Strait Lace, Guest Post by Rosemary Hayward

It is 1905. Edwardian England. Harriet Loxley, the daughter of a vicar and niece to a prominent Nottingham lace manufacturer, spends her days playing cricket with her brother, scouring the countryside for botanical specimens, and never missing an opportunity to argue the case for political power for women. Given the chance to visit the House of Commons, Harriet witnesses the failure of a historic bill for women’s voting rights. She also meets the formidable Pankhurst women.

When Harriet gets the chance to study biology at Bedford College, London, she finds her opportunity to be at the heart of the fight. From marching in the street, to speaking to hostile crowds, to hurling stones through windows, just how far will Harriet go?

The Origins of the Suffragettes

The fight for votes for women in Britain began way back in the nineteenth century with a petition presented to Parliament in 1832. In the following years women’s suffrage societies campaigning for the vote were founded all over the country. A generation later, in 1867, John Stuart Mill proposed an amendment to include women to the great voting reform bill of that year. That amendment failed, but not without a substantial vote in its favour. Bills calling for votes for women were brought before Parliament almost every year from then on and women’s suffrage societies that spoke to organisations and lobbied Parliament proliferated. Advances were made in local government, women served on school boards and became poor law guardians, and many oppressive laws concerning women were abolished but, by 1903, when Emeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), women could still not vote for a member of parliament.

The origins of the WSPU, the party whose members became known as Suffragettes, lie in England’s industrial north and the nascent Labour Party. Emmeline Pankhurst was born into a family that valued political agitation and her mother encouraged her attendance at suffrage society meetings. Her father, Robert Goulden, was a self-made man from a humble Manchester family with its own background in politics. His mother worked with the Anti-Corn-Law league and his father was present at the notorious Peterloo Massacre in 1819.

In 1879 Emmeline, aged twenty, married the radical socialist lawyer Richard Pankhurst, twenty-four years her senior and an advocate for women’s and worker’s rights. The Pankhursts had five children, four surviving Richard’s death at the age of sixty-four which left Emmeline a restless and not particularly well-provided-for widow.

Emmeline attempted to follow in Richard’s footsteps and become an activist in the International Labour Party, but was to discover that working men could be every bit as unwilling to promote women’s causes as the Conservatives in Parliament. So, in 1903, she called a meeting of Labour women at her home in Manchester. There were very few people in Emmeline’s small living room that night but it was start of something big, something that would reverberate down the century.

Calling themselves the Women’s Social and Political Union the small group adopted the slogan Deeds Not Words and determined to be different from the many other women’s groups campaigning for the vote.

In 1905, when a bill granting votes to women on the same terms as men was talked out in the House of Commons, Emmeline leapt onto a bench in the lobby and exhorted all women to follow her outside, where she addressed the crowd. When she was moved on by the police, she continued addressing the crowd in the public street. Respectable women didn’t behave like that in 1905. Emmeline did and she was to continue to do so as the WSPU’s dynamic leader and speaker for the next nine years.

The first outrageously radical action of the WSPU was later in 1905 when Christabel Pankhurst along with Annie Kenney, a Lancashire cotton mill worker, tried to get questions answered at a Liberal party meeting in Manchester Free Trade Hall. When their questions were ignored they raised a banner inscribed Votes for Women, the first appearance of that memorable slogan. Ejected from the hall and her hands restrained, Christabel, who was studying for a law degree, spat at a policeman, thus ensuring a court appearance for assault. It also ensured significant lines in the Manchester newspapers. Refusing to be bound over to good behaviour and pay a fine Christabel and Annie went to prison for two weeks. Militant activity and the determination to draw attention to themselves had taken root in the WSPU’s campaign for the vote.

Always with an eye on effective publicity, in January 1906 Christabel Pankhurst adopted the moniker of Suffragettes after the Daily Mail used it as a scathing diminutive to mock the WSPU’s activities. The magazine of the WSPU, originally Votes for Women, became The Suffragette in 1912, long after women had become proud to be called Suffragettes.

In the summer of 1906, with Christabel’s law studies complete, the WSPU moved its headquarters to London. With Emmeline as the charismatic leader, Christabel, became the chief organizer and propagandist. Another Emmeline, Emmeline Pethwick Lawrence, became the efficient treasurer and fundraiser and the second Pankhurst sister, Sylvia, now a student at the Royal College of Art, became the advocate of the working women’s right to vote. The youngest Pankhurst sister, Adela, later became a powerful speaker touring the North of England.

The WSPU membership grew by leaps and bounds with branches all over Britain and Ireland. It possessed a substantial war chest and many paid organizers. As the government repeatedly undermined attempts to get legislation through Parliament the WSPU became increasingly inventive in its tactics. Starting by disrupting government election meetings and minister’s speeches, they moved on to breaking the windows of the halls from which they were excluded. After organizing the largest mass demonstrations the country had ever seen failed to convince the government that popular opinion was behind women voting they moved on to the greatest mass window breaking event the country had ever seen. Ultimately agitation spread to physical attacks on government ministers, arson and the infamous events of Emily Davison’s death under the hooves of the King’s horse and Mary Richardson’s attack on the Velasquez painting known as the Rokeby Venus.

Emeline Pankhurst called off all militant activity with the start of the First World War in 1914 but the term Suffragette was to go down in history, reviled by some and adored by others.

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Meet Rosemary Hayward

Rosemary Hayward is the author of Margaret Leaving, a historical mystery uncovering little known events that occurred in the immediate aftermath to World War II. She is also the creator of Your Next Book, a deeply nerdy monthly newsletter describing a book picked from her bookshelf, or Kindle.

She is British by birth but now lives part of the year in California and part in southern Spain.