Suffragette Planners and Plotters: The Pankhurst, Pethick-Lawrence Story

By Kathryn Atherton

This true story about the British fight for women’s suffrage “looks at the tumultuous relationship between two couples who led the militant movement” (Publishers Weekly).
 
In early twentieth-century England, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence was treasurer of the Women’s Social and Political Union, founded by the famed militant Mrs. Pankhurst. Emmeline’s husband, Fred, was the only man to achieve leadership status in the organization. Without their wealth, determination, and skills we might never have heard of the suffragettes—yet the couple has been largely forgotten while Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughters are still renowned.
 
Emmeline was always at Mrs. Pankhurst’s side, while Fred was the ‘Godfather’ who stood bail for a thousand women. Both were imprisoned and force-fed. They provided the militant movement with its home and much of its vision, and it was their associates who initiated the hunger strike and who brought force-feeding to national attention. But in 1912, the couple was dramatically ousted from the organization by the Pankhursts in a move that has often been misrepresented. This book is the first in-depth portrait of the couple and their relationship with the Pankhursts—and of their inspirational fight not just for the vote for women but for freedom and equality across the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526722973

Kathryn Atherton

After an MPhil in 17th Century Studies, Kathy spent 10 years as a city lawyer.She is currently responsible for exhibitions at Dorking Museum and regularly leads guided walks and speaks on local history on radio and television. She has published numerous books of local history and has recently completed a short film on the lives of the Pethick-Lawrences.

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Introduction

In 1908 Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence was modelled in wax at Madame Tussauds. Fifty years later a memorial plaque confidently asserted that she and her husband, Frederick, would be remembered by ‘countless generations’. Without Fred and Emmeline we might never have heard of Mrs Pankhurst or her ‘suffragettes’, for it is quite possible that, had they not met the Pethick-Lawrences, the Pankhursts would be no more than a footnote in history, their Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) just one of many competing voices in the campaign for the vote for women. Yet today the Pankhursts are revered, whilst the Pethick-Lawrences are largely forgotten.

We can argue about the effectiveness of suffragette tactics but none can deny their impact. And it was Fred and Emmeline’s wealth, business acumen and dedication that provided the WSPU with its firm foundation. Imprisoned six times, Emmeline was the WSPU’s business mastermind and an inspiration to thousands of women. Nicknamed ‘Godfather’ by the women, Fred was the only man to take a leadership role in an organization that, as a male, he was notIntroduction entitled to join. From 1906 to 1912 the Pethick-Lawrences and the Pankhursts were the heart of the militant suffrage campaign, not just working, but also living together for much of the time.

This is the story of an extraordinary couple, and of the circle that they drew around them. The intense relationship between the Pankhursts and the Pethick-Lawrences lasted for just six years. But in those years the militant suffragettes drew national and international attention to the cause and inspired thousands. The tensions and debates within the leadership led to a dramatic split between the Pankhursts and Pethick-Lawrences, and to Fred and Emmeline’s ousting from the WSPU at the height of their influence and popularity. This split has been misunderstood and misrepresented – by the Pankhursts, by the couple themselves, and by historians. This book examines the reasons for that split and for Fred and Emmeline’s fall from prominence.

The achievements of the Pethick-Lawrences did not begin or end with the vote for women. Emmeline was at the forefront of the revival of English folk dance and early moves to provide holiday accommodation for working people; she was a life-long campaigner for peace (instrumental in the formation of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom), and for the rights of women and children long before the ‘Women’s Liberation’ movement of the 1960s. Fred spent his life promoting equality – between men and women, between the classes, and between races. After a lifetime promoting the cause of Indian independence he was a key part of the team that negotiated the terms of Britain’s withdrawal from India in 1947. In a eulogy Clement Attlee acknowledged how unusual it was for one man to have played a leading part in two great movements of emancipation.

Alhough their followers and secretaries preserved Fred and Emmeline’s correspondence for the biography that they believed would celebrate the couple’s significance (and to an extent vindicate them from the Pankhurst publicity machine), no full-scale biography has yet been attempted. This book provides a new perspective on our understanding of the couple’s place in the campaign for the vote and their relationship with the Pankhursts, as well as celebrating the achievements of their earlier and later lives.

Chapter 1

Forty Years of Peaceful Campaigning (1866–1906)

When Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903 campaigners had been working to win the vote for women for nearly forty years. Prior to 1832 entitlement to vote had depended on ownership of land in rural counties, and on payment of sufficient rents in urban boroughs. Constituency sizes had varied hugely as boundaries had not been revised to reflect long-term changes in population distribution so that ancestral landowners controlled who was returned to Parliament from semi-deserted villages, whilst the new industrial centres of the Midlands and North had relatively few seats and thousands of voters. The Reform Act of 1832 addressed both eligibility to vote and size of constituency so that the new industrial ‘millocracy’ was adequately represented. It took the electorate to some 20 per cent of the male population, but the use of the term ‘male persons’ in the definition of those eligible to vote explicitly excluded women. Most of the population, therefore, and all women, remained without a voice in the government of their country.

Reform of the political system came up for consideration again in the 1860s. The accepted argument was that there should be no taxation without representation, and though a married woman had no legal status apart from her husband and so was not a property owner or taxpayer, many unmarried women and widows were both. A small number of women therefore argued that, provided they met the same criteria as men, they should be allowed to vote. In 1866 Barbara Bodichon (1827–91) initiated a petition proposing the inclusion of voting rights for single and widowed women who were property owners and taxpayers in the forthcoming Reform Bill. The petition marked the start of the women’s suffrage campaign. Signed by 1,499 women, it was presented to Parliament by the MPs John Stuart Mill (1806–73) and Henry Fawcett (1833–84).

When voting rights for women did not appear in the 1867 Reform Bill Mill proposed an amendment. It was following the defeat of this amendment, and with no prospect of further reform, that women’s suffrage committees were set up all over the country. The London National Society for Women’s Suffrage was set up in 1867. The young Millicent Fawcett (1847–1929) – wife of Henry Fawcett and sister of the first woman to qualify as a doctor in Britain, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836–1917) – spoke at its first public meeting.

The lack of the vote was just one of the injustices suffered by women that were under scrutiny by radical thinkers in the mid nineteenth century. In the coming years individual women sought to improve their position through access to education, employment and entry to the professions, and through the acquisition of legal rights. By the later nineteenth century increasing numbers of middle-class women were educated and active in their local communities. They were establishing and running schools, nursing schemes and other charities, and many were working and paying taxes as teachers, writers, and artists. (Lower-class women had always worked, but since they were unlikely to meet the income and property criteria this was largely irrelevant to the argument about eligibility to vote.)

Radical Liberal MP Jacob Bright (1821–99) took over parliamentary stewardship of suffrage bills after Mill’s death in 1873. His wife Ursula (1835–1915) was instrumental in establishing Manchester’s women’s suffrage movement and the city, with its radical tradition, became a stronghold of the campaign – and the birthplace of militancy. In 1872 a national committee, based in London, was formed to support local societies. The Central Committee of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage was initially run from the home of Frederick and Margaret Pennington at 17 Hyde Park Terrace. Their relationship, and those of the Brights and Fawcetts, prefigured the strong marriage of Fred and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence at the heart of the WSPU, promoting the idea that this was not a ‘women’s’ issue but one of equality and justice.

The early campaign for the vote was conducted by argument and persuasion, via public meetings, pamphlets and petitions. In the 1870s Jacob Bright presented several women’s suffrage bills to Parliament, all of which were defeated at the behest of the party whips despite large numbers of MPs pledging personal support. The vote for women was not yet an issue which generated widespread popular interest: for millions of middle and working-class women, gender was hardly an issue; the property requirements of the Reform Act of 1867 had left two-thirds of the male population unqualified to vote. So if women were to be enfranchised on the same terms as men, few – and none who were married – would meet the property requirement. This, however, was set to change.

With the prospect of another reform bill in the 1880s, suffrage meetings were held in larger centres of population. In Manchester Ursula Bright and her sister-in-law, Priscilla Bright McLaren (1815–1906), organized Grand Demonstrations, drawing on the anti-corn-law rallies with which their family’s name is synonymous. Ursula was close friends with the radical Manchester lawyer and founder member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) Richard Marsden Pankhurst (1835–98). Pankhurst had drafted the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act which allowed married women to own and control property in their own right. He and his young wife, Emmeline, then in her early twenties, were both women’s suffrage supporters. When it came, the Reform Act of 1884 was a disappointment to them all. It enfranchised whole sections of the male population, extending the vote to the majority of men, but not to women.

Gender was no longer one of many grounds for disqualification from eligibility to vote; it was the principal ground. Female suffrage became a cause, not just of wealthy women, but of the educated middle-classes. It became an issue of individual and group fitness, for if the main argument against granting the vote to working-class men was their supposed fecklessness and ignorance, then women of whatever social class or education found themselves classed with the pathetic and the despised. No matter how accomplished a woman was, nor what she contributed to society or to the Treasury, politically her voice counted for less than the lowest of the low. Under the heading What a woman may be and yet not have a vote’ a suffrage poster depicted female mayors, nurses, mothers, doctors, teachers and factory hands, contrasting hard-working, law-abiding women with depictions of the male drunks, convicts, pimps and lunatics who retained the right to vote whatever their sins. Women had based their claim to the vote on proving themselves to be responsible, hardworking, taxpaying citizens; it frustrated campaigners that only gender was considered relevant.

The sense of injustice engendered by the 1884 Act was compounded by the fact that by the 1870s women were increasingly educated. The newly-established ‘professions’, with their examinations at which women might prove their ability on equal terms with male applicants, were battlegrounds for those seeking the advancement of women. Women like Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake (1840–1912) had taken on the medical establishment; others had the law in their sights. By 1900 increasing numbers of women were taxpayers; others sat on the boards of hospitals and charities, or served as guardians of the poor. From 1894 women were eligible to stand for election to the new rural and urban district councils (though not for borough or county councils). And many found that their responsibilities lead them to question women’s exclusion from national influence.

Some women were directly active in party politics, fundraising and campaigning for the established political parties in the hope that if they proved themselves responsible citizens their efforts would be rewarded and their fitness to vote recognized. Though denying them the vote, the 1884 Act’s enfranchisement of large numbers of new male voters served to increase women’s involvement in politics as the campaigning that must be undertaken to reach such voters required a party structure. Women were drawn into organizing and fundraising, into hand-shaking and tea-making, into speaking and distributing. By the end of the century much of the legwork of the major parties was being done by women who had no vote themselves.

With no immediate prospect of government-sponsored legislation to extend the franchise to the lower orders (on which the vote for women might piggyback its way through Parliament), women would have to promote a specific bill to give them the vote. But three decades of reasoned persuasion had resulted in nothing by way of legislation. Though women’s suffrage was a non-party issue and many MPs of all political persuasions professed to be in favour, neither Conservatives nor Liberals wished to risk doing something that might give electoral advantage to the other. And the fledgling Independent Labour Party (ILP) vacillated about whether to support limited female enfranchisement – which would benefit the wealthy – rather than universal suffrage that would give all working men the vote; it was too small in any event to wield influence. Women were reliant therefore on a favourably-minded MP winning the ballot for a private member’s bill and choosing to introduce a female suffrage bill which would, in all likelihood, be voted down or talked out without the support of party whips. Repeated such disappointments left many campaigners frustrated. And for young women, like Emmeline Pethick, growing up in the west of England, the issue seemed a dead one, an issue that had exercised her parents’ generation, but which had come to nothing, nor was likely to.

By 1900 there were scores of organizations promoting the vote for women. But they were often conflicted as to the means by which it might be achieved, and the terms on which it would be acceptable. The leading campaigning organization was the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). Led by Millicent Fawcett, it had thousands of members in affiliated branches all over the country. Its members tended to be respectable members of society, of professional and, in many cases eminent, families, for whom ‘militant’ action would have been inconceivable. They had written, petitioned and lectured for nearly forty years; they would wait as long as it took. There were others, however, who were not willing to wait. And they would seek not to convince – but to coerce.

In 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928) decided that women should stop putting their faith and their fates into the hands of male MPs who put party politics before commitment to an issue that, to them, was just one of many. The major parties had repeatedly failed women, she argued, and should be deprived of their female support. Rather than joining a mainstream party and raising funds for it in the hope of winning influence and gratitude, women should join an organization with one aim – to win the vote for women.

Emmeline Pankhurst was now in her forties. She was by nature a revolutionary, impatient and drawn to bold action. She had proposed living with Richard Pankhurst outside the conventions and legal inequalities of marriage in the 1870s but had been persuaded that the subsequent social ostracism would have prevented her from playing any part in public life. In 1886 the couple moved their young family from Manchester to London, where Emmeline opened a shop and her husband stood unsuccessfully for Parliament. He had been a long-term advocate of women’s suffrage and together they worked for women’s emancipation, cautiously and within the framework of the law. But they grew frustrated with existing suffrage societies who urged timid, piecemeal enfranchisement for unmarried and widowed women (rather than married women whose husbands, it was argued, represented the views of their households). They formed the more radical Women’s Franchise League in London in 1889. The short-lived League promoted not only female suffrage but equal legal rights for women and allied itself with socialists and trades unionists. Returning to Manchester, the Pankhursts were amongst the first members of the ILP founded by James Keir Hardie (1856–1915) in 1893. Emmeline stood for office as a poor law guardian. Appalled at what she saw, she campaigned for reform of inhumane conditions – particularly for women, children and babies – at the Manchester workhouse. In 1896 she narrowly avoided a prison sentence for ignoring a court order prohibiting the holding of ILP meetings at Boggart Hole Clough, her first taste of unlawful militant action.

Widowed in 1898, Mrs Pankhurst was working as a registrar for births, marriages and deaths in 1903. Many branches of the ILP excluded women and Mrs Pankhurst decided to form a Labour group for women that would campaign for social justice and the franchise for women in tandem. She formed the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) at her home at 62 Nelson Street on 10 October. The organization’s manifesto announced that achievement of the vote would be the most effective way of securing better working and living conditions for women. It was only later that the WSPU became a one-issue organization.

Mrs Pankhurst was in her element when in opposition – fighting against injustice, the law, even eventually against the whole male sex. She knew what she wished to sweep away and relished the fight. Her daughters too were of a revolutionary disposition. In 1903 her eldest daughter, Christabel Harriette Pankhurst (1880–1958), was studying law at the University of Manchester – though with little hope of practising since the profession was closed to women. Her second daughter, (Estelle) Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960), was about to win a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London. Her third daughter, Adela Constantia Mary Pankhurst (1885–1961), had just turned 18 and her son, Henry ‘Harry’ Francis, was still a schoolboy. (Her first-born son, Francis Henry, had died at the age of 4 in 1888.) Like her mother, whose business ventures had been uniformly unsuccessful, Christabel was more comfortable with the grand gestures of opposition and struggled to find a positive role for herself once the vote was won. Sylvia, however, had a clear vision of the world she wished to build, and the dogged determination to work for it through the small-scale initiatives that would relieve poverty and improve lives. It is perhaps not surprising that it was with Sylvia that Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence built the longest-lasting relationship.

The WSPU began life as a small and somewhat disorganized fringe group. Committed to direct action, Mrs Pankhurst adopted the motto ‘Deeds not Words’, but the organization initially differed from its established rivals not so much in tactics as in the nature of its support. Mrs Pankhurst sought to educate and convert Manchester’s working women to the cause, despite criticism from the Labour movement that she was putting the interests