoner deigned to reply to the Home
Secretary's provision. A few days later, no doubt influenced by
representations made to the Government by men and women of every
political faith--many of them never having been supporters of
revolutionary tactics--Mr. McKenna announced in the House of Commons
that it was the intention of the Government, within a few days, to
release unconditionally, all suffrage prisoners. So ends, for the
present, the war of women against men. As of old, the women become the
nurturing mothers of men, their sisters and uncomplaining helpmates. The
future lies far ahead, but let this preface and this volume close with
the assurance that the struggle for the full enfranchisement of women
has not been abandoned; it has simply, for the moment, been placed in
abeyance. When the clash of arms ceases, when normal, peaceful, rational
society resumes its functions, the demand will again be made. If it is
not quickly granted, then once more the women will take up the arms they
to-day generously lay down. There can be no real peace in the world
until woman, the mother half of the human family, is given liberty in
the councils of the world.
BOOK I
THE MAKING OF A MILITANT
Mrs. Pankhurst's Own Story
CHAPTER I
Those men and women are fortunate who are born at a time when a great
struggle for human freedom is in progress. It is an added good fortune
to have parents who take a personal part in the great movements of their
time. I am glad and thankful that this was my case.
One of my earliest recollections is of a great bazaar which was held in
my native city of Manchester, the object of the bazaar being to raise
money to relieve the poverty of the newly emancipated negro slaves in
the United States. My mother took an active part in this effort, and I,
as a small child, was entrusted with a lucky bag by means of which I
helped to collect money.
Young as I was--I could not have been older than five years--I knew
perfectly well the meaning of the words slavery and emancipation. From
infancy I had been accustomed to hear pro and con discussions of slavery
and the American Civil War. Although the British government finally
decided not to recognise the Confederacy, public opinion in England was
sharply divided on the questions both of slavery and of secession.
Broadly speaking, the propertied classes were pro-slavery, but there
were many exceptions to the rule. Most of those who formed the circle
of our family friends were opposed to slavery, and my father, Robert
Goulden, was always a most ardent abolitionist. He was prominent enough
in the movement to be appointed on a committee to meet and welcome Henry
Ward Beecher when he arrived in England for a lecture tour. Mrs. Harriet
Beecher Stowe's novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," was so great a favourite
with my mother that she used it continually as a source of bedtime
stories for our fascinated ears. Those stories, told almost fifty years
ago, are as fresh in my mind to-day as events detailed in the morning's
papers. Indeed they are more vivid, because they made a much deeper
impression on my consciousness. I can still definitely recall the thrill
I experienced every time my mother related the tale of Eliza's race for
freedom over the broken ice of the Ohio River, the agonizing pursuit,
and the final rescue at the hands of the determined old Quaker. Another
thrilling tale was the story of a negro boy's flight from the plantation
of his cruel master. The boy had never seen a railroad train, and when,
staggering along the unfamiliar railroad track, he heard the roar of an
approaching train, the clattering car-wheels seemed to his strained
imagination to be repeating over and over again the awful words, "Catch
a nigger--catch a nigger--catch a nigger--" This was a terrible story,
and throughout my childhood, whenever I rode in a train, I thought of
that poor runaway slave escaping from the pursuing monster.
These stories, with the bazaars and the relief funds and subscriptions
of which I heard so much talk, I am sure made a permanent impression on
my brain and my character. They awakened in me the two sets of
sensations to which all my life I have most readily responded: first,
admiration for that spirit of fighting and heroic sacrifice by which
alone the soul of civilisation is saved; and next after that,
appreciation of the gentler spirit which is moved to mend and repair the
ravages of war.
I do not remember a time when I could not read, nor any time when
reading was not a joy and a solace. As far back as my memory runs I
loved tales, especially those of a romantic and idealistic character.
"Pilgrim's Progress" was an early favourite, as well as another of
Bunyan's visionary romances, which does not seem to be as well known,
his "Holy War." At nine I discovered the Odyssey and very soon after
that another classic which has remained all my life a source of
inspiration. This was Carlyle's "French Revolution," and I received it
with much the same emotion that Keats experienced when he read Chapman's
translation of Homer--" ... like some watcher of the skies, When a new
planet swims into his ken."
I never lost that first impression, and it strongly affected my attitude
toward events which were occurring around my childhood. Manchester is a
city which has witnessed a great many stirring episodes, especially of a
political character. Generally speaking, its citizens have been liberal
in their sentiments, defenders of free speech and liberty of opinion. In
the late sixties there occurred in Manchester one of those dreadful
events that prove an exception to the rule. This was in connection with
the Fenian Revolt in Ireland. There was a Fenian riot, and the police
arrested the leaders. These men were being taken to the jail in a prison
van. On the way the van was stopped and an attempt was made to rescue
the prisoners. A man fired a pistol, endeavouring to break the lock of
the van door. A policeman fell, mortally wounded, and several men were
arrested and were charged with murder. I distinctly remember the riot,
which I did not witness, but which I heard vividly described by my older
brother. I had been spending the afternoon with a young playmate, and my
brother had come after tea to escort me home. As we walked through the
deepening November twilight he talked excitedly of the riot, the fatal
pistol shot, and the slain policeman. I could almost see the man
bleeding on the ground, while the crowd swayed and groaned around him.
The rest of the story reveals one of those ghastly blunders which
justice not infrequently makes. Although the shooting was done without
any intent to kill, the men were tried for murder and three of them were
found guilty and hanged. Their execution, which greatly excited the
citizens of Manchester, was almost the last, if not the last, public
execution permitted to take place in the city. At the time I was a
boarding-pupil in a school near Manchester, and I spent my week-ends at
home. A certain Saturday afternoon stands out in my memory, as on my way
home from school I passed the prison where I knew the men had been
confined. I saw that a part of the prison wall had been torn away, and
in the great gap that remained were evidences of a gallows recently
removed. I was transfixed with horror, and over me there swept the
sudden conviction that that hanging was a mistake--worse, a crime. It
was my awakening to one of the most terrible facts of life--that justice
and judgment lie often a world apart.
I relate this incident of my formative years to illustrate the fact that
the impressions of childhood often have more to do with character and
future conduct than heredity or education. I tell it also to show that
my development into an advocate of militancy was largely a sympathetic
process. I have not personally suffered from the deprivations, the
bitterness and sorrow which bring so many men and women to a realisation
of social injustice. My childhood was protected by love and a
comfortable home. Yet, while still a very young child, I began
instinctively to feel that there was something lacking, even in my own
home, some false conception of family relations, some incomplete ideal.
This vague feeling of mine began to shape itself into conviction about
the time my brothers and I were sent to school. The education of the
English boy, then as now, was considered a much more serious matter than
the education of the English boy's sister. My parents, especially my
father, discussed the question of my brothers' education as a matter of
real importance. My education and that of my sister were scarcely
discussed at all. Of course we went to a carefully selected girls'
school, but beyond the facts that the head mistress was a gentlewoman
and that all the pupils were girls of my own class, nobody seemed
concerned. A girl's education at that time seemed to have for its prime
object the art of "making home attractive"--presumably to migratory male
relatives. It used to puzzle me to understand why I was under such a
particular obligation to make home attractive to my brothers. We were on
excellent terms of friendship, but it was never suggested to them as a
duty that they make home attractive to me. Why not? Nobody seemed to
know.
The answer to these puzzling questions came to me unexpectedly one night
when I lay in my little bed waiting for sleep to overtake me. It was a
custom of my father and mother to make the round of our bedrooms every
night before going themselves to bed. When they entered my room that
night I was still awake, but for some reason I chose to feign slumber.
My father bent over me, shielding the candle flame with his big hand. I
cannot know exactly what thought was in his mind as he gazed down at me,
but I heard him say, somewhat sadly, "What a pity she wasn't born a
lad."
My first hot impulse was to sit up in bed and protest that I didn't want
to be a boy, but I lay still and heard my parents' footsteps pass on
toward the next child's bed. I thought about my father's remark for many
days afterward, but I think I never decided that I regretted my sex.
However, it was made quite clear that men considered themselves superior
to women, and that women apparently acquiesced in that belief.
I found this view of things difficult to reconcile with the fact that
both my father and my mother were advocates of equal suffrage. I was
very young when the Reform Act of 1866 was passed, but I very well
remember the agitation caused by certain circumstances attending it.
This Reform Act, known as the Household Franchise Bill, marked the first
popular extension of the ballot in England since 1832. Under its terms,
householders paying a minimum of ten pounds a year rental were given the
Parliamentary vote. While it was still under discussion in the House of
Commons, John Stuart Mill moved an amendment to the bill to include
women householders as well as men. The amendment was defeated, but in
the act as passed the word "man," instead of the usual "male person,"
was used. Now, under another act of Parliament it had been decided that
the word "man" always included "woman" unless otherwise specifically
stated. For example, in certain acts containing rate-paying clauses, the
masculine noun and pronoun are used throughout, but the provisions apply
to women rate-payers as well as to men. So when the Reform Bill with the
word "man" in it became law, many women believed that the right of
suffrage had actually been bestowed upon them. A tremendous amount of
discussion ensued, and the matter was finally tested by a large number
of women seeking to have their names placed upon the register as voters.
In my city of Manchester 3,924 women, out of a total of 4,215 possible
women voters, claimed their votes, and their claim was defended in the
law courts by eminent lawyers, including my future husband, Dr.
Pankhurst. Of course the women's claim was settled adversely in the
courts, but the agitation resulted in a strengthening of the
woman-suffrage agitation all over the country.
I was too young to understand the precise nature of the affair, but I
shared in the general excitement. From reading newspapers aloud to my
father I had developed a genuine interest in politics, and the Reform
Bill presented itself to my young intelligence as something that was
going to do the most wonderful good to the country. The first election
after the bill became law was naturally a memorable occasion. It is
chiefly memorable to me because it was the first one in which I ever
participated. My sister and I had just been presented with new winter
frocks, green in colour, and made alike, after the custom of proper
British families. Every girl child in those days wore a red flannel
petticoat, and when we first put on our new frocks I was struck with the
fact that we were wearing red and green--the colours of the Liberal
party. Since our father was a Liberal, of course the Liberal party ought
to carry the election, and I conceived a brilliant scheme for helping
its progress. With my small sister trotting after me, I walked the
better part of a mile to the nearest polling-booth. It happened to be in
a rather rough factory district, but we did not notice that. Arrived
there, we two children picked up our green skirts to show our scarlet
petticoats, and brimful of importance, walked up and down before the
assembled crowds to encourage the Liberal vote. From this eminence we
were shortly snatched by outraged authority in the form of a
nursery-maid. I believe we were sent to bed into the bargain, but I am
not entirely clear on this point.
I was fourteen years old when I went to my first suffrage meeting.
Returning from school one day, I met my mother just setting out for the
meeting, and I begged her to let me go along. She consented, and without
stopping to lay my books down I scampered away in my mother's wake. The
speeches interested and excited me, especially the address of the great
Miss Lydia Becker, who was the Susan B. Anthony of the English movement,
a splendid character and a truly eloquent speaker. She was the secretary
of the Manchester committee, and I had learned to admire her as the
editor of the _Women's Suffrage Journal_, which came to my mother every
week. I left the meeting a conscious and confirmed suffragist.
I suppose I had always been an unconscious suffragist. With my
temperament and my surroundings I could scarcely have been otherwise.
The movement was very much alive in the early seventies, nowhere more so
than in Manchester, where it was organised by a group of extraordinary
men and women. Among them were Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Bright, who were
always ready to champion the struggling cause. Mr. Jacob Bright, a
brother of John Bright, was for many years member of Parliament for
Manchester, and to the day of his death was an active supporter of woman
suffrage. Two especially gifted women, besides Miss Becker, were members
of the committee. These were Mrs. Alice Cliff Scatcherd and Miss
Wolstentholm, now the venerable Mrs. Wolstentholm-Elmy. One of the
principal founders of the committee was the man whose wife, in later
years, I was destined to become, Dr. Richard Marsden Pankhurst.
When I was fifteen years old I went to Paris, where I was entered as a
pupil in one of the pioneer institutions in Europe for the higher
education of girls. This school, one of the founders of which was Madame
Edmond Adam, who was and is still a distinguished literary figure, was
situated in a fine old house in the Avenue de Neuilly. It was under the
direction of Mlle. Marchef-Girard, a woman distinguished in education,
and who afterward was appointed government inspector of schools in
France. Mlle. Marchef-Girard believed that girls' education should be
quite as thorough and even more practical than the education boys were
receiving at that time. She included chemistry and other sciences in her
courses, and in addition to embroidery she had her girls taught
bookkeeping. Many other advanced ideas prevailed in this school, and the
moral discipline which the pupils received was, to my mind, as valuable
as the intellectual training. Mlle. Marchef-Girard held that women
should be given the highest ideals of honour. Her pupils were kept to
the strictest principles of truth-telling and candour. Myself she
understood and greatly benefited by an implicit trust which I am sure I
could not have betrayed, even had I felt for her less real affection.
My roommate in this delightful school was an interesting young girl of
my own age, Noemie Rochefort, daughter of that great Republican,
Communist, journalist, and swordsman, Henri Rochefort. This was very
shortly after the Franco-Prussian War, and memories of the Empire's
fall and of the bloody and disastrous Commune were very keen in Paris.
Indeed my roommate's illustrious father and many others were then in
exile in New Caledonia for participation in the Commune. My friend
Noemie was torn with anxiety for her father. She talked of him
constantly, and many were the blood-curdling accounts of daring and of
patriotism to which I listened. Henri Rochefort was, in fact, one of the
moving spirits of the Republican movement in France, and after his
amazing escape in an open boat from New Caledonia, he lived through many
years of political adventures of the most lively and picturesque
character. His daughter and I remained warm friends long after our
school-days ended, and my association with her strengthened all the
liberal ideas I had previously acquired.
I was between eighteen and nineteen when I finally returned from school
in Paris and took my place in my father's home as a finished young lady.
I sympathised with and worked for the woman-suffrage movement, and came
to know Dr. Pankhurst, whose work for woman suffrage had never ceased.
It was Dr. Pankhurst who drafted the first enfranchisement bill, known
as the Women's Disabilities Removal Bill, and introduced into the House
of Commons in 1870 by Mr. Jacob Bright. The bill advanced to its second
reading by a majority vote of thirty-three, but it was killed in
committee by Mr. Gladstone's peremptory orders. Dr. Pankhurst, as I have
already said, with another distinguished barrister, Lord Coleridge,
acted as counsel for the Manchester women, who tried in 1868 to be
placed on the register as voters. He also drafted the bill giving
married women absolute control over their property and earnings, a bill
which became law in 1882.
My marriage with Dr. Pankhurst took place in 1879.
I think we cannot be too grateful to the group of men and women who,
like Dr. Pankhurst, in those early days lent the weight of their
honoured names to the suffrage movement in the trials of its struggling
youth. These men did not wait until the movement became popular, nor did
they hesitate until it was plain that women were roused to the point of
revolt. They worked all their lives with those who were organising,
educating, and preparing for the revolt which was one day to come.
Unquestionably those pioneer men suffered in popularity for their
feminist views. Some of them suffered financially, some politically. Yet
they never wavered.
My married life lasted through nineteen happy years. Often I have heard
the taunt that suffragists are women who have failed to find any normal
outlet for their emotions, and are therefore soured and disappointed
beings. This is probably not true of any suffragist, and it is most
certainly not true of me. My home life and relations have been as nearly
ideal as possible in this imperfect world. About a year after my
marriage my daughter Christabel was born, and in another eighteen months
my second daughter Sylvia came. Two other children followed, and for
some years I was rather deeply immersed in my domestic affairs.
I was never so absorbed with home and children, however, that I lost
interest in community affairs. Dr. Pankhurst did not desire that I
should turn myself into a household machine. It was his firm belief that
society as well as the family stands in need of women's services. So
while my children were still in their cradles I was serving on the
executive committee of the Women's Suffrage Society, and also on the
executive board of the committee which was working to secure the Married
Women's Property Act. This act having passed in 1882, I threw myself
into the suffrage work with renewed energy. A new Reform Act, known as
the County Franchise Bill, extending the suffrage to farm labourers, was
under discussion, and we believed that our years of educational
propaganda work had prepared the country to support us in a demand for a
women's suffrage amendment to the bill. For several years we had been
holding the most splendid meetings in cities all over the kingdom. The
crowds, the enthusiasm, the generous response to appeals for support,
all these seemed to justify us in our belief that women's suffrage was
near. In fact, in 1884, when the County Franchise Bill came before the
country, we had an actual majority in favour of suffrage in the House of
Commons.
But a favourable majority in the House of Commons by no means insures
the success of any measure. I shall explain this at length when I come
to our work of opposing candidates who have avowed themselves
suffragists, a course which has greatly puzzled our American friends.
The Liberal party was in power in 1884, and a great memorial was sent
to the Prime Minister, the Right Honourable William E. Gladstone, asking
that a women's suffrage amendment to the County Franchise Bill be
submitted to the free and unbiased consideration of the House. Mr.
Gladstone curtly refused, declaring that if a women's suffrage amendment
should be carried, the Government would disclaim responsibility for the
bill. The amendment was submitted nevertheless, but Mr. Gladstone would
not allow it to be freely discussed, and he ordered Liberal members to
vote against it. What we call a whip was sent out against it, a note
virtually commanding party members to be on hand at a certain hour to
vote against the women's amendment. Undismayed, the women tried to have
an independent suffrage bill introduced, but Mr. Gladstone so arranged
Parliamentary business that the bill never even came up for discussion.
I am not going to write a history of the woman suffrage movement in
England prior to 1903, when the Women's Social and Political Union was
organised. That history is full of repetitions of just such stories as
the one I have related. Gladstone was an implacable foe of woman
suffrage. He believed that women's work and politics lay in service to
men's parties. One of the shrewdest acts of Mr. Gladstone's career was
his disruption of the suffrage organisation in England. He accomplished
this by substituting "something just as good," that something being
Women's Liberal Associations. Beginning in 1881 in Bristol, these
associations spread rapidly through the country and, in 1887, became a
National Women's Liberal Federation. The promise of the Federation was
that by allying themselves with men in party politics, women would soon
earn the right to vote. The avidity with which the women swallowed this
promise, left off working for themselves, and threw themselves into the
men's work was amazing.
The Women's Liberal Federation is an organisation of women who believe
in the principles of the Liberal party. (The somewhat older Primrose
League is a similar organisation of women who adhere to Conservative
party principles.) Neither of these organisations have woman suffrage
for their object. They came into existence to uphold party ideas and to
work for the election of party candidates.
I am told that women in America have recently allied themselves with
political parties, believing, just as we did, that such action would
break down opposition to suffrage by showing the men that women possess
political ability, and that politics is work for women as well as men.
Let them not be deceived. I can assure the American women that our long
alliance with the great parties, our devotion to party programmes, our
faithful work at elections, never advanced the suffrage cause one step.
The men accepted the services of the women, but they never offered any
kind of payment.
As far as I am concerned, I did not delude myself with any false hopes
in the matter. I was present when the Women's Liberal Federation came
into existence. Mrs. Gladstone presided, offering the meeting many
consolatory words for the absence of "our great leader," Mr. Gladstone,
who of course had no time to waste on a gathering of women. At Mrs.
Jacob Bright's request I joined the Federation. At this stage of my
development I was a member of the Fabian Society, and I had considerable
faith in the permeating powers of its mild socialism. But I was already
fairly convinced of the futility of trusting to political parties. Even
as a child I had begun to wonder at the _naive_ faith of party members
in the promises of their leaders. I well remember my father returning
home from political meetings, his face aglow with enthusiasm. "What
happened, father?" I would ask, and he would reply triumphantly, "Ah! We
passed the resolution."
"Then you'll get your measure through the next session," I predicted.
"I won't say that," was the usual reply. "Things don't always move as
quickly as that. But we passed the resolution."
Well, the suffragists, when they were admitted into the Women's Liberal
Federation must have felt that they had passed their resolution. They
settled down to work for the party and to prove that they were as
capable of voting as the recently enfranchised farm labourers. Of course
a few women remained loyal to suffrage. They began again on the old
educational lines to work for the cause. Not one woman took counsel with
herself as to how and why the agricultural labourers had won their
franchise. They had won it, as a matter of fact, by burning hay-ricks,
rioting, and otherwise demonstrating their strength in the only way that
English politicians can understand. The threat to march a hundred
thousand men to the House of Commons unless the bill was passed played
its part also in securing the agricultural labourer his political
freedom. But no woman suffragist noticed that. As for myself, I was too
young politically to learn the lesson then. I had to go through years of
public work before I acquired the experience and the wisdom to know how
to wring concessions from the English Government. I had to hold public
office. I had to go behind the scenes in the government schools, in the
workhouses and other charitable institutions; I had to get a close-hand
view of the misery and unhappiness of a man-made world, before I reached
the point where I could successfully revolt against it. It was almost
immediately after the collapse of the woman suffrage movement in 1884
that I entered upon this new phase of my career.
CHAPTER II
In 1885, a year after the failure of the third women's suffrage bill, my
husband, Dr. Pankhurst, stood as the Liberal candidate for Parliament in
Rotherline, a riverside constituency of London. I went through the
campaign with him, speaking and canvassing to the best of my ability.
Dr. Pankhurst was a popular candidate, and unquestionably would have
been returned but for the opposition of the Home-Rulers. Parnell was in
command, and his settled policy was opposition to all Government
candidates. So, in spite of the fact that Dr. Pankhurst was a staunch
upholder of home rule, the Parnell forces were solidly opposed to him,
and he was defeated. I remember expressing considerable indignation, but
my husband pointed out to me that Parnell's policy was absolutely right.
With his small party he could never hope to win home rule from a hostile
majority, but by constant obstruction he could in time wear out the
Government, and force it to surrender. That was a valuable political
lesson, one that years later I was destined to put into practice.
The following year found us living in London, and, as usual, interesting
ourselves with labour matters and other social movements. This year was
memorable for a great strike of women working in the Bryant and May
match factories. I threw myself into this strike with enthusiasm,
working with the girls and with some women of prominence, among these
the celebrated Mrs. Annie Besant. The strike was a successful one, the
girls winning substantial improvements in their working conditions.
It was a time of tremendous unrest, of labour agitations, of strikes and
lockouts. It was a time also when a most stupid reactionary spirit
seemed to take possession of the Government and the authorities. The
Salvation Army, the Socialists, the trade-unionists--in fact, all bodies
holding outdoor meetings--were made special objects of attack. As a
protest against this policy a Law and Liberty League was formed in
London, and an immense Free Speech meeting was held in Trafalgar Square,
John Burns and Cunningham Graham being the principal speakers. I was
present at this meeting, which resulted in a bloody riot between the
police and the populace. The Trafalgar Square Riot is historic, and to
it Mr. John Burns owes, in large part, his subsequent rise to political
eminence. Both John Burns and Cunningham Graham served prison sentences
for the part they played in the riot, but they gained fame, and they did
much to establish the right of free speech for English men. English
women are still contending for that right.
In 1890 my last child was born in London. I now had a family of five
young children, and for a time I was less active in public work. On the
retirement of Mrs. Annie Besant from the London School Board I had been
asked to stand as candidate for the vacancy, but although I should have
enjoyed the work, I decided not to accept this invitation. The next
year, however, a new suffrage association, the Women's Franchise League,
was formed, and I felt it my duty to become affiliated with it The
League was preparing a new suffrage bill, the provisions of which I
could not possibly approve, and I joined with old friends, among whom
were Mrs. Jacob Bright, Mrs. Wolstentholm-Elmy, who was a member of the
London School Board, and Mrs. Stanton Blatch, then resident in England,
in an effort to substitute the original bill drafted by Dr. Pankhurst.
As a matter of fact, neither of the bills was introduced into Parliament
that year. Mr. (now Lord) Haldane, who had the measure in charge,
introduced one of his own drafting. It was a truly startling bill,
royally inclusive in its terms. It not only enfranchised all women,
married and unmarried, of the householding classes, but it made them
eligible to all offices under the Crown. The bill was never taken
seriously by the Government, and indeed it was never intended that it
should be, as we were later made to understand. I remember going with
Mrs. Stanton Blatch to the law courts to see Mr. Haldane, and to protest
against the introduction of a measure that had not the remotest chance
of passing.
"All, that bill," said Haldane, "is for the future."
All their woman suffrage bills are intended for the future, a future so
remote as to be imperceptible. We were beginning to understand this even
in 1891. However, as long as there was a bill, we determined to support
it. Accordingly, we canvassed the members, distributed a great deal of
literature, and organised and addressed meetings. We not only made
speeches ourselves, but we induced friendly members of Parliament to go
on our platforms. One of these meetings, held in an East End Radical
club, was addressed by Mr. Haldane and a young man who accompanied him.
This young man, Sir Edward Grey, then in the beginning of his career,
made an eloquent plea for woman's suffrage. That Sir Edward Grey should,
later in life, become a bitter foe of woman's suffrage need astonish no
one. I have known many young Englishmen who began their political life
as suffrage speakers and who later became anti-suffragists or traitorous
"friends" of the cause. These young and aspiring statesmen have to
attract attention in some fashion, and the espousal of advanced causes,
such as labour or women's suffrage, seems an easy way to accomplish that
end.
Well, our speeches and our agitation did nothing at all to assist Mr.
Haldane's impossible bill. It never advanced beyond the first reading.
Our London residence came to an end in 1893. In that year we returned to
our Manchester home, and I again took up the work of the Suffrage
Society. At my suggestion the members began to organise their first
out-of-door meetings, and we continued these until we succeeded in
working up a great meeting that filled Free Trade Hall, and overflowed
into and crowded a smaller hall near at hand. This marked the beginning
of a campaign of propaganda among working people, an object which I had
long desired to bring about.
And now began a new and, as I look back on it, an absorbingly
interesting stage of my career. I have told how our leaders in the
Liberal Party had advised the women to prove their fitness for the
Parliamentary franchise by serving in municipal offices, especially the
unsalaried offices. A large number of women had availed themselves of
this advice, and were serving on Boards of Guardians, on school boards,
and in other capacities. My children now being old enough for me to
leave them with competent nurses, I was free to join these ranks. A year
after my return to Manchester I became a candidate for the Board of Poor
Law Guardians. Several weeks before, I had contested unsuccessfully for
a place on the school board. This time, however, I was elected, heading
the poll by a very large majority.
For the benefit of American readers I shall explain something of the
operation of our English Poor Law. The duty of the law is to administer
an act of Queen Elizabeth, one of the greatest reforms effected by that
wise and humane monarch. When Elizabeth came to the throne she found
England, the Merrie England of contemporary poets, in a state of
appalling poverty. Hordes of people were literally starving to death, in
wretched hovels, in the streets, and at the very gates of the palace.
The cause of all this misery was the religious reformation under Henry
VIII, and the secession from Rome of the English Church. King Henry, it
is known, seized all the Church lands, the abbeys and the convents, and
gave them as rewards to those nobles and favourites who had supported
his policies. But in taking over the Church's property the Protestant
nobles by no means assumed the Church's ancient responsibilities of
lodging wayfarers, giving alms, nursing the sick, educating youths, and
caring for the young and the superannuated. When the monks and the nuns
were turned out of their convents these duties devolved on no one. The
result, after the brief reign of Edward VI and the bloody one of Queen
Mary, was the social anarchy inherited by Elizabeth.
This great queen and great woman, perceiving that the responsibility for
the poor and the helpless rightfully rests on the community, caused an
act to be passed creating in the parishes public bodies to deal with
local conditions of poverty. The Board of Poor Law Guardians disburses
for the poor the money coming from the Poor Rates (taxes), and some
additional moneys allowed by the local government board, the president
of which is a cabinet minister. Mr. John Burns is the present incumbent
of the office. The Board of Guardians has control of the institution we
call the workhouse. You have, I believe, almshouses, or poorhouses, but
they are not quite so extensive as our workhouses, which are all kinds
of institutions in one. We had, in my workhouse, a hospital with nine
hundred beds, a school with several hundred children, a farm, and many
workshops.
When I came into office I found that the law in our district, Chorlton,
was being very harshly administered. The old board had been made up of
the kind of men who are known as rate savers. They were guardians, not
of the poor but of the rates, and, as I soon discovered, not very astute
guardians even of money. For instance, although the inmates were being
very poorly fed, a frightful waste of food was apparent. Each inmate was
given each day a certain weight of food, and bread formed so much of the
ration that hardly anyone consumed all of his portion. In the farm
department pigs were kept on purpose to consume this surplus of bread,
and as pigs do not thrive on a solid diet of stale bread the animals
fetched in the market a much lower price than properly fed farm pigs. I
suggested that, instead of giving a solid weight of bread in one lump,
the loaf be cut in slices and buttered with margarine, each person being
allowed all that he cared to eat. The rest of the board objected, saying
that our poor charges were very jealous of their rights, and would
suspect in such an innovation an attempt to deprive them of a part of
their ration. This was easily overcome by the suggestion that we consult
the inmates before we made the change. Of course the poor people
consented, and with the bread that we saved we made puddings with milk
and currants, to be fed to the old people of the workhouse. These old
folks I found sitting on backless forms, or benches. They had no
privacy, no possessions, not even a locker. The old women were without
pockets in their gowns, so they were obliged to keep any poor little
treasures they had in their bosoms. Soon after I took office we gave the
old people comfortable Windsor chairs to sit in, and in a number of ways
we managed to make their existence more endurable.
These, after all, were minor benefits. But it does gratify me when I
look back and remember what we were able to do for the children of the
Manchester workhouse. The first time I went into the place I was
horrified to see little girls seven and eight years old on their knees
scrubbing the cold stones of the long corridors. These little girls were
clad, summer and winter, in thin cotton frocks, low in the neck and
short sleeved. At night they wore nothing at all, night dresses being
considered too good for paupers. The fact that bronchitis was epidemic
among them most of the time had not suggested to the guardians any
change in the fashion of their clothes. There was a school for the
children, but the teaching was of the poorest order. They were forlorn
enough, these poor innocents, when I first met them. In five years' time
we had changed the face of the earth for them. We had bought land in the
country and had built a cottage system home for the children, and we had
established for them a modern school with trained teachers. We had even
secured for them a gymnasium and a swimming-bath. I may say that I was
on the building committee of the board, the only woman member.
Whatever may be urged against the English Poor Law system, I maintain
that under it no stigma of pauperism need be applied to workhouse
children. If they are treated like paupers of course they will be
paupers, and they will grow up paupers, permanent burdens on society;
but if they are regarded merely as children under the guardianship of
the state, they assume quite another character. Rich children are not
pauperized by being sent to one or another of the free public schools
with which England is blest. Yet a great many of those schools, now
exclusively used for the education of upper middle-class boys, were
founded by legacies left to educate the poor--girls as well as boys. The
English Poor Law, properly administered, ought to give back to the
children of the destitute what the upper classes have taken from them, a
good education on a self-respecting basis.
The trouble is, as I soon perceived after taking office, the law cannot,
in existing circumstances, do all the work, even for children, that it
was intended to do. We shall have to have new laws, and it soon became
apparent to me that we can never hope to get them until women have the
vote. During the time I served on the board, and for years since then,
women guardians all over the country have striven in vain to have the
law reformed in order to ameliorate conditions which break the hearts of
women to see, but which apparently affect men very little. I have spoken
of the little girls I found scrubbing the workhouse floors. There were
others at the hateful labour who aroused my keenest pity. I found that
there were pregnant women in that workhouse, scrubbing floors, doing the
hardest kind of work, almost until their babies came into the world.
Many of them were unmarried women, very, very young, mere girls. These
poor mothers were allowed to stay in the hospital after confinement for
a short two weeks. Then they had to make a choice of staying in the
workhouse and earning their living by scrubbing and other work, in
which case they were separated from their babies; or of taking their
discharges. They could stay and be paupers, or they could leave--leave
with a two-weeks-old baby in their arms, without hope, without home,
without money, without anywhere to go. What became of those girls, and
what became of their hapless infants? That question was at the basis of
the women guardians' demand for a reform of one part of the Poor Law.
That section deals with the little children who are boarded out, not by
the workhouse, but by the parents, that parent being almost always the
mother. It is from that class of workhouse mothers--mostly young servant
girls--which thoughtless people say all working girls ought to be; it is
from that class more than from any other that cases of illegitimacy
come. Those poor little servant girls, who can get out perhaps only in
the evening, whose minds are not very cultivated, and who find all the
sentiment of their lives in cheap novelettes, fall an easy prey to those
who have designs against them. These are the people by whom the babies
are mostly put out to nurse, and the mothers have to pay for their keep.
Of course the babies are very badly protected. The Poor Law Guardians
are supposed to protect them by appointing inspectors to visit the homes
where the babies are boarded. But, under the law, if a man who ruins a
girl pays down a lump sum of twenty pounds, less than a hundred dollars,
the boarding home is immune from inspection. As long as a baby-farmer
takes only one child at a time, the twenty pounds being paid, the
inspectors cannot inspect the house. Of course the babies die with
hideous promptness, often long before the twenty pounds have been spent,
and then the baby-farmers are free to solicit another victim. For years,
as I have said, women have tried in vain to get that one small reform of
the Poor Law, to reach and protect all illegitimate children, and to
make it impossible for any rich scoundrel to escape future liability for
his child because of the lump sum he has paid down. Over and over again
it has been tried, but it has always failed, because the ones who really
care about the thing are mere women.
I thought I had been a suffragist before I became a Poor Law Guardian,
but now I began to think about the vote in women's hands not only as a
right but as a desperate necessity. These poor, unprotected mothers and
their babies I am sure were potent factors in my education as a
militant. In fact, all the women I came in contact with in the workhouse
contributed to that education. Very soon after I went on the board I saw
that the class of old women who came into the workhouse were in many
ways superior to the kind of old men who came into the workhouse. One
could not help noticing it. They were, to begin with, more industrious.
In fact, it was quite touching to see their industry and patience. Old
women, over sixty and seventy years of age, did most of the work of that
place, most of the sewing, most of the things that kept the house clean
and which supplied the inmates with clothing. I found that the old men
were different. One could not get very much work out of them. They liked
to stop in the oakum picking-room, where they were allowed to smoke;
but as to real work, very little was done by our old men.
I began to make inquiries about these old women. I found that the
majority of them were not women who had been dissolute, who had been
criminal, but women who had lead perfectly respectable lives, either as
wives and mothers, or as single women earning their own living. A great
many were of the domestic-servant class, who had not married, who had
lost their employment, and had reached a time of life when it was
impossible to get more employment. It was through no fault of their own,
but simply because they had never earned enough to save. The average
wage of working women in England is less than two dollars a week. On
this pittance it is difficult enough to keep alive, and of course it is
impossible to save. Every one who knows anything about conditions under
which our working women live knows that few of them can ever hope to put
by enough to keep them in old age. Besides, the average working woman
has to support others than herself. How can she save?
Some of our old women were married. Many of them, I found, were widows
of skilled artisans who had had pensions from their unions, but the
pensions had died with the men. These women, who had given up the power
to work for themselves, and had devoted themselves to working for their
husbands and children, were left penniless. There was nothing for them
to do but to go into the workhouse. Many of them were widows of men who
had served their country in the army or the navy. The men had had
pensions from the government, but the pensions had died with them, and
so the women were in the workhouse.
We shall not in future, I hope, find so many respectable old women in
English workhouses. We have an old-age pension law now, which allows old
women as well as old men the sum of five shillings--$1.20--a week;
hardly enough to live on, but enough to enable the poor to keep their
old fathers and mothers out of the workhouse without starving themselves
or their children. But when I was a Poor Law Guardian there was simply
nothing to do with a woman when her life of toil ceased except make a
pauper of her.
I wish I had space to tell you of other tragedies of women I witnessed
while I was on that board. In our out-relief department, which exists
chiefly for able-bodied poor and dependent persons, I was brought into
contact with widows who were struggling desperately to keep their homes
and families together. The law allowed these women relief of a certain
very inadequate kind, but for herself and one child it offered no relief
except the workhouse. Even if the woman had a baby at her breast she was
regarded, under the law, as an able-bodied man. Women, we are told,
should stay at home and take care of their children. I used to astound
my men colleagues by saying to them: "When women have the vote they will
see that mothers _can_ stay at home and care for their children. You men
have made it impossible for these mothers to do that."
I am convinced that the enfranchised woman will find many ways in which
to lessen, at least, the curse of poverty. Women have more practical
ideas about relief, and especially of prevention of dire poverty, than
men display. I was struck with this whenever I attended the District
Conferences and the annual Poor Law Union Meetings. In our discussions
the women showed themselves much more capable, much more resourceful,
than the men. I remember two papers which I prepared and which caused
considerable discussion. One of these was on the Duties of Guardians in
Times of Unemployment, in which I pointed out that the government had
one reserve of employment for men which could always be used. We have,
on our northwest coast, a constant washing away of the fore shore. Every
once in a while the question of coast reclamation comes up for
discussion, but I had never heard any man suggest coast reclamation as a
means of giving the unemployed relief.
In 1898 I suffered an irreparable loss in the death of my husband. His
death occurred suddenly and left me with the heavy responsibility of
caring for a family of children, the eldest only seventeen years of age.
I resigned my place on the Board of Guardians, and was almost
immediately appointed to the salaried office of Registrar of Births and
Deaths in Manchester. We have registrars of births, deaths and marriages
in England, but since the act establishing the last named contains the
words "male person," a woman may not be appointed a registrar of
marriages. The head of this department of the government is the
registrar-general, with offices at Somerset House, London, where all
vital statistics are returned and all records filed.
It was my duty as registrar of births and deaths to act as chief census
officer of my district; I was obliged to receive all returns of births
and deaths, record them, and send my books quarterly to the office of
the registrar-general. My district was in a working-class quarter, and
on this account I instituted evening office hours twice a week. It was
touching to observe how glad the women were to have a woman registrar to
go to. They used to tell me their stories, dreadful stories some of
them, and all of them pathetic with that patient and uncomplaining
pathos of poverty. Even after my experience on the Board of Guardians, I
was shocked to be reminded over and over again of the little respect
there was in the world for women and children. I have had little girls
of thirteen come to my office to register the births of their babies,
illegitimate, of course. In many of these cases I found that the child's
own father or some near male relative was responsible for her state.
There was nothing that could be done in most cases. The age of consent
in England is sixteen years, but a man can always claim that he thought
the girl was over sixteen. During my term of office a very young mother
of an illegitimate child exposed her baby, and it died. The girl was
tried for murder and was sentenced to death. This was afterwards
commuted, it is true, but the unhappy child had the horrible experience
of the trial and the sentence "to be hanged by the neck, until you are
dead." The wretch who was, from the point of view of justice, the real
murderer of the baby, received no punishment at all.
I needed only one more experience after this one, only one more contact
with the life of my time and the position of women, to convince me that
if civilisation is to advance at all in the future, it must be through
the help of women, women freed of their political shackles, women with
full power to work their will in society. In 1900 I was asked to stand
as a candidate for the Manchester School Board. The schools were then
under the old law, and the school boards were very active bodies. They
administered the Elementary Education Act, bought school sites, erected
buildings, employed and paid teachers. The school code and the
curriculum were framed by the Board of Education, which is part of the
central government. Of course this was absurd. A body of men in London
could not possibly realise all the needs of boys and girls in remote
parts of England. But so it was.
As a member of the school board I very soon found that the teachers,
working people of the higher grade, were in exactly the same position as
the working people of the lower grades. That is, the men had all the
advantage. Teachers had a representative in the school board councils.
Of course that representative was a man teacher, and equally of course,
he gave preference to the interests of the men teachers. Men teachers
received much higher salaries than the women, although many of the
women, in addition to their regular class work, had to teach sewing and
domestic science into the bargain. They received no extra pay for their
extra work. In spite of this added burden, and in spite of the lower
salaries received, I found that the women cared a great deal more about
their work, and a great deal more about the children than the men. It
was a winter when there was a great deal of poverty and unemployment in
Manchester. I found that the women teachers were spending their slender
salaries to provide regular dinners for destitute children, and were
giving up their time to waiting on them and seeing that they were
nourished. They said to me, quite simply: "You see, the little things
are too badly off to study their lessons. We have to feed them before we
can teach them."
Well, instead of seeing that women care more for schools and school
children than men do and should therefore have more power in education,
the Parliament of 1900 actually passed a law which took education in
England entirely out of the hands of women. This law abolished the
school board altogether and placed the administration of schools in the
hands of the municipalities. Certain corporations had formerly made
certain grants to technical education--Manchester had built a
magnificent technical college--and now the corporations had full control
of both elementary and secondary education.
The law did indeed provide that the corporations should co-opt at least
one woman on their education boards. Manchester co-opted four women, and
at the strong recommendation of the Labour Party, I was one of the
women chosen. At their urgent solicitation I was appointed to the
Committee on Technical Instruction, the one woman admitted to this
committee. I learned that the Manchester Technical College, called the
second best in Europe, spending thousands of pounds annually for
technical training, had practically no provision for training women.
Even in classes where they might easily have been admitted, bakery and
confectionery classes and the like, the girls were kept out because the
men's trades unions objected to their being educated for such skilled
work. It was rapidly becoming clear to my mind that men regarded women
as a servant class in the community, and that women were going to remain
in the servant class until they lifted themselves out of it. I asked
myself many times in those days what was to be done. I had joined the
Labour Party, thinking that through its councils something vital might
come, some such demand for the women's enfranchisement that the
politicians could not possibly ignore. Nothing came.
All these years my daughters had been growing up. All their lives they
had been interested in women's suffrage. Christabel and Sylvia, as
little girls, had cried to be taken to meetings. They had helped in our
drawing-room meetings in every way that children can help. As they grew
older we used to talk together about the suffrage, and I was sometimes
rather frightened by their youthful confidence in the prospect, which
they considered certain, of the success of the movement. One day
Christabel startled me with the remark: "How long you women have been
trying for the vote. For my part, I mean to get it."
Was there, I reflected, any difference between trying for the vote and
getting it? There is an old French proverb, "If youth could know; if age
could do." It occurred to me that if the older suffrage workers could in
some way join hands with the young, unwearied and resourceful
suffragists, the movement might wake up to new life and new
possibilities. After that I and my daughters together sought a way to
bring about that union of young and old which would find new methods,
blaze new trails. At length we thought we had found a way.
CHAPTER III
In the summer of 1902--I think it was 1902--Susan B. Anthony paid a
visit to Manchester, and that visit was one of the contributory causes
that led to the founding of our militant suffrage organisation, the
Women's Social and Political Union. During Miss Anthony's visit my
daughter Christabel, who was very deeply impressed, wrote an article for
the Manchester papers on the life and works of the venerable reformer.
After her departure Christabel spoke often of her, and always with
sorrow and indignation that such a splendid worker for humanity was
destined to die without seeing the hopes of her lifetime realised. "It
is unendurable," declared my daughter, "to think of another generation
of women wasting their lives begging for the vote. We must not lose any
more time. We must act."
By this time the Labour Party, of which I was still a member, had
returned Mr. Keir Hardie to Parliament, and we decided that the first
step in a campaign of action was to make the Labour Party responsible
for a new suffrage bill. At a recent annual conference of the party I
had moved a resolution calling upon the members to instruct their own
member of Parliament to introduce a bill for the enfranchisement of
women. The resolution was passed, and we determined to organise a
society of women to demand immediate enfranchisement, not by means of
any outworn missionary methods, but through political action.
It was in October, 1903, that I invited a number of women to my house in
Nelson street, Manchester, for purposes of organisation. We voted to
call our new society the Women's Social and Political Union, partly to
emphasise its democracy, and partly to define its object as political
rather than propagandist. We resolved to limit our membership
exclusively to women, to keep ourselves absolutely free from any party
affiliation, and to be satisfied with nothing but action on our
question. Deeds, not words, was to be our permanent motto.
To such a pass had the women's suffrage cause come in my country that
the old leaders, who had done such fine educational work in the past,
were now seemingly content with expressions of sympathy and regret on
the part of hypocritical politicians. This fact was thrust upon me anew
by an incident that occurred almost at the moment of the founding of the
Women's Social and Political Union. In our Parliament no bill has a
chance of becoming a law unless it is made a Government measure. Private
members are at liberty to introduce measures of their own, but these
rarely reach the second reading, or debatable stage. So much time is
given to discussion of Government measures that very little time can be
given to any private bills. About one day in a week is given over to
consideration of private measures, to which, as we say, the Government
give facilities; and since there are a limited number of weeks in a
session, the members, on the opening days of Parliament, meet and draw
lots to determine who shall have a place in the debates. Only these
successful men have a chance to speak to their bills, and only those who
have drawn early chances have any prospect of getting much discussion on
their measures.
Now, the old suffragists had long since given up hope of obtaining a
Government suffrage bill, but they clung to a hope that a private
member's bill would some time obtain consideration. Every year, on the
opening day of Parliament, the association sent a deputation of women to
the House of Commons, to meet so-called friendly members and consider
the position of the women's suffrage cause. The ceremony was of a most
conventional, not to say farcical character. The ladies made their
speeches and the members made theirs. The ladies thanked the friendly
members for their sympathy, and the members renewed their assurances
that they believed in women's suffrage and would vote for it when they
had an opportunity to do so. Then the deputation, a trifle sad but
entirely tranquil, took its departure, and the members resumed the real
business of life, which was support of their party's policies.
Such a ceremony as this I attended soon after the founding of the
W. S. P. U. Sir Charles M'Laren was the friendly member who presided
over the gathering, and he did his full duty in the matter of formally
endorsing the cause of women's suffrage. He assured the delegation of
his deep regret, as well as the regret of numbers of his colleagues,
that women so intelligent, so devoted, etc., should remain
unenfranchised. Other members did likewise. The ceremonies drew to a
close, but I, who had not been asked to speak, determined to add
something to the occasion.
"Sir Charles M'Laren," I began abruptly, "has told us that numbers of
his colleagues desire the success of the women's suffrage cause. Now
every one of us knows that at this moment the members of the House of
Commons are balloting for a place in the debates. Will Sir Charles
M'Laren tell us if any member is preparing to introduce a bill for
women's suffrage? Will he tell us what he and the other members will
pledge themselves to _do_ for the reform they so warmly endorse?"
Of course, the embarrassed Sir Charles was not prepared to tell us
anything of the kind, and the deputation departed in confusion and
wrath. I was told that I was an interloper, an impertinent intruder. Who
asked me to say anything? And what right had I to step in and ruin the
good impression they had made? No one could tell how many friendly
members I had alienated by my unfortunate remarks.
I went back to Manchester and with renewed energy continued the work of
organising for the W. S. P. U.
In the spring of 1904 I went to the annual conference of the Independent
Labour Party, determined if possible to induce the members to prepare a
suffrage bill to be laid before Parliament in the approaching session.
Although I was a member of the National Administrative Council and
presumably a person holding some influence in the party, I knew that my
plan would be bitterly opposed by a strong minority, who held that the
Labour Party should direct all its efforts toward securing universal
adult suffrage for both men and women. Theoretically, of course, a
Labour party could not be satisfied with anything less than universal
adult suffrage, but it was clear that no such sweeping reform could be
effected at that time, unless indeed the Government made it one of their
measures. Besides, while a large majority of members of the House of
Commons were pledged to support a bill giving women equal franchise
rights with men, it was doubtful whether a majority could be relied upon
to support a bill giving adult suffrage, even to men. Such a bill, even
if it were a Government measure, would probably be difficult of passage.
After considerable discussion, the National Council decided to adopt the
original Women's Enfranchisement Bill, drafted by Dr. Pankhurst, and
advanced in 1870 to its second reading in the House of Commons. The
Council's decision was approved by an overwhelming majority of the
conference.
The new session of Parliament, so eagerly looked forward to, met on
February 13, 1905. I went down from Manchester, and with my daughter
Sylvia, then a student at the Royal College of Art, South Kensington,
spent eight days in the Strangers' Lobby of the House of Commons,
working for the suffrage bill. We interviewed every one of the members
who had pledged themselves to support a suffrage bill when it should be
introduced, but we found not one single member who would agree that his
chance in the ballot, if he drew such a chance, should be given to
introducing the bill. Every man had some other measure he was anxious to
further. Mr. Keir Hardie had previously given us his pledge, but his
name, as we had feared, was not drawn in the ballot. We next set out to
interview all the men whose names had been drawn, and we finally induced
Mr. Bamford Slack, who held the fourteenth place, to introduce our bill.
The fourteenth place was not a good one, but it served, and the second
reading of our bill was set down for Friday, May 12th, the second order
of the day.
This being the first suffrage bill in eight years, a thrill of
excitement animated not only our ranks but all the old suffrage
societies. Meetings were held, and a large number of petitions
circulated. When the day came for consideration on our bill, the
Strangers' Lobby could not hold the enormous gathering of women of all
classes, rich and poor, who flocked to the House of Commons. It was
pitiful to see the look of hope and joy that shone on the faces of many
of these women. We knew that our poor little measure had the very
slightest chance of being passed. The bill that occupied the first order
of the day was one providing that carts travelling along public roads at
night should carry a light behind as well as before. We had tried to
induce the promoters of this unimportant little measure to withdraw it
in the interests of our bill, but they refused. We had tried also to
persuade the Conservative Government to give our bill facilities for
full discussion, but they also refused. So, as we fully anticipated,
the promoters of the Roadway Lighting Bill were allowed to "talk out"
our bill. They did this by spinning out the debate with silly stories
and foolish jokes. The members listened to the insulting performance
with laughter and applause.
When news of what was happening reached the women who waited in the
Strangers' Lobby, a feeling of wild excitement and indignation took
possession of the throng. Seeing their temper, I felt that the moment
had come for a demonstration such as no old-fashioned suffragist had
ever attempted. I called upon the women to follow me outside for a
meeting of protest against the government. We swarmed out into the open,
and Mrs. Wolstenholm-Elmy, one of the oldest suffrage workers in
England, began to speak. Instantly the police rushed into the crowd of
women, pushing them about and ordering them to disperse. We moved on as
far as the great statue of Richard Coeur de Lion that guards the
entrance to the House of Lords, but again the police intervened. Finally
the police agreed to let us hold a meeting in Broad Sanctuary, very near
the gates of Westminster Abbey. Here we made speeches and adopted a
resolution condemning the Government's action in allowing a small
minority to talk out our bill. This was the first militant act of the
W. S. P. U. It caused comment and even some alarm, but the police
contented themselves with taking our names.
The ensuing summer was spent in outdoor work. By this time the Women's
Social and Political Union had acquired some valuable accessions, and
money began to come to us. Among our new members was one who was
destined to play an important role in the unfolding drama of the
militant movement. At the close of one of our meetings at Oldham a young
girl introduced herself to me as Annie Kenney, a mill-worker, and a
strong suffrage sympathiser. She wanted to know more of our society and
its objects, and I invited her and her sister Jenny, a Board School
teacher, to tea the next day. They came and joined our Union, a step
that definitely changed the whole course of Miss Kenney's life, and gave
us one of our most distinguished leaders and organisers. With her help
we began to carry our propaganda to an entirely new public.
In Lancashire there is an institution known as the Wakes, a sort of
travelling fair where they have merry-go-rounds, Aunt-Sallies, and other
festive games, side-shows of various kinds, and booths where all kinds
of things are sold. Every little village has its Wakes-week during the
summer and autumn, and it is the custom for the inhabitants of the
villages to spend the Sunday before the opening of the Wakes walking
among the booths in anticipation of tomorrow's joys. On these occasions
the Salvation Army, temperance orators, venders of quack medicines,
pedlars, and others, take advantage of the ready-made audience to
advance their propaganda. At Annie Kenney's suggestion we went from one
village to the other, following the Wakes and making suffrage speeches.
We soon rivalled in popularity the Salvation Army, and even the
tooth-drawers and patent-medicine pedlars.
The Women's Social and Political Union had been in existence two years
before any opportunity was presented for work on a national scale. The
autumn of 1905 brought a political situation which seemed to us to
promise bright hopes for women's enfranchisement. The life of the old
Parliament, dominated for nearly twenty years by the Conservative Party,
was drawing to an end, and the country was on the eve of a general
election in which the Liberals hoped to be returned to power. Quite
naturally the Liberal candidates went to the country with perfervid
promises of reform in every possible direction. They appealed to the
voters to return them, as advocates and upholders of true democracy, and
they promised that there should be a Government united in favour of
people's rights against the powers of a privileged aristocracy.
Now repeated experiences had taught us that the only way to attain
women's suffrage was to commit a Government to it. In other words,
pledges of support from candidates were plainly useless. They were not
worth having. The only object worth trying for was pledges from
responsible leaders that the new Government would make women's suffrage
a part of the official programme. We determined to address ourselves to
those men who were likely to be in the Liberal Cabinet, demanding to
know whether their reforms were going to include justice to women.
We laid our plans to begin this work at a great meeting to be held in
Free Trade Hall, Manchester, with Sir Edward Grey as the principal
speaker. We intended to get seats in the gallery, directly facing the
platform and we made for the occasion a large banner with the words:
"Will the Liberal Party Give Votes for Women?" We were to let this
banner down over the gallery rails at the moment when our speaker rose
to put the question to Sir Edward Grey. At the last moment, however, we
had to alter the plan because it was impossible to get the gallery seats
we wanted. There was no way in which we could use our large banner, so,
late in the afternoon on the day of the meeting, we cut out and made a
small banner with the three-word inscription: "Votes for Women." Thus,
quite accidentally, there came into existence the present slogan of the
suffrage movement around the world.
Annie Kenney and my daughter Christabel were charged with the mission of
questioning Sir Edward Grey. They sat quietly through the meeting, at
the close of which questions were invited. Several questions were asked
by men and were courteously answered. Then Annie Kenney arose and asked:
"If the Liberal party is returned to power, will they take steps to give
votes for women?" At the same time Christabel held aloft the little
banner that every one in the hall might understand the nature of the
question. Sir Edward Grey returned no answer to Annie's question, and
the men sitting near her forced her rudely into her seat, while a
steward of the meeting pressed his hat over her face. A babel of
shouts, cries and catcalls sounded from all over the hall.
As soon as order was restored Christabel stood up and repeated the
question: "Will the Liberal Government, if returned, give votes to
women?" Again Sir Edward Grey ignored the question, and again a perfect
tumult of shouts and angry cries arose. Mr. William Peacock, chief
constable of Manchester, left the platform and came down to the women,
asking them to write their question, which he promised to hand to the
speaker. They wrote: "Will the Liberal Government give votes to
working-women? Signed, on behalf of the Women's Social and Political
Union, Annie Kenney, member of the Oldham committee of the card-and
blowing-room operatives." They added a line to say that, as one of
96,000 organised women textile-workers, Annie Kenney earnestly desired
an answer to the question.
Mr. Peacock kept his word and handed the question to Sir Edward Grey,
who read it, smiled, and passed it to the others on the platform. They
also read it with smiles, but no answer to the question was made. Only
one lady who was sitting on the platform tried to say something, but the
chairman interrupted by asking Lord Durham to move a vote of thanks to
the speaker. Mr. Winston Churchill seconded the motion, Sir Edward Grey
replied briefly, and the meeting began to break up. Annie Kenney stood
up in her chair and cried out over the noise of shuffling feet and
murmurs of conversation: "Will the Liberal Government give votes to
women?" Then the audience became a mob. They howled, they shouted and
roared, shaking their fists fiercely at the woman who dared to intrude
her question into a man's meeting. Hands were lifted to drag her out of
her chair, but Christabel threw one arm about her as she stood, and with
the other arm warded off the mob, who struck and scratched at her until
her sleeve was red with blood. Still the girls held together and shouted
over and over: "The question! The question! Answer the question!"
Six men, stewards of the meeting, seized Christabel and dragged her down
the aisle, past the platform, other men following with Annie Kenney,
both girls still calling for an answer to their question. On the
platform the Liberal leaders sat silent and unmoved while this
disgraceful scene was taking place, and the mob were shouting and
shrieking from the floor.
Flung into the streets, the two girls staggered to their feet and began
to address the crowds, and to tell them what had taken place in a
Liberal meeting. Within five minutes they were arrested on a charge of
obstruction and, in Christabel's case, of assaulting the police. Both
were summonsed to appear next morning in a police court, where, after a
trial which was a mere farce, Annie Kenney was sentenced to pay a fine
of five shillings, with an alternative of three days in prison, and
Christabel Pankhurst was given a fine of ten shillings or a jail
sentence of one week.
Both girls promptly chose the prison sentence. As soon as they left the
court-room I hurried around to the room where they were waiting, and I
said to my daughter: "You have done everything you could be expected to
do in this matter. I think you should let me pay your fines and take you
home." Without waiting for Annie Kenney to speak, my daughter exclaimed:
"Mother, if you pay my fine I will never go home." Before going to the
meeting she had said, "We will get our question answered or sleep in
prison to-night." I now knew her courage remained unshaken.
Of course the affair created a tremendous sensation, not only in
Manchester, where my husband had been so well known and where I had so
long held public office, but all over England. The comments of the press
were almost unanimously bitter. Ignoring the perfectly well-established
fact that men in every political meeting ask questions and demand
answers of the speakers, the newspapers treated the action of the two
girls as something quite unprecedented and outrageous. They generally
agreed that great leniency had been shown them. Fines and jail-sentences
were too good for such unsexed creatures. "The discipline of the
nursery" would have been far more appropriate. One Birmingham paper
declared that "if any argument were required against giving ladies
political status and power it had been furnished in Manchester."
Newspapers which had heretofore ignored the whole subject now hinted
that while they had formerly been in favour of women's suffrage, they
could no longer countenance it. The Manchester incident, it was said,
had set the cause back, perhaps irrevocably.
This is how it set the cause back. Scores of people wrote to the
newspapers expressing sympathy with the women. The wife of Sir Edward
Grey told her friends that she considered them quite justified in the
means they had taken. It was stated that Winston Churchill, nervous
about his own candidacy in Manchester, visited Strangeways Gaol, where
the two girls were imprisoned, and vainly begged the governor to allow
him to pay their fines. On October 20, when the prisoners were released,
they were given an immense demonstration in Free-Trade Hall, the very
hall from which they had been ejected the week before. The Women's
Social and Political Union received a large number of new members. Above
all, the question of women's suffrage became at once a live topic of
comment from one end of Great Britain to the other.
We determined that from that time on the little "Votes For Women"
banners should appear wherever a prospective member of the Liberal
Government rose to speak, and that there should be no more peace until
the women's question was answered. We clearly perceived that the new
Government, calling themselves Liberal, were reactionary so far as women
were concerned, that they were hostile to women's suffrage, and would
have to be fought until they were conquered, or else driven from office.
We did not begin to fight, however, until we had given the new
Government every chance to give us the pledge we wanted. Early in
December the Conservative Government had gone out, and Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberal leader, had formed a new Cabinet. On
December 21 a great meeting was held in Royal Albert Hall, London, where
Sir Henry, surrounded by his cabinet, made his first utterance as Prime
Minister. Previous to the meeting we wrote to Sir Henry and asked him,
in the name of the Women's Social and Political Union, whether the
Liberal Government would give women the vote. We added that our
representatives would be present at the meeting, and we hoped that the
Prime Minister would publicly answer the question. Otherwise we should
be obliged publicly to protest against his silence.
Of course Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman returned no reply, nor did his
speech contain any allusion to women's suffrage. So, at the conclusion,
Annie Kenney, whom we had smuggled into the hall in disguise, whipped
out her little white calico banner, and called out in her clear, sweet
voice: "Will the Liberal Government give women the vote?"
At the same moment Theresa Billington let drop from a seat directly
above the platform a huge banner with the words: "Will the Liberal
Government give justice to working-women?" Just for a moment there was a
gasping silence, the people waiting to see what the Cabinet Ministers
would do. They did nothing. Then, in the midst of uproar and conflicting
shouts, the women were seized and flung out of the hall.
This was the beginning of a campaign the like of which was never known
in England, or, for that matter, in any other country. If we had been
strong enough we should have opposed the election of every Liberal
candidate, but being limited both in funds and in members we
concentrated on one member of the Government, Mr. Winston Churchill. Not
that we had any animus against Mr. Churchill. We chose him simply
because he was the only important candidate standing for constituencies
within reach of our headquarters. We attended every meeting addressed by
Mr. Churchill. We heckled him unmercifully; we spoiled his best points
by flinging back such obvious retorts that the crowds roared with
laughter. We lifted out little white banners from unexpected corners of
the hall, exactly at the moment when an interruption was least desired.
Sometimes our banners were torn from our hands and trodden under foot.
Sometimes, again, the crowds were with us, and we actually broke up the
meeting. We did not succeed in defeating Mr. Churchill, but he was
returned by a very small majority, the smallest of any of the Manchester
Liberal candidates.
We did not confine our efforts to heckling Mr. Churchill. Throughout the
campaign we kept up the work of questioning Cabinet Ministers at
meetings all over England and Scotland. At Sun Hall, Liverpool,
addressed by the Prime Minister, nine women in succession asked the
important question, and were thrown out of the hall; this in the face of
the fact that Sir Campbell-Bannerman was an avowed suffragist. But we
were not questioning him as to his private opinions on the suffrage; we
were asking him what his Government were willing to do about suffrage.
We questioned Mr. Asquith in Sheffield, Mr. Lloyd-George in Altrincham,
Cheshire, the Prime Minister again in Glasgow, and we interrupted a
great many other meetings as well. Always we were violently thrown out
and insulted. Often we were painfully bruised and hurt.
What good did it do? We have often been asked that question, even by the
women our actions spurred into an activity they had never before thought
themselves capable of. For one thing, our heckling campaign made women's
suffrage a matter of news--it had never been that before. Now the
newspapers were full of us. For another thing, we woke up the old
suffrage associations. During the general election various groups of
non-militant suffragists came back to life and organised a gigantic
manifesto in favour of action from the Liberal Government. Among others,
the manifesto was signed by the Women's Co-operative Guild with nearly
21,000 members; the Women's Liberal Federation, with 76,000 members; the
Scottish Women's Liberal Federation, with 15,000 members; the
North-of-England Weavers' Association, with 100,000 members; the British
Women's Temperance Association, with nearly 110,000 members; and the
Independent Labour Party with 20,000 members. Surely it was something to
have inspired all this activity.
We decided that the next step must be to carry the fight to London, and
Annie Kenney was chosen to be organiser there. With only two pounds,
less than ten dollars, in her pocket the intrepid girl set forth on her
mission. In about a fortnight I left my official work as registrar in
the hands of a deputy and went down to London to see what had been
accomplished. To my astonishment I found that Annie, working with my
daughter Sylvia, had organised a procession of women and a demonstration
to be held on the opening day of Parliament. The confident young things
had actually engaged Caxton Hall, Westminster; they had had printed a
large number of handbills to announce the meeting, and they were busily
engaged in working up the demonstration. Mrs. Drummond, who had joined
the Union shortly after the imprisonment of Annie Kenney and Christabel,
sent word from Manchester that she was coming to help us. She had to
borrow the money for her railroad-fare, but she came, and, as ever
before and since, her help was invaluable.
How we worked, distributing handbills, chalking announcements of the
meeting on pavements, calling on every person we knew and on a great
many more we knew only by name, canvassing from door to door!
At length the opening day of Parliament arrived. On February 19, 1906,
occurred the first suffrage procession in London. I think there were
between three and four hundred women in that procession, poor
working-women from the East End, for the most part, leading the way in
which numberless women of every rank were afterward to follow. My eyes
were misty with tears as I saw them, standing in line, holding the
simple banners which my daughter Sylvia had decorated, waiting for the
word of command. Of course our procession attracted a large crowd of
intensely amused spectators. The police, however, made no attempt to
disperse our ranks, but merely ordered us to furl our banners. There
was no reason why we should not have carried banners but the fact that
we were women, and therefore could be bullied. So, bannerless, the
procession entered Caxton Hall. To my amazement it was filled with
women, most of whom I had never seen at any suffrage gathering before.
Our meeting was most enthusiastic, and while Annie Kenney was speaking,
to frequent applause, the news came to me that the King's speech (which
is not the King's at all, but the formally announced Government
programme for the session) had been read, and that there was in it no
mention of the women's suffrage question. As Annie took her seat I arose
and made this announcement, and I moved a resolution that the meeting
should at once proceed to the House of Commons to urge the members to
introduce a suffrage measure. The resolution was carried, and we rushed
out in a body and hurried toward the Strangers' Entrance. It was pouring
rain and bitterly cold, yet no one turned back, even when we learned at
the entrance that for the first time in memory the doors of the House of
Commons were barred to women. We sent in our cards to members who were
personal friends, and some of them came out and urged our admittance.
The police, however, were obdurate. They had their orders. The Liberal
government, advocates of the people's rights, had given orders that
women should no longer set foot in their stronghold.
Pressure from members proved too great, and the government relented to
the extent of allowing twenty women at a time to enter the lobby.
Through all the rain and cold those hundreds of women waited for hours
their turn to enter. Some never got in, and for those of us who did
there was small satisfaction. Not a member could be persuaded to take up
our cause.
Out of the disappointment and dejection of that experience I yet reaped
a richer harvest of happiness than I had ever known before. Those women
had followed me to the House of Commons. They had defied the police.
They were awake at last. They were prepared to do something that women
had never done before--fight for themselves. Women had always fought for
men, and for their children. Now they were ready to fight for their own
human rights. Our militant movement was established.
CHAPTER IV
To account for the phenomenal growth of the Women's Social and Political
Union after it was established in London, to explain why it made such an
instant appeal to women hitherto indifferent, I shall have to point out
exactly wherein our society differs from all other suffrage
associations. In the first place, our members are absolutely single
minded; they concentrate all their forces on one object, political
equality with men. No member of the W. S. P. U. divides her attention
between suffrage and other social reforms. We hold that both reason and
justice dictate that women shall have a share in reforming the evils
that afflict society, especially those evils bearing directly on women
themselves. Therefore, we demand, before any other legislation whatever,
the elementary justice of votes for women.
There is not the slightest doubt that the women of Great Britain would
have been enfranchised years ago had all the suffragists adopted this
simple principle. They never did, and even to-day many English women
refuse to adopt it. They are party members first and suffragists
afterward; or they are suffragists part of the time and social theorists
the rest of the time. We further differ from other suffrage
associations, or from others existing in 1906, in that we clearly
perceived the political situation that solidly interposed between us and
our enfranchisement.
For seven years we had had a majority in the House of Commons pledged to
vote favourably on a suffrage bill. The year before, they had voted
favourably on one, yet that bill did not become law. Why? Because even
an overwhelming majority of private members are powerless to enact law
in the face of a hostile Government of eleven cabinet ministers. The
private member of Parliament was once possessed of individual power and
responsibility, but Parliamentary usage and a changed conception of
statesmanship have gradually lessened the functions of members. At the
present time their powers, for all practical purposes, are limited to
helping to enact such measures as the Government introduces or, in rare
instances, private measures approved by the Government. It is true that
the House can revolt, can, by voting a lack of confidence in the
Government, force them to resign. But that almost never happens, and it
is less likely now than formerly to happen. Figureheads don't revolt.
This, then, was our situation: the Government all-powerful and
consistently hostile; the rank and file of legislators impotent; the
country apathetic; the women divided in their interests. The Women's
Social and Political Union was established to meet this situation, and
to overcome it. Moreover we had a policy which, if persisted in long
enough, could not possibly fail to overcome it. Do you wonder that we
gained new members at every meeting we held?
There was little formality about joining the Union. Any woman could
become a member by paying a shilling, but at the same time she was
required to sign a declaration of loyal adherence to our policy and a
pledge not to work for any political party until the women's vote was
won. This is still our inflexible custom. Moreover, if at any time a
member, or a group of members, loses faith in our policy; if any one
begins to suggest, that some other policy ought to be substituted, or if
she tries to confuse the issue by adding other policies, she ceases at
once to be a member. Autocratic? Quite so. But, you may object, a
suffrage organisation ought to be democratic. Well the members of the
W. S. P. U. do not agree with you. We do not believe in the
effectiveness of the ordinary suffrage organisation. The W. S. P. U. is
not hampered by a complexity of rules. We have no constitution and
by-laws; nothing to be amended or tinkered with or quarrelled over at an
annual meeting. In fact, we have no annual meeting, no business
sessions, no elections of officers. The W. S. P. U. is simply a suffrage
army in the field. It is purely a volunteer army, and no one is obliged
to remain in it. Indeed we don't want anybody to remain in it who does
not ardently believe in the policy of the army.
The foundation of our policy is opposition to a Government who refuse
votes to women. To support by word or deed a Government hostile to woman
suffrage is simply to invite them to go on being hostile. We oppose the
Liberal party because it is in power. We would oppose a Unionist
government if it were in power and were opposed to woman suffrage. We
say to women that as long as they remain in the ranks of the Liberal
party they give their tacit approval to the Government's anti-suffrage
policy. We say to members of Parliament that as long as they support any
of the Government's policies they give their tacit approval to the
anti-suffrage policy. We call upon all sincere suffragists to leave the
Liberal party until women are given votes on equal terms with men. We
call upon all voters to vote against Liberal candidates until the
Liberal Government does justice to women.
We did not invent this policy. It was most successfully pursued by Mr.
Parnell in his Home Rule struggle more than thirty-five years ago. Any
one who is old enough to remember the stirring days of Parnell may
recall how, in 1885, the Home Rulers, by persistently voting against the
Government in the House of Commons, forced the resignation of Mr.
Gladstone and his Cabinet. In the general election which followed, the
Liberal party was again returned to power, but by the slender majority
of eighty-four, the Home Rulers having fought every Liberal candidate,
even those, who, like my husband, were enthusiastic believers in Home
Rule. In order to control the House and keep his leadership, Mr.
Gladstone was obliged to bring in a Government Home Rule Bill. The
downfall, through private intrigue, and the subsequent death of Parnell
prevented the bill from becoming law. For many years afterward the Irish
Nationalists had no leader strong enough to carry on Parnell's
anti-government policy, but within late years it was resumed by Mr.
James Redmond, with the result that the Commons passed a Home Rule
Bill.
The contention of the old-fashioned suffragists, and of the politicians
as well, has always been that an educated public opinion will ultimately
give votes to women without any great force being exerted in behalf of
the reform. We agree that public opinion must be educated, but we
contend that even an educated public opinion is useless unless it is
vigorously utilised. The keenest weapon is powerless unless it is
courageously wielded. In the year 1906 there was an immensely large
public opinion in favour of woman suffrage. But what good did that do
the cause? We called upon the public for a great deal more than
sympathy. We called upon it to demand of the Government to yield to
public opinion and give women votes. And we declared that we would wage
war, not only on all anti-suffrage forces, but on all neutral and
non-active forces. Every man with a vote was considered a foe to woman
suffrage unless he was prepared to be actively a friend.
Not that we believed that the campaign of education ought to be given
up. On the contrary, we knew that education must go on, and in much more
vigorous fashion than ever before. The first thing we did was to enter
upon a sensational campaign to arouse the public to the importance of
woman suffrage, and to interest it in our plans for forcing the
Government's hands. I think we can claim that our success in this regard
was instant, and that it has proved permanent. From the very first, in
those early London days, when we were few in numbers and very poor in
purse, we made the public aware of the woman suffrage movement as it had
never been before. We adopted Salvation Army methods and went out into
the highways and the byways after converts. We threw away all our
conventional notions of what was "ladylike" and "good form," and we
applied to our methods the one test question, Will it help? Just as the
Booths and their followers took religion to the street crowds in such
fashion that the church people were horrified, so we took suffrage to
the general public in a manner that amazed and scandalised the other
suffragists.
We had a lot of suffrage literature printed, and day by day our members
went forth and held street meetings. Selecting a favourable spot, with a
chair for a rostrum, one of us would ring a bell until people began to
stop to see what was going to happen. What happened, of course, was a
lively suffrage speech, and the distribution of literature. Soon after
our campaign had started, the sound of the bell was a signal for a crowd
to spring up as if by magic. All over the neighbourhood you heard the
cry: "Here are the Suffragettes! Come on!" We covered London in this
way; we never lacked an audience, and best of all, an audience to which
the woman-suffrage doctrine was new. We were increasing our favourable
public as well as waking it up. Besides these street meetings, we held
many hall and drawing-room meetings, and we got a great deal of press
publicity, which was something never accorded the older suffrage
methods.
Our plans included the introduction of a Government suffrage bill at
the earliest possible moment, and in the spring of 1906 we sent a
deputation of about thirty of our members to interview the Prime
Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. The Prime Minister, it was
stated, was not at home; so in a few days we sent another deputation.
This time the servant agreed to carry our request to the Prime Minister.
The women waited patiently on the doorstep of the official residence,
No. 10 Downing Street, for nearly an hour. Then the door opened and two
men appeared. One of the men addressed the leader of the deputation,
roughly ordering her and the others to leave. "We have sent a message to
the Prime Minister," she replied, "and we are waiting for the answer."
"There will be no answer," was the stern rejoinder, and the door closed.
"Yes, there will be an answer," exclaimed the leader, and she seized the
door-knocker and banged it sharply. Instantly the men reappeared, and
one of them called to a policeman standing near, "Take this woman in
charge." The order was obeyed, and the peaceful deputation saw its
leader taken off to Canon Row Station.
Instantly the women protested vigorously. Annie Kenney began to address
the crowd that had gathered, and Mrs. Drummond actually forced her way
past the doorkeeper into the sacred residence of the Prime Minister of
the British Empire! Her arrest and Annie's followed. The three women
were detained at the police station for about an hour, long enough, the
Prime Minister probably thought, to frighten them thoroughly and teach
them not to do such dreadful things again. Then he sent them word that
he had decided not to prosecute them, but would, on the contrary,
receive a deputation from the W. S. P. U., and, if they cared to attend,
from other suffrage societies as well.
All the suffrage organisations at once began making preparations for the
great event. At the same time two hundred members of Parliament sent a
petition to the Prime Minister, asking him to receive their committee
that they might urge upon him the necessity of a Government measure for
woman suffrage. Sir Henry fixed May 19th as the day on which he would
receive a joint deputation from Parliament and from the women's suffrage
organisations.
The W. S. P. U. determined to make the occasion as public as possible,
and began preparations for a procession and a demonstration. When the
day came we assembled at the foot of the beautiful monument to the
warrior-queen, Boadicea, that guards the entrance to Westminster Bridge,
and from there we marched to the Foreign Office. At the meeting eight
women spoke in behalf of an immediate suffrage measure, and Mr. Keir
Hardie presented the argument for the suffrage members of Parliament. I
spoke for the W. S. P. U., and I tried to make the Prime Minister see
that no business could be more pressing than ours. I told him that the
group of women organised in our Union felt so strongly the necessity for
women enfranchisement that they were prepared to sacrifice for it
everything they possessed, their means of livelihood, their very lives,
if necessary. I begged him to make such a sacrifice needless by doing us
justice now.
What answer do you think Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman made us? He
assured us of his sympathy with our cause, his belief in its justice,
and his confidence in our fitness to vote. And then he told us to have
patience and wait; he could do nothing for us because some of his
Cabinet were opposed to us. After a few more words the usual vote of
thanks was moved, and the deputation was dismissed. I had not expected
anything better, but it wrung my heart to see the bitter disappointment
of the W. S. P. U. women who had waited in the street to hear from the
leaders the result of the deputation. We held a great meeting of protest
that afternoon, and determined to carry on our agitation with increased
vigor.
Now that it had been made plain that the Government were resolved not to
bring in a suffrage bill, there was nothing to do but to continue our
policy of waking up the country, not only by public speeches and
demonstrations, but by a constant heckling of Cabinet Ministers. Since
the memorable occasion when Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney were
thrown out of Sir Edward Grey's meeting in Manchester, and afterward
imprisoned for the crime of asking a courteous question, we had not lost
an opportunity of addressing the same question to every Cabinet Minister
we could manage to encounter. For this we have been unmercifully
criticised, and in a large number of cases most brutally handled.
In almost every one of my American meetings I was asked the question,
"What good do you expect to accomplish by interrupting meetings?" Is it
possible that the time-honoured, almost sacred English privilege of
interrupting is unknown in America? I cannot imagine a political meeting
from which "the Voice" was entirely absent. In England it is invariably
present. It is considered the inalienable right of the opposition to
heckle the speaker and to hurl questions at him which are calculated to
spoil his arguments. For instance, when Liberals attend a Conservative
gathering they go prepared to shatter by witticisms and pointed
questions all the best effects of the Conservative orators. The next day
you will read in Liberal newspapers headlines like these: "The Voice in
Fine Form," "Short Shrift for Tory Twaddle," "Awkward Answers from the
Enemy's Platform." In the body of the article you will learn that "Lord
X found that the Liberals at his meeting were more than a match for
him," that "there was continued interruption during Sir So-and-so's
speech," that "Lord M fared badly last night in his encounter with the
Voice," or that "Captain Z had the greatest difficulty in making himself
heard."
In accordance with this custom we heckle Cabinet Ministers. Mr. Winston
Churchill, for example, is speaking. "One great question," he exclaims,
"remains to be settled."
"And that is woman suffrage," shouts a voice from the gallery.
Mr. Churchill struggles on with his speech: "The men have been
complaining of me----"
"The women have been complaining of you, too, Mr. Churchill," comes
back promptly from the back of the hall.
"In the circumstances what can we do but----"
"Give votes to women."
Our object, of course, is to keep woman suffrage in the foreground of
interest and to insist on every possible occasion that no other reform
advocated is of such immediate importance.
From the first the women's interruptions have been resented with
unreasoning anger. I remember hearing Mr. Lloyd-George saying once of a
man who interrupted him:
"Let him remain. I like interruptions. They show that people holding
different opinions to mine are present, giving me a chance to convert
them." But when suffragists interrupt Mr. Lloyd-George he says something
polite like this: "Pay no attention to those cats mewing."
Some of the ministers are more well bred in their expressions, but all
are disdainful and resentful. All see with approval the brutal ejection
of the women by the Liberal stewards.
At one meeting where Mr. Lloyd-George was speaking, we interrupted with
a question, and he claimed the sympathy of the audience on the score
that he was a friend to woman suffrage. "Then why don't you do something
to give votes to women?" was the obvious retort. But Mr. Lloyd-George
evaded this by the counter query: "Why don't they go for their enemies?
Why don't they go for their greatest enemy?" Instantly, all over the
hall, voices shouted, "Asquith! Asquith!" For even at that early day it
was known that the then Chancellor of the Exchequer was a stern foe of
women's independence.
In the summer of 1906, together with other members of the W. S. P. U., I
went to Northampton, where Mr. Asquith was holding a large meeting in
behalf of the Government's education bills. We organised a number of
outdoor meetings, and of course prepared to attend Mr. Asquith's
meeting. In conversation with the president of the local Women's Liberal
Association, I mentioned the fact that we expected to be put out, and
she indignantly declared that such a thing could not happen in
Northampton, where the women had done so much for the Liberal party. I
told her that I hoped she would be at the meeting.
I had not intended to go myself, my plans being to hold a meeting of my
own outside the door. But our members, before Mr. Asquith began to
speak, attempted to question him, and were thrown out with violence. So
then, turning my meeting over to them, I slipped quietly into the hall
and sat down in the front row of a division set apart for wives and
women friends of the Liberal leaders. I sat there in silence, hearing
men interrupt the speaker and get answers to their questions. At the
close of the speech I stood up and, addressing the chairman, said: "I
should like to ask Mr. Asquith a question about education." The chairman
turned inquiringly to Mr. Asquith, who frowningly shook his head. But
without waiting for the chairman to say a word, I continued: "Mr.
Asquith has said that the parents of children have a right to be
consulted in the matter of their children's education, especially upon
such questions as the kind of religious instruction they should receive.
Women are parents. Does not Mr. Asquith think that women should have the
right to control their children's education, as men do, through the
vote?" At this point the stewards seized me by the arms and shoulders
and rushed me, or rather dragged me, for I soon lost my footing, to the
door and threw me out of the building.
The effect on the president of the Northampton Women's Liberal
Association was most salutary. She resigned her office and became a
member of the W. S. P. U. Perhaps her action was influenced further by
the press reports of the incident. Mr. Asquith was reported as saying,
after my ejection, that it was difficult to enter into the minds of
people who thought they could serve a cause which professed to appeal to
the reason of the electors of the country by disturbing public meetings.
Apparently he could enter into the minds of the men who disturbed public
meetings.
To our custom of public heckling of the responsible members of the
hostile Government we added the practice of sending deputations to them
for the purpose of presenting orderly arguments in favour of our cause.
After Mr. Asquith had shown himself so uninformed as to the objects of
the suffragists, we decided to ask him to receive a deputation from the
W. S. P. U. To our polite letter Mr. Asquith returned a cold refusal to
be interviewed on any subject not connected with his particular office.
Whereupon we wrote again, reminding Mr. Asquith that as a member of the
Government he was concerned with all questions likely to be dealt with
by Parliament. We said that we urgently desired to put our question
before him, and that we would send a deputation to his house hoping that
he would feel it his duty to receive us.
Our first deputation was told that Mr. Asquith was not at home. He had,
in fact, escaped from the house through the back door, and had sped away
in a fast motor-car. Two days later we sent a larger deputation, of
about thirty women, to his house in Cavendish Square. To be accurate,
the deputation got as near the house as the entrance to Cavendish
Square; there the women met a strong force of police, who told them that
they would not be permitted to go farther.
Many of the women were carrying little "Votes for Women" banners, and
these the police tore from them, in some cases with blows and insults.
Seeing this, the leader of the deputation cried out: "We will go
forward. You have no right to strike women like that." The reply, from a
policeman near her, was a blow in the face. She screamed with pain and
indignation, whereupon the man grasped her by the throat and choked her
against the park railings until she was blue in the face. The young
woman struggled and fought back, and for this she was arrested on a
charge of assaulting the police. Three other women were arrested, one
because, in spite of the police, she succeeded in ringing Mr. Asquith's
door-bell and another because she protested against the laughter of
some ladies who watched the affair from a drawing-room window. She was a
poor working-woman, and it seemed to her a terrible thing that rich and
protected women should ridicule a cause that to her was so profoundly
serious. The fourth woman was taken in charge, because after she had
been pushed off the pavement, she dared to step back. Charged with
disorderly conduct, these women were sentenced to six weeks in the
Second Division. They were given the option of a fine, it is true, but
the payment of a fine would have been an acknowledgment of guilt, which
made such a course impossible. The leader of the deputation was given a
two months' sentence, with the option of a fine of ten pounds. She, too,
refused to pay, and was sent to prison; but some unknown friend paid the
fine secretly, and she was released before the expiration of her
sentence.
About the time these things were happening in London, similar violence
was offered our women in Manchester, where John Burns, Lloyd-George, and
Winston Churchill, all three Cabinet Ministers, were addressing a great
Liberal demonstration. The women were there, as usual, to ask government
support for our measure. There, too, they were thrown out of the
meeting, and three of them were sent to prison.
There are people in England, plenty of them, who will tell you that the
Suffragettes were sent to prison for destroying property. The fact is
that hundreds of women were arrested for exactly such offences as I have
described before it ever occurred to any of us to destroy property. We
were determined, at the beginning of our movement, that we would make
ourselves heard, that we would force the Government to take up our
question and answer it by action in Parliament. Perhaps you will see
some parallel to our case in the stand taken in Massachusetts by the
early Abolitionists, Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. They,
too, had to fight bitterly, to face insult and arrest, because they
insisted on being heard. And they were heard; and so, in time, were we.
I think we began to be noticed in earnest after our first success in
opposing a Liberal candidate. This was in a by-election held at
Cockermouth in August, 1906. I shall have to explain that a by-election
is a local election to fill a vacancy in Parliament caused by a death or
a resignation. The verdict of a by-election is considered as either an
indorsement or a censure of the manner in which the Government have
fulfilled their pre-election pledges. So we went to Cockermouth and told
the voters how the Liberal party had fulfilled its pledges of democracy
and lived up to its avowed belief in the rights of all the people. We
told them of the arrests in London and Manchester, of the shameful
treatment of women in Liberal meetings, and we asked them to censure the
Government who had answered so brutally our demand for a vote. We told
them that the only rebuke that the politicians would notice was a lost
seat in Parliament, and that on that ground we asked them to defeat the
Liberal candidate.
How we were ridiculed! With what scorn the newspapers declared that
"those wild women" could never turn a single vote. Yet when the
election was over it was found that the Liberal candidate had lost the
seat, which, at the general election a little more than a year before,
had been won by a majority of 655. This time the Unionist candidate was
returned by a majority of 609. Tremendously elated, we hurried our
forces off to another by-election.
Now the ridicule was turned to stormy abuse. Mind you, the Liberal
Government still refused to notice the women's question; they declared
through the Liberal press that the defeat at Cockermouth was
insignificant, and that anyhow it wasn't caused by the Suffragettes; yet
the Liberal leaders were furiously angry with the W. S. P. U. Many of
our members had been Liberals, and it was considered by the men that
these women were little better than traitors. They were very foolish and
ill-advised, into the bargain, the Liberals said, because the vote, if
won at all, must be gained from the Liberal party; and how did the women
suppose the Liberal party would ever give the vote to open and avowed
enemies? This sage argument was used also by the women Liberals and the
constitutional suffragists. They advised us that the proper way was to
work for the party. We retorted that we had done that unsuccessfully for
too many years already, and persisted with the opposite method of
persuasion.
Throughout the summer and autumn we devoted ourselves to the by-election
work, sometimes actually defeating the Liberal candidate, sometimes
reducing the Liberal majority, and always raising a tremendous sensation
and gaining hundreds of new members to the Union. In almost every
neighbourhood we visited we left the nucleus of a local union, so that
before the year was out we had branches all over England and many in
Scotland and Wales. I especially remember a by-election in Wales at
which Mr. Samuel Evans, who had accepted an officership under the Crown,
had to stand for re-election. Unfortunately no candidate had been
brought out against him. So there was nothing for my companions and me
to do but make his campaign as lively as possible. Mr.--now Sir
Samuel--Evans was the man who had incensed women by talking out a
suffrage resolution introduced into the House by Keir Hardie. So we went
to two of his meetings and literally talked him out, breaking up the
gatherings amid the laughter and cheers of delighted crowds.
On October 23d Parliament met for its autumn session, and we led a
deputation to the House of Commons in another effort to induce the
Government to take action on woman suffrage. In accordance with orders
given the police, only twenty of us were admitted to the Strangers'
Lobby. We sent in for the chief Liberal whip, and asked him to take a
message to the Prime Minister, the message being the usual request to
grant women the vote that session. We also asked the Prime Minister if
he intended to include the registration of qualified women voters in the
provisions of the plural voting bill, then under consideration. The
Liberal whip came back with the reply that nothing could be done for
women that session.
[Illustration: MRS. PANKHURST ADDRESSING A BY-ELECTION CROWD]
"Does the Prime Minister," I asked, "hold out any hope for the women
for any session during this Parliament, or at any future time?" The
Prime Minister, you will remember, called himself a suffragist.
The Liberal whip replied, "No, Mrs. Pankhurst, the Prime Minister does
not."
What would a deputation of unenfranchised men have done in these
circumstances--men who knew themselves to be qualified to exercise the
franchise, who desperately needed the protection of the franchise, and
who had a majority of legislators in favour of giving them the
franchise? I hope they would have done at least as much as we did, which
was to start a meeting of protest on the spot. The newspapers described
our action as creating a disgraceful scene in the lobby of the House of
Commons, but I think that history will otherwise describe it. One of the
women sprang up on a settee and began to address the crowd. In less than
a minute she was pulled down, but instantly another woman took her
place; and after she had been dragged down, still another sprang to her
place, and following her another and another, until the order came to
clear the lobby, and we were all forced outside.
In the melee I was thrown to the floor and painfully hurt. The women,
thinking me seriously injured, crowded around me and refused to move
until I was able to regain myself. This angered the police, who were
still more incensed when they found that the demonstration was continued
outside. Eleven women were arrested, including Mrs. Pethick Lawrence,
our treasurer, Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, Annie Kenney and three more of our
organisers; and they were all sent to Holloway for two months. But the
strength of our movement was proved by the number of volunteers who
immediately came forward to carry on the work. Mrs. Tuke, now Hon.
Secretary of the W. S. P. U., joined the Union at this time. It had not
occurred to the authorities that their action would have this effect.
They thought to crush the Union at a blow, but they gave it the greatest
impetus it had yet received. The leaders of the older suffrage
organisations for the time forgot their disapproval of our methods, and
joined with women writers, physicians, actresses, artists, and other
prominent women in denouncing the affair as barbarous.
One more thing the authorities failed to take into account. The
condition of English prisons was known to be very bad, but when two of
our women were made so ill in Holloway that they had to be released
within a few days, the politicians began to tremble for their prestige.
Questions were asked in Parliament concerning the advisability of
treating the Suffragettes not as common criminals but as political
offenders with the right to confinement in the First Division. Mr.
Herbert Gladstone, the Home Secretary, replied to these questions that
he had no power to interfere with the magistrates' decisions, and could
do nothing in the matter of the suffragettes' punishment. I shall ask
you to remember this statement of Mr. Herbert Gladstone's, as later we
were able to prove it a deliberate falsehood--although really the
falsehood proved itself when the women, by Government order, were
released from prison when they had served just half their sentences.
The reason for this was that an important by-election was being held in
the north of England, and we had distributed broadcast throughout the
constituency hand bills telling the electors that nine women, including
the daughter of Richard Cobden, were being held as common criminals by
the Liberal Government who were asking for their votes.
I took a group of the released prisoners to Huddersfield, and they told
prison stories to such effect that the Liberal majority was reduced by
540 votes. As usual the Liberal leaders denied that our work had
anything to do with the slender majority by which the party retained the
seat, but among our souvenirs is a handbill, one of thousands given out
from Liberal headquarters:
+------------------------------+
| MEN OF HUDDERSFIELD |
| DON'T BE MISLED |
| BY SOCIALISTS, SUFFRAGETTES |
| OR TORIES |
| VOTE FOR SHERWELL |
+------------------------------+
Meanwhile, other demonstrations had taken place before the House of
Commons, and at Christmas time twenty-one suffragettes were in Holloway
Prison, though they had committed no crime. The Government professed
themselves unmoved, and members of Parliament spoke with sneers of the
"self-made martyrs." However, a considerable group of members, strongly
moved by the passion and unquenchable ardor of this new order of
suffragists, met during the last week of the year and formed a
committee whose object it was to press upon the government the necessity
of giving the franchise to women during that Parliament. The committee
resolved that its members would work to educate a wider public opinion
on the question, and especially to advocate suffrage when addressing
meetings in their constituencies, to take Parliamentary action on every
possible occasion, and to induce as many members of Parliament as
possible to ballot for the introduction of a suffrage bill or motion
next session.
Our first year in London had borne wonderful fruits. We had grown from a
mere handful of women, a "family party" the newspapers had derisively
called us, to a strong organisation with branches all over the country,
permanent headquarters in Clements Inn, Strand; we had found good
financial backing, and above all, we had created a suffrage committee in
the House of Commons.
BOOK II
FOUR YEARS OF PEACEFUL MILITANCY
CHAPTER I
The campaign of 1907 began with a Women's Parliament, called together on
February 13th in Caxton Hall, to consider the provisions of the King's
speech, which had been read in the national Parliament on the opening
day of the session, February 12th. The King's speech, as I have
explained, is the official announcement of the Government's programme
for the session. When our Women's Parliament met at three o'clock on the
afternoon of the thirteenth we knew that the Government meant to do
nothing for women during the session ahead.
I presided over the women's meeting, which was marked with a fervency
and a determination of spirit at that time altogether unprecedented. A
resolution expressing indignation that woman suffrage should have been
omitted from the King's speech, and calling upon the House of Commons to
give immediate facilities to such a measure, was moved and carried. A
motion to send the resolution from the hall to the Prime Minister was
also carried. The slogan, "Rise up, women," was cried from the platform,
the answering shout coming back as from one woman, "Now!" With copies of
the resolution in their hands, the chosen deputation hurried forth into
the February dusk, ready for Parliament or prison, as the fates decreed.
Fate did not leave them very long in doubt. The Government, it
appeared, had decided that not again should their sacred halls of
Parliament be desecrated by women asking for the vote, and orders had
been given that would henceforth prevent women from reaching even the
outer precincts of the House of Commons. So when our deputation of women
arrived in the neighbourhood of Westminster Abbey they found themselves
opposed by a solid line of police, who, at a sharp order from their
chief, began to stride through and through the ranks of the procession,
trying to turn the women back. Bravely the women rallied and pressed
forward a little farther. Suddenly a body of mounted police came riding
up at a smart trot, and for the next five hours or more, a struggle,
quite indescribable for brutality and ruthlessness, went on.
The horsemen rode directly into the procession, scattering the women
right and left. But still the women would not turn back. Again and again
they returned, only to fly again and again from the merciless hoofs.
Some of the women left the streets for the pavements, but even there the
horsemen pursued them, pressing them so close to walls and railings that
they were obliged to retreat temporarily to avoid being crushed. Other
strategists took refuge in doorways, but they were dragged out by the
foot police and were thrown directly in front of the horses. Still the
women fought to reach the House of Commons with their resolution. They
fought until their clothes were torn, their bodies bruised, and the last
ounce of their strength exhausted. Fifteen of them did actually fight
their way through those hundreds on hundreds of police, foot and
mounted, as far as the Strangers' Lobby of the House. Here they
attempted to hold a meeting, and were arrested. Outside, many more women
were taken into custody. It was ten o'clock before the last arrest was
made, and the square cleared of the crowds. After that the mounted men
continued to guard the approaches to the House of Commons until the
House rose at midnight.
The next morning fifty-seven women and two men were arraigned, two and
three at a time, in Westminster police court. Christabel Pankhurst was
the first to be placed in the dock. She tried to explain to the
magistrate that the deputation of the day before was a perfectly
peaceful attempt to present a resolution, which, sooner or later, would
be presented and acted upon. She assured him that the deputation was but
the beginning of a campaign that would not cease until the Government
yielded to the women's demand. "There can be no going back for us," she
declared, "and more will happen if we do not get justice."
The magistrate, Mr. Curtis Bennett, who was destined later to try women
for that "more," rebuked my daughter sternly, telling her that the
Government had nothing to do with causing the disorders of the day
before, that the women were entirely responsible for what had occurred,
and finally, that these disgraceful scenes in the street must
cease--just as King Canute told the ocean that it must roll out instead
of in. "The scenes can be stopped in only one way," replied the
prisoner. His sole reply to that was, "Twenty shillings or fourteen
days," Christabel chose the prison sentence, and so did all the other
prisoners. Mrs. Despard, who headed the deputation, and Sylvia
Pankhurst, who was with her, were given three weeks in prison.
Of course the raid, as it was called, gave the Women's Social and
Political Union an enormous amount of publicity, on the whole,
favourable publicity. The newspapers were almost unanimous in condemning
the Government for sending mounted troops out against unarmed women.
Angry questions were asked in Parliament, and our ranks once more
increased in size and ardour. The old-fashioned suffragists, men as well
as women, cried out that we had alienated all our friends in Parliament;
but this proved to be untrue. Indeed, it was found that a Liberal
member, Mr. Dickinson, had won the first place in the ballot, and had
announced that he intended to use it to introduce a women's suffrage
bill. More than this, the prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman,
promised to give the bill his support. For a time, a very short time, it
is true, we felt that the hour of our freedom might be at hand, that our
prisoners had perhaps already won us our precious symbol--the vote.
Soon, however, a number of professed suffragists in the House began to
complain that Mr. Dickinson's bill, practically the original bill, was
not "democratic" enough, that it would enfranchise only the women of the
upper classes--to which, by the way, most of them belonged. That this
was not true had been proved again and again from the municipal
registers, which showed a majority of working women's names as qualified
householders. The contention was but a shallow excuse, and we knew it.
Therefore we were not surprised when Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
departed from his pledge of support, and allowed the bill to be talked
out.
Following this event, the second Women's Parliament assembled, on the
afternoon of March 20, 1907. As before, we adopted a resolution calling
upon the Government to introduce an official suffrage measure, and again
we voted to send the resolution from the hall to the Prime Minister.
Lady Harberton was chosen to lead the deputation, and instantly hundreds
of women sprang up and volunteered to accompany her. This time the
police met the women at the door of the hall, and another useless,
disgraceful scene of barbarous, brute-force opposition took place.
Something like one thousand police had been sent out to guard the House
of Commons from the peaceful invasion of a few hundred women. All
afternoon and evening we kept Caxton Hall open, the women returning
every now and again, singly and in small groups, to have their bruises
bathed, or their torn clothing repaired. As night fell the crowds in the
street grew denser, and the struggle between the women and the police
became more desperate. Lady Harberton, we heard, had succeeded in
reaching the entrance to the House of Commons, nay, had actually managed
to press past the sentries into the lobby, but her resolution had not
been presented to the Prime Minister. She and many others were arrested
before the police at last succeeded in clearing the streets, and the
dreadful affair was over.
The next day, in Westminster police court, the magistrate meted out
sentences varying from twenty shillings or fourteen days to forty
shillings or one month's imprisonment. Two of the women, Miss Woodlock
and Mrs. Chatterton, who had left Holloway only a week before, were, as
"old offenders," given thirty days without the option of a fine. Another
woman, Mary Leigh, was given thirty days because she offended the
magistrate's dignity by hanging a "Votes for Women" banner over the edge
of the dock. Those of my readers who are unable to connect the word
"militancy" with anything milder than arson are invited to reflect that
within the first two months of the year 1907 the English Government sent
to prison one hundred and thirty women whose "militancy" consisted
merely of trying to carry a resolution from a hall to the Prime Minister
in the House of Commons. Our crime was called obstructing the police. It
will be seen that it was the police who did the obstructing.
It may be asked why neither of these deputations was led by me
personally. The reason was that I was needed in another capacity, that
of leader and supervisor of the suffrage forces in the field to defeat
Government candidates at by-elections. On the night of the second
"riot," while our women were still struggling in the streets, I left
London for Hexham in Northumberland, where by our work the majority of
the Liberal candidate was reduced by a thousand votes. Seven more
by-elections followed in rapid succession.
Our by-election work was such a new thing in English politics that we
attracted an enormous amount of attention wherever we went. It was our
custom to begin work the very hour we entered a town. If, on our way
from the station to the hotel, we encountered a group of men, say, in
the market-place, we either stopped and held a meeting on the spot, or
else we stayed long enough to tell them when and where our meetings were
to be held, and to urge them to attend. The usual first step, after
securing lodgings, was to hire a vacant shop, fill the windows with
suffrage literature, and fling out our purple, green, and white flag.
Meanwhile, some of us were busy hiring the best available hall. If we
got possession of the battle-ground before the men, we sometimes
"cornered" all the good halls and left the candidate nothing but
schoolhouses for his indoor meetings. Truth to tell, our meetings were
so much more popular than theirs that we really needed the larger halls.
Often, a candidate with the Suffragettes for rivals spoke to almost
empty benches. The crowds were away listening to the women.
Naturally, this greatly displeased the politicians, and it scandalised
many of the old-fashioned Liberal partisans. In one place, I think it
was Colne Valley in Yorkshire, an amusing instance of masculine
hostility occurred. We had arrived on a day when both Conservative and
Liberal committees were choosing their candidates, and we thought it a
good opportunity to hold a series of outdoor meetings. We tried to get
a lorry for a rostrum, but the only man in town who had these big vans
to let disapproved of Suffragettes so violently that he wouldn't let us
have one. So we borrowed a chair from a woman shopkeeper, and went at
it. Soon we had a large crowd and an interested audience. We also got
the attention of a number of small boys with pea-shooters, and had to
make our speeches under a blistering fire of dried peas.
While I was speaking the fire ceased, to my relief--for dried peas
sting. I continued my speech with renewed vigor, only to have one of my
best points spoiled by roars of laughter from the crowd. I finished
somehow, and sat down; and then it was explained to me that the
pea-shooters had been financed by one of the prominent Liberals of the
town, another man who disapproved of our policy of opposing the
Government. As soon as the ammunition gave out this man furnished the
boys with a choice supply of rotten oranges. These were not so easily
handled, it appeared, for the very first one went wild, and struck the
chivalrous gentleman violently in the neck. This it was that had caused
the laughter, and stopped the attack on the women.
We met with some pretty rough horse-play, and even with some brutality,
in several by-elections, but on the whole we found the men ready, and
the women more than ready, to listen to us. We tamed and educated a
public that had always been used to violence at elections. We even tamed
the boys, who came to the meetings on purpose to skylark. When we were
in Rutlandshire that spring three schoolboys came to see me and told me,
shyly, that they were interested in suffrage. They had had a debate on
the subject at their school, and although the decision had been for the
other side, all the boys wanted to know more about it. Wouldn't I please
have a meeting especially for them? Of course I consented, and I found
my boy audience quite delightful. Indeed, I hope they liked me half as
well as I did them.
All through the spring our by-election work continued with amazing
success, although our part in the Government losses was rarely admitted
by the politicians. The voters knew, however. At an election in Suffolk,
where we helped to double the Unionist vote, the successful candidate,
speaking to the crowd from his hotel window, said, "What has been the
cause of the great and glorious victory?" Instantly the crowd roared,
"Votes for Women!"--"Three cheers for the Suffragettes!" This was not at
all what the successful candidate had intended, but he waved his hand
graciously and said, "No doubt the ladies had something to do with it."
The newspaper correspondents were not so reluctant to acknowledge our
influence. Even when they condemned our policy, they were unsparing in
their admiration for our energy, and the courage and ardour of our
workers. Said the correspondent of the London _Tribune_, a Liberal paper
hostile to our tactics: "Their staying power, judging them by the
standards of men, is extraordinary. By taking afternoon as well as
evening meetings, they have worked twice as hard as the men. They are
up earlier, they retire just as late. Women against men, they are
better speakers, more logical, better informed, better phrased, with a
surer insight for the telling argument."
After a summer spent in strengthening our forces, organising new
branches, holding meetings--something like three thousand of these
between May and October--invading meetings of Cabinet Ministers--we
managed to do that about once every day--electioneering, and getting up
huge demonstrations in various cities, we arrived at the end of the
year. In the last months of the year, I directed several hotly contested
by-elections, at one of which I met with one of the most serious
misadventures of my life.
This by-election was held in the division of Mid-Devon, a stronghold of
Liberalism. In fact, since its creation in 1885, the seat has never been
held by any except a Liberal member. The constituency is a large one,
divided into eight districts. The population of the towns is a rough and
boisterous one, and its devotion, blind and unreasoning, to the Liberal
party has always reflected the rude spirit of the voters. A Unionist
woman told me, shortly after my arrival, that my life would be unsafe if
I dared openly to oppose the Liberal candidate. She had never dared, she
assured me, to wear her party colours in public. However, I did
speak--in our headquarters at Newton Abbott, the principal town of the
division, at Hull, and at Bovey Tracey. We held meetings twice a day,
calling upon the voters to "beat the Government in Mid-Devon, as a
message that women must have votes next year." Although some of the
meetings were turbulent, we were treated with much more consideration
than either of the candidates, who, not infrequently, were howled down
and put to flight. Often the air of their meetings was thick with
decayed vegetables and dirty snowballs. We had some rather lively
sessions, too. Once, at an outdoor meeting, some young roughs dragged
our lorry round and round until it seemed that we must be upset, and
several times the language hurled at us from the crowd was quite unfit
for me to repeat. Still, we escaped actual violence until the day of the
election, when it was announced that the Unionist candidate had won the
seat by a majority of twelve hundred and eighty. We knew instantly that
the deepest resentment of the Liberals would be aroused, but it did not
occur to us that the resentment would be directed actively against us.
After the declaration at the polls, my companion, Mrs. Martel, and I
started to walk to our lodgings. Some of our friends stopped us, and
drew our attention to the newly elected Unionist member of Parliament,
who was being escorted from the polling place by a strong guard of
police. We were warned that our safety demanded an immediate flight from
the town. I laughingly assured our friends that I was never afraid to
trust myself in a crowd, and we walked on. Suddenly we were confronted
by a crowd of young men and boys, clay-cutters from the pits on the edge
of town. These young men, who wore the red rosettes of the Liberal
party, had just heard of their candidate's defeat, and they were mad
with rage and humiliation. One of them pointed to us, crying: "They did
it! Those women did it!" A yell went up from the crowd, and we were
deluged with a shower of clay and rotten eggs. We were not especially
frightened, but the eggs were unbearable, and to escape them we rushed
into a little grocer's shop close at hand. The grocer's wife closed and
bolted the door, but the poor grocer cried out that his place would be
wrecked. I did not want that to happen, of course, so I asked them to
let us out by the back door. They led us out the door, into a small back
yard which led into a little lane, whence we expected to make our
escape. But when we reached the yard we found that the rowdies,
anticipating our move, had surged round the corner, and were waiting for
us.
They seized Mrs. Martel first, and began beating her over the head with
their fists, but the brave wife of the shopkeeper, hearing the shouts
and the oaths of the men, flung open the door and rushed to our rescue.
Between us we managed to tear Mrs. Martel from her captors and get her
into the house. I expected to get into the house, too, but as I reached
the threshold a staggering blow fell on the back of my head, rough hands
grasped the collar of my coat, and I was flung violently to the ground.
Stunned, I must have lost consciousness for a moment, for my next
sensation was of cold, wet mud seeping through my clothing. Sight
returning to me, I perceived the men, silent now, but with a dreadful,
lowering silence, closing in a ring around me. In the centre of the ring
was an empty barrel, and the horrid thought occurred to me that they
might intend putting me in it. A long time seemed to pass, while the
ring of men slowly drew closer. I looked at them, in their drab clothes
smeared with yellow pit-clay, and they appeared so underfed, so puny and
sodden, that a poignant pity for them swept over me. "Poor souls," I
thought, and then I said suddenly, "Are none of you _men_?" Then one of
the youths darted toward me, and I knew that whatever was going to
happen to me was about to begin.
At that very moment came shouts, and a rush of police who had fought
their way through hostile crowds to rescue us. Of course the mob turned
tail and fled, and I was carried gently into the shop, which the police
guarded for two hours, before it was deemed safe for us to leave in a
closed motor-car. It was many months before either Mrs. Martel or I
recovered from our injuries.
The rowdies, foiled of their woman prey, went to the Conservative Club,
smashed all the windows in the house, and kept the members besieged
there through the night. The next morning the body of a man, frightfully
bruised about the head, was found in the mill-race. Throughout all this
disorder and probable crime, not a man was arrested. Contrast this, if
you like, with the treatment given our women in London.
The King opened Parliament in great state on January 29, 1908. Again his
speech omitted all mention of woman suffrage, and again the W. S. P. U.
issued a call for a Women's Parliament, for February 11th, 12th and
13th. Before it was convened we heard that an excellent place in the
ballot had been won by a friend of the movement, Mr. Stanger, who
promised to introduce a suffrage bill, February 28th was the day fixed
for the second reading, and we realised that strong pressure would have
to be brought to bear to prevent the bill being wrecked, as the
Dickinson bill had been the previous year. Therefore, on the first day
of the Women's Parliament, almost every woman present volunteered for
the deputation, which was to try to carry the resolution to the prime
minister. Led by two well-known portrait painters, the deputation left
Caxton Hall and proceeded in orderly ranks, four abreast, toward the
House of Commons. The crowds in the streets were enormous, thousands of
sympathisers coming out to help the women, thousands of police
determined that the women should not be helped, and thousands of curious
spectators. When the struggle was over, fifty women were locked up in
police-court cells.
The next morning, when the cases were tried, Mr. Muskett, who prosecuted
for the Crown, and who was perhaps a little tired of telling the
Suffragettes that these scenes in the streets must cease, and then
seeing them go on exactly as if he had not spoken, made a very severe
and terrifying address. He told the women that this time they would be
subject to the usual maximum of two months' imprisonment, with the
option of a fine of five pounds, but that, in case they ever offended
again, the law had worse terrors in store for them. It was proposed to
revive, for the benefit of the Suffragettes, an Act passed in the reign
of Charles II, which dealt with "Tumultuous Petitions, either to the
Crown or Parliament." This Act provided that no person should dare to go
to the King or to Parliament "with any petition, complaint,
remonstrance, declaration or other address" accompanied with a number of
persons above twelve. A fine of one hundred pounds, or three months'
imprisonment, might be imposed under this law. The magistrate then
sentenced all but two of the women to be bound over for twelve months,
or to serve six weeks in the second division. Two other women, "old
offenders," were given one month in the third division, or lowest class.
All the prisoners, except two who had very ill relatives at home, chose
the prison sentence.
The next day's session of the Women's Parliament was one of intense
excitement, as the women reviewed the events of the previous day, the
trials, and especially the threat to revive the obsolete Act of Charles
II, an act _which was passed to obstruct the progress of the Liberal
party, which came into existence under the Stuarts, and under the second
Charles was fighting for its life_. It was an amazing thing that the
political descendants of these men were proposing to revive the Act to
obstruct the advance of the women's cause, fighting for its life under
George V and his Liberal government. At least, it was evidence that the
Government were baffled in their attempt to crush our movement.
Christabel Pankhurst, presiding over the second session of the Women's
Parliament, said: "At last it is realized that women are fighting for
freedom, as their fathers fought. If they want twelve women, aye, and
more than twelve, if a hundred women are wanted to be tried under that
act and sent to prison for three months, they can be found."
I was not present at this session, nor had I been present at the first
one. I was working in a by-election at South Leeds, the last of several
important by-elections in great industrial centres, where our success
was unquestioned, except by the Liberal press. The elections had wound
up with a great procession, and a meeting of 100,000 people on Hounslet
Moor. The most wonderful enthusiasm marked that meeting. I shall never
forget what splendid order the people kept, in spite of the fact that no
police protection was given us; how the vast crowd parted to let our
procession through; how the throngs of mill women kept up a chorus in
broad Yorkshire: "Shall us win? Shall us have the vote? We shall!" No
wonder the old people shook their beads, and declared that "there had
never been owt like it."
CHAPTER II
With those brave shouts in my ears, I hurried down to London for the
concluding session of the parliament, for I had determined that I must
be the first person to challenge the Government to carry out their
threat to revive the old Act of Charles II. I made a long speech to the
women that day, telling them something of my experiences of the past
months, and how all that I had seen and heard throughout the country had
only deepened my conviction of the necessity for women's votes. "I
feel," I concluded, "that the time has come when I must act, and I wish
to be one of those to carry our resolution to Parliament this afternoon.
My experience in the country, and especially in South Leeds, has taught
me things that Cabinet Ministers, who have not had that experience, do
not know, and has made me feel that I must make one final attempt to see
them, and to urge them to reconsider their position before some terrible
disaster has occurred."
Amid a good deal of excitement and emotion, we chose the requisite
thirteen women, who were prepared to be arrested and tried under the
Charles II "Tumultuous Petitions" Act. I had not entirely recovered from
the attack made upon me at Mid-Devon, and my wrenched ankle was still
too sensitive to make walking anything but a painful process. Seeing me
begin almost at once to limp badly, Mrs. Drummond, with characteristic,
blunt kindness, called to a man driving a dog-cart and asked him if he
would drive me to the House of Commons. He readily agreed, and I mounted
to the seat behind him, the other women forming in line behind the cart.
We had not gone far when the police, who already surrounded us in great
force, ordered me to dismount. Of course I obeyed and walked, or rather
limped along with my companions. They would have supported me, but the
police insisted that we should walk single-file. Presently I grew so
faint from the pain of the ankle that I called to two of the women, who
took hold of my arms and helped me on my way. This was our one act of
disobedience to police orders. We moved with difficulty, for the crowd
was of incredible size. All around, as far as eye could see, was the
great moving, swaying, excited multitude, and surrounding us on all
sides were regiments of uniformed police, foot and mounted. You might
have supposed that instead of thirteen women, one of them lame, walking
quietly along, the town was in the hands of an armed mob.
We had progressed as far as the entrance to Parliament Square, when two
stalwart policemen suddenly grasped my arms on either side and told me
that I was under arrest. My two companions, because they refused to
leave me, were also arrested, and a few minutes later Annie Kenney and
five other women suffered arrest. That night we were released on bail,
and the next morning we were arraigned in Westminster police court for
trial under the Charles II Act. But, as it turned out, the authorities,
embarrassed by our readiness to test the act, announced that they had
changed their minds, and would continue, for the present, to treat us as
common street brawlers.
This was my first trial, and I listened, with a suspicion that my ears
were playing tricks with my reason, to the most astonishing perjuries
put forth by the prosecution. I heard that we had set forth from Caxton
Hall with noisy shouts and songs, that we had resorted to the most
riotous and vulgar behaviour, knocking off policemen's helmets,
assaulting the officers right and left as we marched. Our testimony, and
that of our witnesses, was ignored. When I tried to speak in my own
defence, I was cut short rudely, and was told briefly that I and the
others must choose between being bound over or going to prison, in the
second division, for six weeks.
I remember only vaguely the long, jolting ride across London to Holloway
Prison. We stopped at Pentonville, the men's prison, to discharge
several men prisoners, and I remember shuddering at the thought of our
women, many of them little past girlhood, being haled to prison in the
same van with criminal men. Arriving at the prison, we groped our way
through dim corridors into the reception-ward, where we were lined up
against the wall for a superficial medical examination. After that we
were locked up in separate cells, unfurnished, except for low, wooden
stools.
It seemed an endless time before my cell door was opened by a wardress,
who ordered me to follow her. I entered a room where another wardress
sat at a table, ready to take an inventory of my effects. Obeying an
order to undress, I took off my gown, then paused. "Take off
everything," was the next order. "Everything?" I faltered. It seemed
impossible that they expected me to strip. In fact, they did allow me to
take off my last garments in the shelter of a bath-room. I shivered
myself into some frightful underclothing, old and patched and stained,
some coarse, brown woollen stockings with red stripes, and the hideous
prison dress stamped all over with the broad arrow of disgrace. I fished
a pair of shoes out of a big basket of shoes, old and mostly mismates. A
pair of coarse but clean sheets, a towel, a mug of cold cocoa, and a
thick slice of brown bread were given me, and I was conducted to my
cell.
My first sensations when the door was locked upon me were not altogether
disagreeable. I was desperately weary, for I had been working hard,
perhaps a little too hard, for several strenuous months. The excitement
and fatigue of the previous day, and the indignation I had suffered
throughout the trial, had combined to bring me to the point of
exhaustion, and I was glad to throw myself on my hard prison bed and
close my eyes. But soon the relief of being alone, and with nothing to
do, passed from me. Holloway Prison is a very old place, and it has the
disadvantages of old places which have never known enough air and
sunshine. It reeks with the odours of generations of bad ventilation,
and it contrives to be at once the stuffiest and the draughtiest
building I have ever been in. Soon I found myself sickening for fresh
air. My head began to ache. Sleep fled. I lay all night suffering with
cold, gasping for air, aching with fatigue, and painfully wide awake.
The next day I was fairly ill, but I said nothing about it. One does not
expect to be comfortable in prison. As a matter of fact, one's mental
suffering is so much greater than any common physical distress that the
latter is almost forgotten. The English prison system is altogether
mediaeval and outworn. In some of its details the system has improved
since they began to send the Suffragettes to Holloway. I may say that
we, by our public denunciation of the system, have forced these slight
improvements. In 1907 the rules were excessively cruel. The poor
prisoner, when she entered Holloway, dropped, as it were, into a tomb.
No letters and no visitors were allowed for the first month of the
sentence. Think of it--a whole month, more than four weeks, without
sending or receiving a single word. One's nearest and dearest may have
gone through dreadful suffering, may have been ill, may have died,
meantime. One was given plenty of time to imagine all these things, for
the prisoner was kept in solitary confinement in a narrow, dimly-lit
cell, twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four. Solitary confinement is
too terrible a punishment to inflict on any human being, no matter what
his crime. Hardened criminals in the men's prisons, it is said, often
beg for the lash instead. Picture what it must be to a woman who has
committed some small offence, for most of the women who go to Holloway
are small offenders, sitting alone, day after day, in the heavy silence
of a cell--thinking of her children at home--thinking, thinking. Some
women go mad. Many suffer from shattered nerves for a long period after
release. It is impossible to believe that any woman ever emerged from
such a horror less criminal than when she entered it.
Two days of solitary confinement, broken each day by an hour of silent
exercise in a bitterly cold courtyard, and I was ordered to the
hospital. There I thought I should be a little more comfortable. The bed
was better, the food a little better, and small comforts, such as warm
water for washing, were allowed. I slept a little the first night. About
midnight I awoke, and sat up in bed, listening. A woman in the cell next
mine was moaning in long, sobbing breaths of mortal pain. She ceased for
a few minutes, then moaned again, horribly. The truth flashed over me,
turning me sick, as I realised that a life was coming into being, there
in that frightful prison. A woman, imprisoned by men's laws, was giving
a child to the world. A child born in a cell! I shall never forget that
night, nor what I suffered with the birth-pangs of that woman, who, I
found later, was simply waiting trial on a charge which was found to be
baseless.
The days passed very slowly, the nights more slowly still. Being in
hospital, I was deprived of chapel, and also of work. Desperate, at last
I begged the wardress for some sewing, and she kindly gave me a skirt of
her own to hem, and later some coarse knitting to do. Prisoners were
allowed a few books, mostly of the "Sunday-school" kind. One day I
asked the chaplain if there were not some French or German books in the
library, and he brought me a treasure, "_Autour de mon Jardin_," by
Jules Janin. For a few days I was quite happy, reading my book and
translating it on the absurd little slate they gave us in lieu of paper
and pencil. That slate was, after all, a great comfort. I did all kinds
of things with it. I kept a calendar, I wrote all the French poetry I
could remember on it, I even recorded old school chorals and old English
exercises. It helped wonderfully to pass the endless hours until my
release. I even forgot the cold, which was the harder to bear because of
the fur coat, which I knew was put away, ticketed with my name. I begged
them for the coat, but they wouldn't let me have it.
At last the time came when they gave me back all my things, and let me
go free. At the door the Governor spoke to me, and asked me if I had any
complaints to make. "Not of you," I replied, "nor of any of the
wardresses. Only of this prison, and all of men's prisons. We shall raze
them to the ground."
Back in my comfortable home, surrounded by loving friends, I would have
rested quietly for a few days, but there was a great meeting that night
at Albert Hall, to mark the close of a week of self-denial to raise
money for the year's campaign. Women had sold papers, flowers, toys,
swept crossings, and sung in the streets for the cause. Many women, well
known in the world of art and letters, did these things. I felt that I
should be doing little if I merely attended the meeting. So I went. My
release was not expected until the following morning, and no one thought
of my appearing at the meeting. My chairman's seat was decorated with a
large placard with the inscription, "Mrs. Pankhurst's Chair." After all
the others were seated, the speakers, and hundreds of ex-prisoners. I
walked quietly onto the stage, took the placard out of the chair and sat
down. A great cry went up from the women as they sprang from their seats
and stretched their hands toward me. It was some time before I could see
them for my tears, or speak to them for the emotion that shook me like a
storm.
The next morning I, with the other released prisoners, drove off to
Peckham, a constituency of London, where the W. S. P. U. members were
fighting a vigorous by-election. In open brakes we paraded the streets,
dressed in our prison clothes, or exact reproductions of them.
Naturally, we attracted a great deal of attention and sympathy, and our
daily meetings on Peckham Rye, as their common is known, drew enormous
crowds. When polling day came our members were stationed at every
polling booth, and many men as they came to the booths told us that they
were, for the first time, voting "for the women," by which they meant
against the Government. That night, amid great excitement, it was made
known that the Liberal majority of 2,339 at the last general election
had been turned into a Conservative majority of 2,494. Letters poured
into the newspapers, declaring that the loss of this important Liberal
seat was due almost entirely to the work of the Suffragettes, and many
prominent Liberals called upon party leaders to start doing something
for women before the next general election. The Liberal leaders, with
the usual perspicacity of politicians, responded not at all. Instead
they beheld with approval the rise to highest power the arch-enemy of
the suffragists, Mr. Asquith.
Mr. Asquith became prime minister about Easter time, 1908, on the
resignation, on account of ill health, of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman.
Mr. Asquith was chosen, not because of any remarkable record of
statesmanship, nor yet because of great personal popularity--for he
possessed neither--but simply because no better man seemed available
just then. He was known as a clever, astute, and somewhat unscrupulous
lawyer. He had filled several high offices to the satisfaction of his
party, and under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had been Chancellor of the
Exchequer, a post which is generally regarded as a stepping-stone to the
Premiership. The best thing the Liberal press found to say of the new
Premier was that he was a "strong" man. Generally in politics this term
is used to describe an obstinate man, and this we already knew Mr.
Asquith to be. He was a bluntly outspoken opponent of woman suffrage,
and it was sufficiently plain to us that no methods of education or
persuasion would ever prove successful where he was concerned. Therefore
the necessity of action on our part was greater than ever.
Such an opportunity presented itself at once through changes that took
place in the new Cabinet. According to English law, all new comers into
the Cabinet are obliged to resign their seats in Parliament and offer
themselves to their constituencies for re-election. Besides these
vacancies there were several others, on account of death or elevations
to the peerage. This made necessary a number of by-elections, and the
Women's Social and Political Union once more went into the field against
the Liberal candidates. I shall deal no further with these by-elections
than is necessary to show the effect of our work on the Government, and
its subsequent effect on our movement--which was to force us into more
and more militancy. I shall leave it to the honest judgment of my
readers to place where it ought rightly to be placed the responsibility
for those first broken windows.
We selected as our first candidate for defeat Mr. Winston Churchill, who
was about to appeal to his constituency of North West Manchester to
sanction his appointment as president of the Board of Trade. My daughter
Christabel took charge of this election, and the work of herself and her
forces was so successful that Mr. Churchill lost his seat by 420 votes.
All the newspapers acknowledged that it was the Suffragettes who had
defeated Mr. Churchill, and one Liberal newspaper, the London _Daily
News_, called upon the party to put a stop to an intolerable state of
affairs by granting the women's demand for votes.
Another seat was immediately secured for Mr. Churchill, that of Dundee,
then strongly--in the merely party sense--Liberal, and therefore safe.
Nevertheless, we determined to fight Mr. Churchill there, to defeat him
if possible, and to bring down the Liberal majority in any case. I took
personal charge of the campaign, holding a very large meeting in
Kinnaird Hall on the evening before Mr. Churchill's arrival. Although he
felt absolutely sure of election in this Scottish constituency, Mr.
Churchill dreaded the effect of our presence on the Liberal women. The
second meeting he addressed in Dundee was held for women only, and
instead of asking for support of the various measures actually on the
government's programme, the politician's usual method, he talked about
the certainty of securing, within a short time, the Parliamentary
franchise for women. "No one," he declared, "can be blind to the fact
that at the next general election woman suffrage will be a real,
practical issue; and the next Parliament, I think, ought to see the
gratification of the women's claims. I do not exclude the possibility of
the suffrage being dealt with in this Parliament." Mr. Churchill
earnestly reiterated his claim to be considered a true friend of the
women's cause; but when pressed for a pledge that his Government would
take action, he urged his inability to speak for his colleagues.
This specious promise, or rather, prophecy of woman suffrage at some
indefinite time, won over a great many of the Liberal women, who
forthwith went staunchly to work for Mr. Churchill's election. Dundee
has a large population of extremely poor people, workers in the jute
mills and the marmalade factories. Some concessions in the matter of the
sugar tax, timely made, and the announcement that the new Government
meant to establish old age pensions, created an immense wave of Liberal
enthusiasm that swept Mr. Churchill into office in spite of our work,
which was untiring. We held something like two hundred meetings, and on
election eve, five huge demonstrations--four of them in the open air and
one which filled a large drill hall. Polling day, May 9th, was very
exciting. For every Suffragette at the polling-booths there were half a
dozen Liberal men and women, handing out bills with such legends as
"Vote for Churchill, and never mind the women," and "Put Churchill in
and keep the women out." Yet for all their efforts, Mr. Churchill polled
2200 votes less than his Liberal predecessor had polled at the general
election.
In the first seven by-elections following Mr. Asquith's elevation to the
premiership, we succeeded in pulling down the Liberal vote by 6663. Then
something happened to check our progress. Mr. Asquith received a
deputation of Liberal members of Parliament, who urged him to allow the
Stanger suffrage bill, which had passed its second reading by a large
majority, to be carried into law. Mr. Asquith replied that he himself
did not wish to see women enfranchised, and that it would not be
possible for the Government to give the required facilities to Mr.
Stanger's bill. He added that he was fully alive to the many defects of
the electoral system, and that the Government intended, "barring
accidents," to bring in a reform bill before the close of that
Parliament. Woman suffrage would have no place in it, but it would be so
worded that a woman-suffrage amendment might be added if any member
chose to move one. In that case, said Mr. Asquith, he should not
consider it the duty of the Government to oppose the amendment if it
were approved by a majority of the House of Commons--_provided_ that the
amendment was on democratic lines, and that it had back of it the
support, the strong and undoubted support, of the women of the country
as well as the present electorate.
One would not suppose that such an evasive utterance as this would be
regarded in any quarter as a promise that woman suffrage would be given
any real chances of success under the Asquith Government. That it was,
by many, taken quite seriously is but another proof of the gullibility
of the party-blinded public. The Liberal press lauded Mr. Asquith's
"promise," and called for a truce of militancy in order that the
Government might have every opportunity to act. Said the _Star_, in a
leader typical of many others: "The meaning of Mr. Asquith's pledge is
plain. Woman's suffrage will be passed through the House of Commons
before the present Government goes to the country."
As for the women's Liberal Associations, they were quite delirious with
joy. In a conference called for the purpose of passing resolutions of
gratitude, Lady Carlisle said: "This is a glorious day of rejoicing. Our
great Prime Minister, all honour to him, has opened a way to us by which
we can enter into that inheritance from which we have been too long
debarred."
At the two following by-elections, the last of the series, enormous
posters were exhibited, "Premier's Great Reform Bill: Votes for Women."
We tried to tell the electors that the pledge was false on the face of
it; that the specious proviso that the amendment be "democratic" left no
doubt that the Government would cause the rejection of any practical
amendment that might be moved. Our words fell on deaf ears, and the
Liberal majorities soared.
Just a week later Mr. Asquith was questioned in the House of Commons by
a slightly alarmed anti-suffragist member. The member asked Mr. Asquith
whether he considered himself pledged to introduce the reform hill
during that Parliament, whether he meant to allow such a bill to carry a
woman-suffrage amendment, if such were moved, and whether, in that case,
the suffrage amendment would become part of the Government policy.
Evasive as ever, the Prime Minister, after some sparring, replied, "My
honourable friend has asked me a question with regard to a remote and
speculative future." Thus was our interpretation of Mr. Asquith's
"promise" justified from his own lips. Yet the Liberal women still clung
to the hope of Government action, and the Liberal press pretended to
cling to it. As for the Women's Social and Political Union, we prepared
for more work. We had to strike out along a new line, since it was
evident that the Government could, for a time at least, neutralise our
by-election work by more false promises. Consistent with our policy, of
never going further than the Government compelled us to go, we made our
first action a perfectly peaceable one.
On the day when the Stanger bill had reached its second reading in the
House, and several days after I had gone to Holloway for the first time,
Mr. Herbert Gladstone, the Home Secretary, made a speech which greatly
interested the Suffragettes. He professed himself a suffragist, and
declared that he intended to vote for the bill. Nevertheless, he was
confident that it could not pass, because of the division in the
Cabinet, and because it had no political party united either for or
against it. Woman suffrage, said Mr. Gladstone, must advance to victory
through all the stages that are required for great reforms to mature.
First academic discussion, then effective action, was the history of
men's suffrage; it must be the same with women's suffrage. "Men,"
declared Mr. Gladstone, "have learned this lesson and know the necessity
for demonstrating the greatness of their movement, and for establishing
that _force majeure_ which actuates and arms a Government for effective
work. That is the task before the supporters of this great movement.
Looking back at the great political crises in the thirties, the sixties
and the eighties, it will be found that the people did not go about in
small crowds, nor were they content with enthusiastic meetings in large
halls; they assembled in their tens of thousands all over the country.
"Of course," added Mr. Gladstone, "it is not to be expected that women
can assemble in such masses, but power belongs to masses, and through
this power a Government can be influenced into more effective action
than a Government will be likely to take under present conditions."
The Women's Social and Political Union determined to answer this
challenge. If assembling in great masses was all that was necessary to
convince the Government that woman suffrage had passed the academic
stage and now demanded political action, we thought we could undertake
to satisfy the most skeptical member of the Cabinet. We knew that we
could organise a demonstration that would out-rival any of the great
franchise demonstrations held by men in the thirties, sixties, and
eighties. The largest number of people ever gathered in Hyde Park was
said to have approximated 72,000. We determined to organise a Hyde Park
demonstration of at least 250,000 people. Sunday, June 21, 1908, was
fixed for the date of this demonstration, and for many months we worked
to make it a day notable in the history of the movement. Our example was
emulated by the non-militant suffragists, who organised a fine
procession of their own, about a week before our demonstration. Thirteen
thousand women, it was said, marched in that procession.
On our demonstration we spent, for advertising alone, over a thousand
pounds, or five thousand dollars. We covered the hoardings of London and
of all the principal provincial cities with great posters bearing
portraits of the women who were to preside at the twenty platforms from
which speeches were to be made; a map of London, showing the routes by
which the seven processions were to advance, and a plan of the Hyde Park
meeting-place were also shown. London, of course, was thoroughly
organised. For weeks a small army of women was busy chalking
announcements on sidewalks, distributing handbills, canvassing from
house to house, advertising the demonstration by posters and sandwich
boards carried through the streets. We invited everybody to be present,
including both Houses of Parliament. A few days before the demonstration
Mrs. Drummond and a number of other women hired and decorated a launch
and sailed up the Thames to the Houses of Parliament, arriving at the
hour when members entertain their women friends at tea on the terrace.
Everyone left the tables and crowded to the water's edge as the boat
stopped, and Mrs. Drummond's strong, clear voice pealed out her
invitation to the Cabinet and the members of Parliament to join the
women's demonstration in Hyde Park. "Come to the park on Sunday," she
cried. "You shall have police protection, and there will be no arrests,
we promise you." An alarmed someone telephoned for the police boats, but
as they appeared, the women's boat steamed away.
What a day was Sunday, June 21st--clear, radiant, filled with golden
sunshine! As I advanced, leading, with the venerable Mrs.
Wolstenholm-Elmy, the first of the seven processions, it seemed to me
that all London had turned out to witness our demonstration. And a
goodly part of London followed the processions. When I mounted my
platform in Hyde Park, and surveyed the mighty throngs that waited there
and the endless crowds that were still pouring into the park from all
directions, I was filled with amazement not unmixed with awe. Never had
I imagined that so many people could be gathered together to share in a
political demonstration. It was a gay and beautiful as well as an
awe-inspiring spectacle, for the white gowns and flower-trimmed hats of
the women, against the background of ancient trees, gave the park the
appearance of a vast garden in full bloom.
The bugles sounded, and the speakers at each of the twenty platforms
began their addresses, which could not have been heard by more than half
or a third of the vast audience. Notwithstanding this, they remained to
the end. At five o'clock the bugles sounded again, the speaking ceased,
and the resolution calling upon the Government to bring in an official
woman-suffrage bill without delay was carried at every platform, often
without a dissenting vote. Then, with a three-times-repeated cry of
"Votes for Women!" from the assembled multitude, the great meeting
dispersed.
The London _Times_ said next day: "Its organisers had counted on an
audience of 250,000. That expectation was certainly fulfilled, and
probably it was doubled, and it would be difficult to contradict any one
who asserted that it was trebled. Like the distances and the number of
the stars, the facts were beyond the threshold of perception."
The _Daily Express_ said: "It is probable that so many people never
before stood in one square mass anywhere in England. Men who saw the
great Gladstone meeting years ago said that compared with yesterday's
multitude it was as nothing."
We felt that we had answered the challenge in Mr. Gladstone's
declaration that "power belongs to the masses," and that through this
power the Government could be influenced; so it was with real hope that
we despatched a copy of the resolution to the Prime Minister, asking him
what answer the Government would make to that unparalleled gathering of
men and women. Mr. Asquith replied formally that he had nothing to add
to his previous statement--that the Government intended, at some
indefinite time, to bring in a general reform bill which _might_ be
amended to include woman suffrage. Our wonderful demonstration, it
appeared, had made no impression whatever upon him.
CHAPTER III
Now we had reached a point where we had to choose between two
alternatives. We had exhausted argument. Therefore either we had to give
up our agitation altogether, as the suffragists of the eighties
virtually had done, or else we must act, and go on acting, until the
selfishness and the obstinacy of the Government was broken down, or the
Government themselves destroyed. Until forced to do so, the Government,
we perceived, would never give women the vote.
We realised the truth of John Bright's words, spoken while the reform
bill of 1867 was being agitated. Parliament, John Bright then declared,
had never been hearty for any reform. The Reform Act of 1832 had been
wrested by force from the Government of that day, and now before
another, he said, could be carried, the agitators would have to fill the
streets with people from Charing Cross to Westminster Abbey. Acting on
John Bright's advice, we issued a call to the public to join us in
holding a huge demonstration, on June 30th outside the House of Commons.
We wanted to be sure that the Government saw as well as read of our
immense following. A public proclamation from the Commissioner of
Police, warning the public not to assemble in Parliament Square and
declaring that the approaches to the Houses of Parliament must be kept
open, was at once issued.
We persisted in announcing that the demonstration would take place, and
I wrote a letter to Mr. Asquith telling him that a deputation would wait
upon him at half-past four on the afternoon of June 30th. We held the
usual Women's Parliament in Caxton Hall, after which Mrs. Pethick
Lawrence, eleven other women, and myself, set forth. We met with no
opposition from the police, but marched through cheering crowds of
spectators to the Strangers' Entrance to the House of Commons. Here we
were met by a large group of uniformed men commanded by Inspector
Scantlebury, of the police. The inspector, whom I knew personally,
stepped forward and demanded officially, "Are you Mrs. Pankhurst, and is
this your deputation?"
"Yes," I replied.
"My orders are to exclude you from the House of Commons."
"Has Mr. Asquith received my letter?" I asked.
For answer the inspector drew my letter from his pocket and handed it to
me.
"Did Mr. Asquith return no message, no kind of reply?" I inquired.
"No," replied the inspector.
We turned and walked back to Caxton Hall, to tell the waiting audience
what had occurred. We resolved that there was nothing to do but wait
patiently until evening, and see how well the public would respond to
our call to meet in Parliament Square. Already we knew that the streets
were filled with people, and early as it was the crowds were increasing
rapidly. At eight we went out in groups from Caxton Hall, to find
Parliament Square packed with a throng, estimated next day at least
100,000. From the steps of public buildings, from stone copings, from
the iron railings of the Palace Yard, to which they clung precariously,
our women made speeches until the police pulled them down and flung them
into the moving, swaying, excited crowds. Some of the women were
arrested, others were merely ordered to move on. Mingled cheers and
jeers rose from the spectators. Some of the men were roughs who had come
out to amuse themselves. Others were genuinely sympathetic, and tried
valiantly to help us to reach the House of Commons. Again and again the
police lines were broken, and it was only as the result of repeated
charges by mounted police that the people's attacks were repelled. Many
members of Parliament, including Mr. Lloyd-George, Mr. Winston
Churchill, and Mr. Herbert Gladstone, came out to witness the struggle,
which lasted until midnight and resulted in the arrest of twenty-nine
women. Two of these women were arrested after they had each thrown a
stone through a window of Mr. Asquith's official residence in Downing
Street, the value of the windows being about $2.40.
This was the first window-breaking in our history. Mrs. Mary Leigh and
Miss Edith New, who had thrown the stones, sent word to me from the
police court that, having acted without orders, they would not resent
repudiation from headquarters. Far from repudiating them, I went at once
to see them in their cells, and assured them of my approval of their
act. The smashing of windows is a time-honoured method of showing
displeasure in a political situation. As one of the newspapers,
commenting on the affair, truly said, "When the King and Queen dine at
Apsley on the 13th inst. they will be entertained in rooms the windows
of which the Duke of Wellington was obliged to protect with iron
shutters from the fury of his political opponents."
In Winchester a few years ago, to give but one instance, a great riot
took place as a protest against the removal of a historic gun from one
part of the town to another. In the course of this riot windows were
broken and other property of various kinds was destroyed, very serious
damage being done. No punishment was administered in respect of this
riot and the authorities, bowing to public opinion thus riotously
expressed, restored the gun to its original situation.
Window-breaking, when Englishmen do it, is regarded as honest expression
of political opinion. Window-breaking, when Englishwomen do it, is
treated as a crime. In sentencing Mrs. Leigh and Miss New to two months
in the first division, the magistrate used very severe language, and
declared that such a thing must never happen again. Of course the women
assured him that it would happen again. Said Mrs. Leigh: "We have no
other course but to rebel against oppression, and if necessary to resort
to stronger measures. This fight is going on."
The summer of 1908 is remembered as one of the most oppressively hot
seasons the country had known for years. Our prisoners in Holloway
suffered intensely, some being made desperately ill from the heat, the
bad air, and the miserable food. We who spent the summer campaigning
suffered also, but in less degree. It was a tremendous relief when the
cool days of autumn set in, and it was with renewed vigour that we
prepared for the opening day of Parliament, which was October 12th.
Again we resolved to send a deputation to the Prime Minister, and again
we invited the general public to take part in the demonstration. We had
printed thousands of little handbills bearing this inscription: "Men and
Women, Help the Suffragettes to Rush the House of Commons, on Tuesday
Evening, October 13th, at 7:30."
On Sunday, October 11th, we held a large meeting in Trafalgar Square, my
daughter Christabel, Mrs. Drummond and I speaking from the plinth of the
Nelson monument. Mr. Lloyd-George, as we afterward learned, was a member
of the audience. The police were there, taking ample notes of our
speeches. We had not failed to notice that they were watching us daily,
dogging our footsteps, and showing in numerous ways that they were under
orders to keep track of all our movements. The climax came at noon on
October 12th, when Christabel, Mrs. Drummond and I were each served with
an imposing legal document which read, "Information has been laid this
day by the Commissioner of Police that you, in the month of October, in
the year 1908, were guilty of conduct likely to provoke a breach of the
peace by initiating and causing to be initiated, by publishing and
causing to be published, a certain handbill, calling upon and inciting
the public to do a certain wrongful and illegal act, viz., to rush the
House of Commons at 7:30 P.M. on October 13th inst."
[Illustration: MRS. PANKHURST AND CHRISTABEL HIDING FROM THE POLICE ON
THE ROOF GARDEN AT CLEMENTS INN
_October, 1908_]
The last paragraph was a summons to appear at Bow Street police station
that same afternoon at three o'clock. We did not go to Bow Street police
station. We went instead to a crowded "At Home" at Queen's Hall, where
it can be imagined that our news created great excitement. The place was
surrounded by constables, and the police reporters were on hand to take
stenographic reports of everything that was said from the platform. Once
an excited cry was raised that a police inspector was coming in to
arrest us. But the officer merely brought a message that the summons had
been adjourned until the following morning.
It did not suit our convenience to obey the adjourned summons quite so
early, so I wrote a polite note to the police, saying that we would be
in our headquarters, No. 4 Clements Inn, the next evening at six
o'clock, and would then be at his disposal. Warrants for our arrests
were quickly issued, and Inspector Jarvis was instructed to execute them
at once. This he found impossible to do, for Mrs. Drummond was spending
her last day of liberty on private business, while my daughter and I had
retreated to another part of Clements Inn, which is a big, rambling
building. There, in the roof-garden of the Pethick Lawrence's private
flat, we remained all day, busy, under the soft blue of the autumn sky,
with our work and our preparations for a long absence. At six we walked
downstairs, dressed for the street. Mrs. Drummond arrived promptly, the
waiting officers read the warrants, and we all proceeded to Bow Street
in cabs. It was too late for the trial to be held. We asked for bail,
but the authorities had no mind to allow us to take part in the "rush"
which we had incited, so we were obliged to spend the night in the
police station. All night I lay awake, thinking of the scenes which were
going on in the streets.
The next morning, in a courtroom crowded to its utmost capacity, my
daughter rose to conduct her first case at law. She had earned the right
to an LL.B. after her name, but as women are not permitted to practise
law in England, she had never appeared at the bar in any capacity except
that of defendant. Now she proposed to combine the two roles of
defendant and lawyer, and conduct the case for the three of us. She
began by asking the magistrate not to try the case in that court, but to
send it for trial before a judge and jury. We had long desired to take
the Suffragettes' cases before bodies of private citizens, because we
had every reason to suspect that the police-court officials acted under
the direct commands of the very persons against whom our agitation was
directed. Jury trial was denied us; but after the preliminary
examination was over the magistrate, Mr. Curtis Bennett, allowed a
week's adjournment for preparation of the case.
On October 21st the trial was resumed, with the courtroom as full as
before and the press table even more crowded, for it had been widely
published that we had actually subpoenaed two members of the
Government, who had witnessed the scenes on the night of October 13th.
The first witness to enter the box was Mr. Lloyd-George. Christabel
examined him at some length as to the meaning and merits of the word
rush, and succeeded in making him very uncomfortable--and the charge
against ourselves look very flimsy. She then questioned him about the
speeches he had heard at Trafalgar Square, and as to whether there had
been any suggestion that property be destroyed or personal violence
used. He admitted that the speeches were temperate and the crowds
orderly. Then Christabel suddenly asked, "There were no words used so
likely to incite to violence as the advice you gave at Swansea, that the
women should be ruthlessly flung out of your meeting?" Mr. Lloyd-George
looked black, and answered nothing. The magistrate hastened to the
protection of Mr. Lloyd-George. "This is quite irrelevant," he said.
"That was a private meeting." It was a public meeting, and Christabel
said so. "It was a private meeting _in a sense_," insisted the
magistrate.
Mr. Lloyd-George assumed an air of pompous indignation when Christabel
asked him, "Have we not received encouragement from you, and if not from
you from your colleagues, to take action of this kind?" Mr. Lloyd-George
rolled his eyes upward as he replied, "I should be very much surprised
to hear that, Miss Pankhurst."
"Is it not a fact," asked Christabel, "that you yourself have set us an
example of revolt?" "I never incited a crowd to violence," exclaimed
the witness. "Not in the Welsh graveyard case?" she asked. "No!" he
cried angrily. "You did not tell them to break down a wall and disinter
a body?" pursued Christabel. He could not deny this but, "I gave advice
which was found by the Court of Appeal to be sound legal advice," he
snapped, and turned his back as far as he could in the narrow
witness-box.
Mr. Herbert Gladstone had asked to be allowed to testify early, as he
was being detained from important public duties. Christabel asked to
question one witness before Mr. Gladstone entered the box. The witness
was Miss Georgiana Brackenbury, who had recently suffered six weeks'
imprisonment for the cause, and had since met and had a talk with Mr.
Horace Smith, the magistrate, who had made to her a most important and
damaging admission of the government's interference in suffragists'
trials. Christabel asked her one question. "Did Mr. Horace Smith tell
you in sentencing you that he was doing what he had been told to do?"
"You must not put that question!" exclaimed the magistrate. But the
witness had already answered "Yes." There was an excited stir in the
courtroom. It had been recorded under oath that a magistrate had
admitted that Suffragettes were being sentenced not by himself,
according to the evidence and according to law, but by the Government,
for no one could possibly doubt where Mr. Horace Smith's orders came
from.
Mr. Gladstone, plump, bald, and ruddy, in no way resembles his
illustrious father. He entered the witness-box smiling and confident,
but his complacence vanished when Christabel asked him outright if the
Government had not ordered the Commissioner of Police to take this
action against us. Of course the magistrate intervened, and Mr.
Gladstone did not answer the question. Christabel tried again. "Did you
instruct Mr. Horace Smith to decide against Miss Brackenbury, and to
send her to prison for six weeks?" That too was objected to, as were all
questions on the subject.
All through the examination the magistrate constantly intervened to save
the Cabinet Minister from embarrassment, but Christabel finally
succeeded in making Mr. Gladstone admit, point by point, that he had
said that women could never get the vote because they could not fight
for it as men had fought.
A large number of witnesses testified to the orderly nature of the
demonstration on the 13th, and then Christabel rose to plead. She began
by declaring that these proceedings had been taken, as the legal saying
is, "in malice and vexation," in order to lame a political enemy. She
declared that, under the law, the charge which might properly be brought
against us was that of illegal assembly, but the Government had not
charged us with this offence, because the Government desired to keep the
case in a police court.
"The authorities dare not see this case come before a jury," she
declared, "because they know perfectly well that if it were heard before
a jury of our countrymen we should be acquitted, just as John Burns was
acquitted years ago for taking action far more dangerous to the public
peace than we have taken. We are deprived of trial by jury. We are also
deprived of the right to appeal against the magistrate's decision. Very
carefully has this procedure been thought out."
Of the handbill she said: "We do not deny that we issued this bill; none
of us three has wished to deny responsibility. We did issue the bill; we
did cause it to be circulated; we did put upon it the words 'Come and
help the suffragettes rush the House of Commons.' For these words we do
not apologise. It is very well known that we took this action in order
to press forward a claim, which, according to the British constitution,
we are well entitled to make."
In all that the Suffragettes had done, in all that they might ever do,
declared my daughter, they would only be following in the footsteps of
men now in Parliament. "Mr. Herbert Gladstone has told us in the speech
I read to him that the victory of argument alone is not enough. As we
cannot hope to win by force of argument alone, it is necessary to
overcome by other means the savage resistance of the Government to our
claim for citizenship. He says, 'Go on, fight as the men did.' And then,
when we show our power and get the people to help us, he takes
proceedings against us in a manner that would have been disgraceful even
in the old days of coercion. Then there is Mr. Lloyd-George, who, if any
man has done so, has set us an example. His whole career has been a
series of revolts. He has said that if we do not get the vote--mark
these words--we should be justified in adopting the methods the men had
to adopt, namely, pulling down the Hyde Park railings." She quoted Lord
Morley as saying of the Indian unrest: "'We are in India in the presence
of a living movement, and a movement for what? For objects which we
ourselves have taught them to think are desirable objects; and unless we
can somehow reconcile order with satisfaction of those ideals and
aspirations, the fault will not be theirs, it will be ours--it will mark
the breakdown of British statesmanship.'--Apply those words to our
case," she continued.
[Illustration: CHRISTABEL, MRS. DRUMMOND AND MRS. PANKHURST IN THE DOCK,
FIRST CONSPIRACY TRIAL
_October, 1908_]
"Remember that we are demanding of Liberal statesmen that which is for
us the greatest boon and the most essential right--and if the present
Government cannot reconcile order with our demand for the vote without
delay, it will mark the breakdown of their statesmanship. Yes, their
statesmanship has broken down already. They are disgraced. It is only in
this court that they have the smallest hope of being supported."
My daughter had spoken with passion and fervour, and her righteous
indignation had moved her to words that caused the magistrate's face to
turn an angry crimson. When I rose to address the Court I began by
assuming an appearance of calmness which I did not altogether feel. I
endorsed all that Christabel had said of the unfairness of our trial and
the malice of the Government; I protested against the trial of political
offenders in a common police court, and I said that we were not women
who would come into the court as ordinary law-breakers. I described Mrs.
Drummond's worthy career as a wife, a mother, and a self-sustaining
business woman. I said, "Before you decide what is to be done with us,
I should like you to hear from me a statement of what has brought me
into the dock this morning." And then I told of my life and experiences,
many of which I have related in these pages of what I had seen and known
as a Poor Law Guardian and a registrar of births and deaths; of how I
had learned the burning necessity of changing the status of women, of
altering the laws under which they and their children live, and of the
essential justice of making women self-governing citizens.
"I have seen," I said, "that men are encouraged by law to take advantage
of the helplessness of women. Many women have thought as I have, and for
many, many years have tried, by that influence of which we have been so
often reminded, to alter these laws, but we find that influence counts
for nothing. When we went to the House of Commons we used to be told,
when we were persistent, that members of Parliament were not responsible
to women, they were responsible only to voters, and that their time was
too fully occupied to reform those laws, although they agreed that they
needed reforming.
"We women have presented larger petitions in support of our
enfranchisement than were ever presented for any other reform; we have
succeeded in holding greater public meetings than men have ever held for
any reform, in spite of the difficulty which women have in throwing off
their natural diffidence, that desire to escape publicity which we have
inherited from generations of our foremothers. We have broken through
that. We have faced hostile mobs at street corners, because we were told
that we could not have that representation for our taxes that men have
won unless we converted the whole of the country to our side. Because we
have done this, we have been misrepresented, we have been ridiculed, we
have had contempt poured upon us, and the ignorant mob have been incited
to offer us violence, which we have faced unarmed and unprotected by the
safeguards which Cabinet Ministers enjoy. We have been driven to do
this; we are determined to go on with this agitation because we feel in
honour bound. Just as it was the duty of your forefathers, it is our
duty to make the world a better place for women than it is to-day.
"Lastly, I want to call attention to the self-restraint which was shown
by our followers on the night of the 13th, after we had been arrested.
Our rule has always been to be patient, exercise self-restraint, show
our so-called superiors that we are not hysterical; to use no violence,
but rather to offer ourselves to the violence of others.
"That is all I have to say to you, sir. We are here, not because we are
law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers."
The burly policemen, the reporters, and most of the spectators were in
tears as I finished. But the magistrate, who had listened part of the
time with his hand concealing his face, still held that we were properly
charged in a common police court as inciters to riot. Since we refused
to be bound over to keep the peace, he sentenced Mrs. Drummond and
myself to three months' imprisonment, and Christabel to ten weeks'
imprisonment. It was destined to be a kind of imprisonment the
authorities had never yet been called upon to dea
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/34856