The Transfiguring Sword: The Just War of the Women's Social and Political Union

By Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp

Provides a new understanding of the recurrent rhetorical need to employ conservative rhetoric in support of a radical cause

The Women’s Social and Political Union, the militant branch of the English women’s suffrage movement, turned to arson, bombing, and widespread property destruction as a strategy to achieve suffrage for women. Because of its comparative rarity, terrorist violence by reform (as opposed to revolutionary) movements is underexplored, as is the discursive rhetoric that accompanies this violence. Largely because of the moral stance that drives such movements, the need to justify violence is greater for the reformist than for the revolutionary terrorist. The burden of rhetorical justification falls even more heavily on women utilizing violence, an option generally perceived as open only to men.

The militant suffragettes justified their turn to limited terrorism by arguing that their violence was part of a “just war.” Appropriating the rhetoric of a just war in defense of reformist violence allowed the suffragettes to exercise a traditional rhetorical vision for the sake of radical action. The concept of a just war allowed a spinning out of a fantasy of heroes, of a gallant band fighting against the odds. It challenged the imagination of the public to extend to women a heroic vision usually reserved for men and to accept the new expectations inherent in that vision. By incorporating the concept of a just war into their rhetoric, the WSPU leaders took the most conventional justification that Western tradition provides for the use of violence and adapted it to meet their unique circumstance as women using violence for political reform.

This study challenges the common view that the suffragettes’ use of military metaphors, their vilification of the government, and their violent attacks on property were signs of hysteria and self-destruction. Instead, what emerges is a picture of a deliberate, if controversial, strategy of violence supported by a rhetorical defense of unusual power and consistency.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9780817388416

Book preview

The Transfiguring Sword

STUDIES IN RHETORIC AND COMMUNICATION

General Editors:

E. Culpepper Clark

Raymie E. McKerrow

David Zarefsky

The Transfiguring Sword

The Just War of the Women’s Social and Political Union

Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 1997 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Hardcover edition published 1997.

Paperback edition published 2015.

eBook edition published 2015.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover illustration: Prisoners of War, from Votes for Women, May 24, 1912; courtesy of The British Library

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8173-5821-1

eBook ISBN: 978-0-8173-8841-6

A previous edition of this book has been catalogued by the Library of Congress as follows:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jorgensen-Earp, Cheryl R., 1952–

The transfiguring sword : the just war of the women’s social and political union / Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp.

  p.        cm. — (Studies in rhetoric and communication)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8173-0870-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Women’s Social and Political Union (Great Britain)—History. 2. Suffragists—Great Britain—History. 3. Women—Suffrage—Great Britain—History. 4. Political violence—Great Britain—History.

I. Title      II. Series.

JN976.J67                                1997

324.6'23'0941—dc20                                                            96-34736

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available

For Mama

Born seventeen days after women achieved the franchise in this country. With her humor, cleverness, and resolve, she would have made a wonderful suffragette.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. A Rhetorical Path to Terrorism

2. The Strategy of Forcing the Crisis

3. The Defensive Response to a Culpable Opponent

4. The Suffragette as Just Warrior

5. The Value of Violence

6. Evil That Good May Come

Conclusion

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Books only come into being through a collaborative effort, and I am deeply grateful to all who contributed to this book’s completion. In attempting to acknowledge at least some of these efforts, I must begin where this project started—in the Speech Communication Department at the University of Washington. I want to thank Haig Bosmajian for his willingness to share his expertise and his ability both to challenge and support. Many thanks are due to Barbara Warnick, not simply for her excellent critique of this project but for her continuing encouragement in so many ways. My special thanks go to John Campbell, now at the University of Memphis. John was largely responsible for my early interest in the suffragettes, and he guided this project with his typical insight and care. I only wish that everyone in academics could have such a generous mentor and friend. I would like to thank Nicole Mitchell of the University of Alabama Press and the reviewers who gave such excellent advice on the revisions. I would particularly like to thank Karlyn Kohrs Campbell for her very helpful guidance. I also want to thank such supportive friends as Ann Staton, Katie Heintz-Knowles, Paula Wilson, and all of my colleagues in the Communication Studies Department at Lynchburg College.

I have always relied upon the kindness of librarians. It has been my good fortune to have the help of the librarians of Knight-Capron Library at Lynchburg College. I have yet to have a question they could not answer or a problem they could not solve, and their continuing good humor is always appreciated. My thanks, also, to the librarians of Fintel Library at Roanoke College, who were so helpful in the early stages of this project.

The WSPU cartoons reproduced in this volume were originally published in Votes for Women and The Suffragette. They appear here by permission of The British Library. I would like to thank Sue Tryon for her excellent work in reproducing the illustrations. Financial support for the inclusion of these cartoons was provided by the Faculty Research and Development Committee at Lynchburg College. The Verbatim report of Mrs. Pankhurst’s speech, delivered Nov. 13, 1913 at Parson’s Theatre, Hartford, Connecticut first appeared in pamphlet form published by the Connecticut Women’s Suffrage Association. Quotations from this speech appear in this book by permission of the General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Finally, and most importantly, I want to thank my family. Like Emmeline Pankhurst, I have drawn prizes in the lucky bag of life, in the shape of [a] good father, [a] good husband, and a good son. My father would have gotten a kick out of seeing this book published, and my one regret is that he is not here to be handed a copy. My love and thanks go to my husband, Darwin, who has no fear of strong-minded women. Without his love, patience, and very practical support, this book would have never been finished. And my love also goes to my son, Ethan, who has patiently shared his mother with women of another era. He is a constant reminder of that better world for which the suffragettes risked so much.

Introduction

In the opening days of 1913, English militant suffragette Mary Richardson, accompanied by another young woman now believed to have been Lilian Lenton, made a quickly arranged journey to Birmingham. Traveling under the names Polly Dick and Lilian Mitchell, they spent the night at the home of a sympathizer who had herself arranged to be out of town on the pretext of visiting an ailing sister in London. In the absence of their hostess, the two women were entertained at dinner by the sympathizer’s husband, a businessman completely unaware of the women’s suffragette ties or the true purpose of their visit. After dinner, the two women retired to the library for tea and, at ten o’clock, to their room for a few hours of sleep. Richardson was awakened by her companion with the news that Black Jennie, a homemade bomb in a marmalade pot, was spluttering in its hiding place in the wardrobe. As Richardson later recounted, the two women dressed quickly:

We were soon ready. Lilian opened the wardrobe door. You carry Jennie, she said casually.

I looked at Jennie in alarm. She was certainly spluttering and hissing. I felt that my last moment had come, and the thing would explode the moment I touched it. To pick up that black bag with the home-made time bomb inside terrified me. I took the strings of the bag carefully in my fingers and lifted. The splutterings increased.

Don’t drop her, whatever you do, Lilian said. She led the way.¹

The two women slipped out of the house and traveled on foot along the dark edges of fields to the newly constructed railway station. Climbing through an uncompleted section of roof, they left Jennie inside the station. Richardson and Lenton then retraced their steps to the house and tiptoed to their room. Reaching there undetected, they climbed into bed after taking double doses of aspirin to ensure that they would sleep through the noise of the explosion. Over breakfast the next morning, the two women responded with innocent surprise as their host angrily read the morning paper and railed against those blasted women who had blown up the new railway station.²

The destruction of isolated railway stations was only one of a series of violent acts perpetrated by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the militant branch of the English women’s suffrage movement. During the final two and a half years of its active involvement in the suffrage campaign, the WSPU turned to arson, bombing, and widespread property destruction as strategies to acquire the franchise for women. The guerrilla militancy of the final years of the WSPU campaign was limited only by restrictions against physically harming anyone (except themselves). The catchphrase used in the union to describe (and, indeed, extend) this prohibition was that not even a cat or canary must be harmed.³ Despite this prohibition, the WSPU strategies culminated in thirty-three months of what is properly called a terrorist campaign. Because of its rarity, terrorist violence by reform movements, and the rhetoric that frames and justifies it, has seldom been examined. Such terrorism seeks only limited change and is often directed at government policies on very specific issues. Occasionally it may be inspired by anger at a particular public official or used to punish an organization for taking some specific action. Generally, such terrorism is limited to attacks upon property. Examples of such attacks include Welsh nationalist protests that resulted in more than eighty arson attacks during a seven-year period (1979–86) against summer cottages belonging to English urbanites.⁴ Examples closer to home include the modern anti-abortion movement, which went from pressuring the government for reform and picketing abortion clinics to physically barricading, bombing, and torching these clinics. In the same movement there was a growing tendency to terrorize abortionist doctors with threats against their families and property. Of course, with the advent of actual murders of doctors performing abortions, the level of violence in the anti-abortion movement escalated beyond that of reformist terrorism. The animal-rights movement has also escalated its tactics from picketing of science labs using animals for research to bombing and torching such labs. Raids are conducted against the labs, and sometimes diseased animals are set free. Some animal-rights groups have physically threatened (or attacked the private property of) scientists who conduct research using laboratory animals.

The escalation of militant strategies in reform groups is triggered by the need to make the movement visible and to place movement concerns high on the current political agenda. Reform movements quickly learn that the ability to force others to attend to their message requires a certain degree of power.⁵ If movement members already possessed conventional power, they would work through the system to have their needs addressed and, quite probably, would never mobilize into a reform movement. In lieu of such power, movements attempt to force a crisis, a breach of social norms that will redefine their invisible and powerless movement as a potent entity to be ignored only at the peril of the status quo. The rhetoric of violence becomes a means to create reality, to guarantee that movement issues become salient.⁶ Reformers as well as revolutionaries learn the lesson that their concerns will be addressed only when they are made equally salient for those in power. Such salience may come naturally from the issue itself, but, if necessary, it may be artificially produced by forcing a crisis of confrontation or strategic violence.

Political actors with inadequate resources need to find novel activities to promote their political agendas. For many social movements, this need for innovation leads to an escalation into violent strategies and, ultimately, into terrorism.⁷ The relationship between violence and persuasion is never simple. Like many nonverbal acts, violence is a clumsy and ambiguous mode of communication.⁸ Terrorism is a communication strategy in which the process of communication is activated and amplified by violence.⁹ That the terrorist act is political violence means that it is theoretically and practically rhetorical. Furthermore, terrorists see themselves as engaged in a conversation with the power structure and often describe their actions as responses to the violence that exists in the system itself. They characterize their acts of violence as answers in an ongoing dialogue, "a response that communicates," and, through this conversation of violence, they attempt to change attitudes and behavior in the larger society.¹⁰ However, terrorism is a rejection of conventional communication. Bombing may thus become a form of language designed to gain access when other forms of communication are blocked.¹¹ Through violence, terrorists hope to break through perceived impediments to communication, end their isolation, and give their ideas value in the larger community.¹² The resort to violence is an indication that more conventional discourse and compromise have failed.¹³

The audience-centered emphasis of terrorism allows researchers in the field of communication to speak of a rhetoric of terrorism. But if there is a general consensus among rhetoricians that violence speaks, there is little acknowledgment that its voice may be a female one. Recognition that women have utilized violence in their own cause is not common even in feminist scholarship. Our societal problem with the very concept of women and violent behavior is particularly evident when the female terrorist is considered. According to Maxwell Taylor, The woman terrorist seems to offer a challenge to the contemporary stereotype of the woman as caregiver and protector and the notion of the violent woman seems to give rise to both horror and fantasy for Western man. It also seems to offer an unusual reflection on the notion of ‘equality’ of opportunity, and clearly reflects upon our most deep seated prejudices about gender appropriate behavior, especially with respect to fighting and aggression.¹⁴ Interestingly, one of the loudest voices raised to divorce women from acts of terrorist violence comes from feminist critic Robin Morgan. Viewing the terrorist as the logical incarnation of patriarchal politics in a technological world, Morgan states quite accurately that the majority of terrorists—and those against whom they are rebelling—are men. Women, along with children, are caught in the middle of terrorist violence, usually as the victim, or, as Morgan quotes the Vietnamese proverb, women are the grass that gets trampled when the elephants fight. Although statistically Morgan may be correct that "history is a record of most women acting peaceably, and of most men acting belligerently" (emphasis in original), this view is largely responsible for a misreading of women’s capacity for terrorist violence in general and the WSPU’s use of such violence in particular.¹⁵ In his book Crusaders, Criminals, and Crazies, Frederick Hacker states that no violent terroristic act has been performed specifically to advertise or further the cause of women’s liberation.¹⁶ Morgan makes the same point when she writes that women as a group do not mobilize for our own rights through violent means.¹⁷ I would disagree with both statements and point to the WSPU as proof that women have used terrorism specifically to obtain their rights.¹⁸

Do the violent actions of the WSPU fit with current definitions of terrorism? Chalmers Johnson provides as criteria the employment of destructive violence, its use against political targets, and the sporadic and clandestine nature of the acts. The latter element [is] felt to be necessary to exclude terrorism, planned or unplanned, which is intrinsic or incidental to ‘an ongoing movement of armed revolution.’¹⁹ Certainly, the suffragettes employed destructive violence, and these were not minor acts but involved arson, bombing, and destruction of public artwork and private property. Their target was ultimately political; for, even though one hallmark of violent militancy was the attack on private property, the suffragettes made it very clear that their primary target was the government. The whole purpose for striking at private property was to force the public to pressure the government to yield to union demands. And the WSPU at this phase operated in the guerrilla fashion through clandestine operations and an avoidance of arrest whenever possible. Perhaps the best indication of the terrorist nature of the WSPU acts is Lisa Tickner’s brief assessment: No longer interested in converting the public, they [the suffragettes] set out to astound and appal it.²⁰

Also, in their final phase of militancy (following a massive breaking of store windows on November 21, 1911) the WSPU entered into the fundamental triangular relationship that Robin Gerrits calls the distinguishing feature of the terrorist strategy.²¹ In terrorism there is generally a split between the target of terrorist action (the victim) and the actual target of the action, the person or persons intended to be influenced by the violence. This audience component is vital to Schmid and de Graaf: Violence, to become terroristic, requires witnesses. When the suffragettes attacked private property rather than official property belonging to (or symbolic of) the government, they moved to a third-party strategy that sought to pressure the guilty (the Liberal government) through attacks upon the innocent (the British public). The British public thus became merely instrumental, the skin on a drum beaten to achieve a calculated impact on a wider audience.²²

Why is it important to see WSPU violence in terms of terrorism? It is not to prove that women are as, or more, violent than men but to see the suffragettes as they saw themselves and to characterize properly the nature and extent of their militancy. There is a tendency to read suffragette actions in the way most conducive to the particular political point the writer is seeking. For example, Robin Morgan, in seeking to show terrorist violence as a problem with the patriarchy, describes WSPU violence in the following manner: I read about the Pankhurst women in the British suffrage movement. Careful acts of select damage only ever against property. No harm to life. Mass demonstrations. Humor (red-pepper ‘bombs’ thrown at the king in procession). Hunger strikes while in prison. Militance without a lust for death.²³ The reader who turns from this description (or from George Dangerfield’s description of small bands of women with their bedraggled little purple banerettes) to actual accounts of suffragette violence will be deeply surprised.²⁴ Although many of the suffragette attacks were imaginative, the continuous destruction of letter boxes and resulting loss of important mail, the nearly daily window-breaking raids on private businesses, the destruction of telegraph lines (particularly the severing of the connections between London and Glasgow), and the destruction of valuable museum artwork must have seemed more than a humorous nuisance. The slashing of Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus, the bombing of Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George’s new home, and the vandalizing of the Kew Garden Orchid House (destroying some flowers that had taken ten years to cultivate) were acts that rival the property destruction of any number of terrorist groups. Life under threat of suffragette violence took on a different feel: fifty caddies guarded night and day the golf links at Walton Heath where Lloyd George played, guards were posted at corner letter boxes, and children played the ‘Suffragette Game,’ placing homemade bombs on neighbours’ doorsteps, and parading with handwritten sandwich boards threatening ‘Votes or Boms.’ The press (earlier so silent on constitutional suffrage efforts) kept the public constantly apprised of the danger: ‘Bombs have been found in St. Paul’s Cathedral and elsewhere,’ said the Press. ‘London is locked up, and very great nervousness prevails.’²⁵ It is only when the destructive nature of WSPU reformist terrorism is fully acknowledged that we can appreciate the strategic nature of both the acts of violence themselves and the rhetoric that accompanied and justified those acts.

One problem with past studies of the Women’s Social and Political Union has been their failure to examine the union’s turn to terrorism from a rhetorical perspective. Very quickly the question always turns to whether WSPU terrorism was an effective tactic in support of their reformist cause. The effectiveness of WSPU violence is (and always must be) difficult to assess, largely because of the intervention of World War I and the resulting time lapse between the end of violent militancy and the granting of the franchise. Although the specific pro and con arguments over suffrage militancy have been put forward extensively, what has been lacking is a broader perspective that views the adoption of violent tactics as a question of rhetorical invention. The WSPU provides a case study of two important aspects of reformist violence hitherto underexplored. First, it is the pressure of changing rhetorical exigencies that leads many reform groups to escalate their tactics to the level of terrorism. Second, there are inventional resources that skilled rhetors can use to frame acts of reformist terrorism in ways that make them intelligible to the general public. Through an examination of the rhetoric of the WSPU, this study will show the power of rhetoric to justify actions that on their face seem unjustifiable.

To say that skilled rhetorical invention can justify violence by a group of women reformers is not to say that the task is easy. Clearly, the burden of rhetorical justification falls more heavily upon women adopting what has always been perceived as an option granted only to men. Women, if only by cultural fiat, cannot adopt a strategy of violence without appearing to violate the philosophy of care considered vital to feminine nature and a feminine style of discourse. Arguments are still made, as they commonly were during the Victorian and Edwardian periods, for the existence of women’s special skills in regard to children, health care, education and domestic morality.²⁶ The concept of woman that has changed least over time is her role as nurturer. The modern version of the nurturing role can be seen in the caretaker image currently addressed by feminist writers.²⁷ In general, women still carry the primary burden of caregiving for the young, the ill, and the elderly. Expressing impatience, demanding political change, and taking violent action are the antithesis of the patience, self-renunciation, and unconditional love that we expect from the caretakers of society.

Strategic violence also violates a feminine style of discourse, for it is both authoritarian and confrontational.²⁸ Rather than allowing the public to draw its own conclusions from the discourse presented by the agent of change, the use of violence presumes that the agent has already decided what is right. This decision is then urged on the public in a forceful manner. Women who utilize violence must justify their acts to a greater extent than men, for whom aggression is seen as a more natural and acceptable trait. Even if the double standard for the use of political violence has lessened today in the wake of the Weathermen, it was certainly in place during the time of the suffrage campaign. G. K. Chesterton wrote disapprovingly about the use of militant tactics in a 1910 Illustrated London News article: The tactics were bad because they were not female and did not use the natural weapons. A woman putting up her fists at a man is a woman putting herself in the one position which does not frighten him.²⁹ Many women refused to take part in even nominal militancy, not because the actions were wrong in themselves but because they were wrong for women.

In moving to violent tactics, reformers also face justificatory pressures not shared by their revolutionary counterparts. It is the difference between the revolutionary goal and the goal of the reformer that would appear to preclude the use of strategic violence by the latter. The reformer does not seek the overthrow of the current system but the change or repair of particular laws, customs, or practices. Reformers seek their rightful place within the system as well as the power to correct the flaws within that system as it currently stands. Yet, as years turn into decades in the pursuit of a particular reform goal, even movements that desire to maintain the purity of classic reform methods find it difficult to do so. The influx of a new generation seeking an old reform may revitalize a movement but may also lead the movement to question the patient strategies of the past. It is not only internal pressures that may force a change in reformist tactics. If the desired changes appear no closer to being obtained as a reform movement ages, and the routes of protest become increasingly overburdened, there may seem to be little choice but to escalate into militancy or violence.³⁰

Although a movement may adopt new actions that are efficacious from a practical standpoint, these actions may carry a heavy burden of rhetorical justification. At such times the action of a movement runs ahead of the rhetoric in place to justify movement strategies. The movement is left with the distinctly rhetorical problem of justifying new and controversial tactics within an old framework of discourse that is not always adequate to the task. The movement must either find space for the new actions within the old rhetorical framework or must develop a line of talk that will provide new justifications for the new strategies. These rhetorical pressures are only exacerbated when the new action undertaken by the movement involves terrorist violence. One problem faced by