The second social and political fire of the period was ignited by women campaigning for the right to vote. Ever since the middle of the nineteenth century, women’s suffrage movements had demanded an extension of the franchise, in the hope that this would lead to an improvement in their parlous situation. Middle-class women could not take degrees or practise professions in Victorian England, while pay in the few occupations they were permitted to enter was grossly unequal. Workingclass women were either employed in factories as manual labourers with limited rights or stayed at home, where they might bear as many as ten children.
Demands for the female vote were denied by a late-Victorian establishment that feared the beginning of the end of male hegemony. The Edwardian establishment was equally unsympathetic to the suffragist cause. Nevertheless, women’s participation in the political process did increase in the early twentieth century. Women were now permitted to serve on local councils, vote in local elections and even become mayors. The rationale for allowing women to participate in local government was that it dealt with purely domestic affairs, women’s ‘natural sphere’. By the end of Edward’s reign, middle-class women also had much better access to higher education (despite still being unable to graduate) and to certain categories of employment, such as teaching and nursing.
Many so-called ‘go-ahead women’ began to complain about their limited professional opportunities, as well as unequal marriage rights and their lack of sexual freedom. Burgeoning female confidence was expressed through their widespread pursuit of dynamic new sports such as tennis, roller skating and cycling, and through new female fashions. Angles and curves were ‘out’, while loose-hanging and straighter garments were ‘in’; violent colours replaced demurer shades. One male journalist remarked: ‘In Victorian England woman was a symbol of innocence, a creature with pretty, kitten-like ways, but having no relevance to the business of the world. Today she is emerging into sex consciousness and beating at the bars of circumstance.’
It is unsurprising that the suffragist movement grew in the Edwardian era or that it became more radical in character. In 1903 the accomplished orator Emmeline Pankhurst, along with her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, established the Women’s Social and Political Union. The WSPU differed from previous suffragist organizations. ‘We resolved to limit our membership exclusively to women,’ Pankhurst declared, ‘to keep ourselves absolutely free from party affiliation, and to be satisfied with nothing but action. “Deeds, not words” was our motto.’ When the Daily Mail derisively dubbed WSPU members ‘suffragettes’, they confidently appropriated and altered the term, pronouncing it ‘suffragets’, to emphasize their determination to obtain the vote. What the suffragettes wanted to ‘get’ was not a vote for every woman, regardless of class and property, since this was also denied to men. Instead they demanded that their sex ceased to be a disqualification for the franchise. Votes on the same terms as men would enfranchise only middle-class female householders, but establishing the principle of votes for women was the key issue.
By the time of George’s coronation in 1910, the resources of the WSPU had grown rapidly, while the number of sister suffrage societies had proliferated. Yet the growing strength of the movement did not result in greater parliamentary influence. A succession of private member’s bills relating to female enfranchisement were introduced around this time but failed to make their way through the Commons. Some backbenchers openly mocked the idea of women voting, while the leading politicians of the day were divided on the issue. Asquith believed that women’s ‘sphere was not the turmoil and dust of politics, but the circle of social and domestic life’. His wife and daughter, who as aristocrats did not require the vote to wield political influence, shared his contempt for ‘petticoat politics’, and physically restrained suffragette protesters who attempted to approach him. The king, too, dismissed the suffragettes as ‘dreadful women’. On the other hand, Balfour and Lloyd George expressed guarded sympathy for the cause, while some Labour MPs championed it – despite the ambivalent official response of their party.
Since the members of the Commons were unresponsive to their cause, the suffragettes decided to challenge them directly. They began interrupting political meetings with questions, and they attempted to disrupt sittings of parliament. On 18 November 1910, thousands of suffragettes marched on Parliament Square, where they were met with police resistance. Churchill had instructed officers to keep the protesters away from parliament by any means, an order that led to scores of women being hit, pushed and arrested. The Pankhursts were put on trial for incitement to riot, but ended up turning the proceedings into a dissection of the government’s incoherent opposition to women’s suffrage. The events of ‘Black Friday’ and its aftermath inspired support for the campaigners throughout the country.
From 1911 onwards, the suffragette movement became more militant. Activists set postboxes alight, chained themselves to railings, broke the windows of shops and male clubs, destroyed public flower beds and slashed cushions on trains. They also wrote graffiti on public buildings and vandalized paintings that depicted women as objects of male desire. Not all suffragists advocated these tactics, yet Pankhurst was convinced that violence was the only option. From 1913 suffragettes also carried out arson attacks, setting light to some 350 buildings over eighteen months in a carefully organized campaign. Leading suffragettes supplied instructions and flammable material to the incendiaries, who manufactured crude bombs and left them in prominent public places. Some of the devices failed to explode, but others damaged buildings, including Lloyd George’s house.
On 4 June 1913, Emily Davison provided the campaign with its most potent symbol. Striding out onto the race track during the Epsom Derby, she was knocked down by an oncoming horse belonging to King George and died in hospital four days later. Some historians suggest that Davison intended to pin a suffragette banner onto the animal, but there is a strong possibility that she was intent on martyrdom. ‘To re-enact the tragedy of Calvary for generations yet unborn,’ Davison had written in a newspaper article, ‘is the last consummate sacrifice of the Militant.’ Immediately after Davison’s death, the suffragettes claimed her as a martyr; over 50,000 sympathizers attended her funeral.
The weak Liberal government once again found itself in unknown territory; as before, its instinct was to respond with coercion. Asquith imprisoned approximately one thousand suffragettes, while denying them the status of political prisoners. This prompted many of the incarcerated women to go on hunger strike. Fearing that they might die in prison and be applauded as martyrs, the government insisted they be strapped to chairs and fed via tubes inserted into the nose and throat before reaching the stomach.
The treatment of the suffragette prisoners caused public outrage. In the Commons the recently elected Labour MP George Lansbury told Asquith: ‘You are beneath contempt … you will go down in history as the man who tortured innocent women.’ The prime minister responded to criticism with legislation, just as he had done during the recent strikes. He introduced a bill which put an end to force-feeding in prison, and allowed enfeebled hunger strikers to be temporarily released in order to recover their health at home, before resuming their sentences. The bill became known as the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’, after the cat’s fondness of toying with its prey, and the Liberals accompanied it with a counter-propaganda campaign. They caricatured the suffragettes as a small group of wealthy and unbalanced eccentrics intent on subverting law and order, rather than a mass movement with a popular political agenda.
Some historians argue that the government’s response was effective in the short term: the suffragette campaign decreased in militancy in the early months of 1914. Yet government repression had undoubtedly roused public sympathy for the suffragettes; it also gave their cause invaluable publicity. From a modern perspective, it is the brutality of the Liberal government that is conspicuous, along with its myopia. ‘Those who read the history of the movement,’ Emmeline Pankhurst predicted, ‘will wonder at the blindness that led the Government to obstinately resist so simple and so obvious a measure of justice.’