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I am a Suffragist and a Socialist”: The Relationship between the British Socialist and Suffrage Movements, 1884-1914

« Je suis suffragiste et socialiste » : relations entre les mouvements suffragiste et socialiste britanniques, 1884-1914
Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière

Abstracts

Although the link between socialism and suffragism can be traced back to the Owenite and Chartist movements of the 1830s and 1840s, between 1884 and 1914, the new phase of the campaign for women’s suffrage coincided with the socialist revival, then the emergence of the Labour Party. The relationship between the socialist and suffrage movements intensified, with a significant overlap of their respective memberships. Yet, the issue of women’s suffrage has generally been overlooked by historians of British socialism, and one has to look mostly to feminist historians to assess the importance of the relationship between the socialist and suffrage movements before the First World War. After a brief reminder of the composition and evolution of both movements in 1884-1914, this article will study their divisions and alliances relating to their main two debates: class v. sex, and adult v. women’s suffrage.

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Introduction

  • 1 Annot Robinson, “Labour and the W.S.P.U”, Labour Leader, 31 October 1912, p.7.
  • 2 June Hannam, “Isabella Ford (1855–1924) and Women’s Suffrage”, in June Purvis and June Hannam (eds) (...)
  • 3 Isabella Ford, Women and Socialism (London, Independent Labour Party, 1904), p.3.

1I am a suffragist and a Socialist”,1 Annot Robinson declared in the Labour Leader in 1912, a position that was far from exceptional at the time. Already in 1904, Isabella Ford, who had founded the Leeds Women’s Suffrage Society and the Leeds branch of the Independent Labour party in the 1890s,2 felt that “The Socialist movement, the Labour movement, and the Women’s movement, are but different aspects of the same great force [...] making for the reconstruction and regeneration of Society”.3 Admittedly, the link between socialism and suffragism can be traced back to the Owenite and Chartist movements of the 1830s and 1840s, but, between 1884 and 1914, the new phase of the campaign for women’s suffrage coincided with the socialist revival, then the emergence of the Labour Party, and the relationship between the socialist and suffrage movements intensified, with a significant overlap of their respective memberships.

  • 4 Karen Hunt, “Fractured Universality: The Language of British Socialism before the First World War” (...)
  • 5 Lily Gair Wilkinson, Revolutionary Socialism and the Woman's Movement (Glasgow, Socialist Labour Pa (...)

2Yet, in 1902, socialist and suffragist Dora Montefiore quoted a disgruntled socialist woman: “Honestly, I have little hope of making any impression on the mind of the ordinary male Socialist, who, I believe [...] has little or no sympathy with the women’s movement.”4 In 1910, Lily Gair Wilkinson, of the Socialist Labour Party, still wondered: “How far is Socialism in sympathy with feminism, and in what are the two movements antagonistic?5 There is no simple answer, but the relationship between the British socialist and suffrage movements can be studied though the two main debates which crystallised their alliances and divisions, including within their own ranks: class v. sex, and adult v. women’s suffrage. This will follow a brief reminder of the composition and evolution the British socialist and suffrage movements in 1884-1914, and a review of the historiography of their relationship.

From the socialist revival to the Labour Party

  • 6 See Marie Terrier, “Annie Besant’s Struggles against Political and Social Inequalities: From Radica (...)
  • 7 Mark Bevir, “Fabianism, Permeation and Independent Labour”, The Historical Journal 39.1, March 1996 (...)

3The Third Reform Act 1884 was one of the catalysts for a socialist revival, to further the cause of working-class interests and representation. In 1884, the Democratic Federation, founded by Henry Hyndman in 1881, became the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), and adopted a Marxist platform. In 1885, a breakaway group, led by William Morris, Ernest Belfort Bax, Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx, formed the Socialist League, which, like the SDF, promoted revolutionary socialism, though, after the League was taken over by anarchists in 1888, many members returned to the SDF. In 1903, in Scotland, another breakaway group led by James Connolly became the Socialist Labour Party (SLP). After the SDF became involved in the Labour Representation Committee (see below), there was another split in 1904, which led to the formation of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. There were also many local socialist groups, such as the Hammersmith Socialist Society, or the Bristol Socialist Society. Meanwhile, the Fabian Society, formed in 1884, was more of a think-tank. Its early members — George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Edward Pease or Annie Besant6 — were middle-class intellectuals, who attempted a socialist “permeation”7 of parliamentary politics. Then, in 1893, delegates from socialist organisations and labour representatives launched the Independent Labour Party (ILP).

  • 8 June Hannam and Karen Hunt, Socialist Women: Britain, 1880s to 1920s (London, Routledge, 2002), p.2

4The ILP had a membership of approximately 30,000 in 1912, while the SDF had 4,500 members at most, with about ten percent women in both cases. There was a higher proportion of women among the Fabians, but far fewer members.8 There were women's groups within these socialist organisations, such as the Women’s Committee of the SDF, established in 1905, or the Fabian Women’s Group, formed in 1908. The most important was the Women’s Labour League (WLL), founded in 1906.

5In 1900, trade unions — often reluctant to associate with socialists before — the ILP, the SDF and the Fabian Society came together in London, and passed James Keir Hardie’s motion to establish the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), with James Ramsay MacDonald as its secretary. At the General Election of 1906, won by the Liberal Party, twenty-nine LRC MPs were returned. The LRC was then renamed the Labour Party, and Keir Hardie became its leader, although the party was not officially socialist. In the general elections of 1910, the Labour Party returned forty MPs in January, and forty-two in December — on whom the Liberals, short of a majority, had to rely.

The suffrage movement from 1884 to 1914

  • 9 Annie Besant, Women and Politics: The Way Out of the Present Difficulty (London, Theosophical Publi (...)
  • 10 See David Rubinstein, Before the Suffragettes. Women’s Emancipation in the 1890s (New York, St. Mar (...)

6After the setback of the Third Reform Act 1884 which conferred the vote on working-class men in the countryside paying £10 rent, but did not grant the vote to women, the Women’s Franchise League was founded in 1889 in Manchester, by Harriot Stanton Blatch, Emmeline and Richard Pankhurst, and Ursula Mellor Bright. Contrary to other women’s suffrage societies, the League refused to support women’s suffrage measures that only applied to single women with property and did not include married women, and they collaborated with working-class women. In fact, by 1914, Annie Besant recalled “that the great impetus for women’s suffrage came largely from those working women of Lancashire and the North”,9 referring to the Manchester women textile workers, such as Ada Nield Chew and Selina Cooper, who became prominent in the 1890s suffrage movement, under the leadership of Eva Gore Booth and Esther Roper. They generally belonged to trade unions and the Women’s Co-operative Guild (WCG), and allied with local middle-class socialist suffragists. In 1893, a special appeal for women’s suffrage which specifically included working-class women went on to collect over 250,000 signatures, and a Lancashire and Cheshire Textile and Other Workers’ Labour Representation Committee was formed in 1903.10

  • 11 A condescending term coined by Charles E. Hands in the Daily Mail of 10 January 1906, but embraced (...)

7The Local Government Act 1894 extended the local franchise to women ratepayers, including married women. This removed a source of division between suffragists, and led, in 1897, to the creation of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett. Yet, in 1903, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst founded their own Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), whose first members came from the Manchester ILP, though the WSPU split from its socialist roots in 1906 — at least at national level. The split, as well as the suffragettes’11 increased militancy, and lack of democracy within the WSPU, led to the formation of the breakaway Women’s Freedom League (WFL) in 1907, led by Teresa Billington-Greig and Charlotte Despard. Meanwhile, in 1904, an Adult Suffrage Society (ASS) was established, to agitate for universal suffrage, with many members from the SDF and the ILP. Another adult suffragist society, the People’s Suffrage Federation (PSF) was formed by the WCG and the WLL in 1909.

8In 1910, the Liberal Government agreed to establish a Conciliation Committee for Women’s Suffrage, but, by 1912, all Conciliation Bills had failed to make it through Parliament. As a result, the NUWSS allied with the Labour Party, and launched the Election Fighting Fund (EFF) to support Labour candidates. In 1914, Sylvia Pankhurst formed the working-class-based East London Federation of the Suffragettes (ELFS), after she was excluded from the WSPU on account of her socialism. Finally, early in 1914, a new group, the United Suffragists, brought together former WSPU militants, and a number of socialists, including the Pethick-Lawrences, John Scurr and George Lansbury.

Historiography

9The issue of women’s suffrage has generally been overlooked by historians of British socialism. A. M. McBriar touched upon the subject over a few scattered pages in Fabian Socialism, in 1962, but Ross McKibbin completely ignored it in 1974 in his Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910-1924. Martin Crick only briefly mentioned women’s suffrage in 1994 in his History of the Social Democratic Federation, as did Keith Laybourn in 1997 in The Rise of Socialism in Britain. Even in 2011, Mark Bevir still only devoted a few paragraphs to the question in The Making of British Socialism.

  • 12 Olive Banks, Faces of Feminism: A Study of Feminism as a Social Movement (1981) (Oxford, Basil Blac (...)
  • 13 Mandy Leveratt, The Relationship Between Feminism and Socialism in England, 1883-1914 (PhD disserta (...)
  • 14 Pamela Graves, Labour Women: Women in British Working-Class Politics, 1918–1939 (Cambridge Universi (...)
  • 15 Joannou Maroula and June Purvis (eds), The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives (Ma (...)
  • 16 Laura E. Nym Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860-1 (...)

10So, one has to look mostly to feminist historians to assess the importance of the relationship between the British socialist and suffrage movements. In 1978, in One Hand Tied Behind Us: The Rise of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, Jill Liddington and Jill Norris revealed that many of the Lancashire working women who supported women's suffrage in the 1890s had close links with the ILP. In her Study of Feminism as a Social Movement (1981), Olive Banks also observed that “by the end of the 1890s and early 1900s the [suffrage] movement had entered a completely new phase. This was largely the result of [...] the increasing importance of the labour movement in British politics”.12 Mandy Leveratt concurred in her unpublished doctoral dissertation on The Relationship Between Feminism and Socialism in England, 1883-1914 (1991). To her “the women’s suffrage campaign is also critical for an understanding of the general relationship between feminism and socialism.13 In 1986, Sandra Holton’s Feminism and Democracy also placed the suffrage campaign at the centre of Labour politics. In her 1994 book, Labour Women, Pamela Graves suggested that women active in the socialist movement before 1914 could be described as the “suffrage generation”,14 and in 1998, Joannou Maroula and June Purvis stressed that the “Socialist current ran deeply through the twentieth-century suffrage movement”.15 Laura E. Nym Mayhall, who focussed on The Militant Suffrage Movement in 2003, also underlined “that a good many suffragettes retained ties to socialist politics and organizations”.16

11In 2002, in Socialist Women, June Hannam and Karen Hunt devoted a chapter to “The Socialist Press and the Suffrage Debate”, and another to socialist women active in the suffrage movement, that followed up on Hunt’s Equivocal Feminists: The Social Democratic Federation and the Woman Question 1884-1911 (1996). Another detailed study was Krista Cowman’s on “The Women’s Social and Political Union and the Independent Labour Party, 1903-14” (2002). Then, in Myriam Boussahba-Bravard’s Suffrage Outside Suffragism (2007), contributor Pat Thane discussed how members of the Labour Party had to position themselves on the suffrage question, in answer to the pressure coming from the suffragists within their own ranks.

12Liddington and Norris’s One Hand Tied Behind Us encouraged a number of local studies, such as Leah Leneman’s A Guid Cause: The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Scotland (1984), Cowman’s Mrs. Brown is a Man and a Brother: Women in Merseyside's Political Organisations, 1890-1920 (2004), or Hannam’s study of “Socialist Women and Women’s Suffrage in Bristol, 1910-1920” (2007). Many biographies of figures active in both movements also shed light on their complex relationship: Liddington’s Life and Times of a Respectable Rebel on Selina Cooper (1984), Margaret Mulvihill’s Charlotte Despard (1989), John Shepherd’s George Lansbury (2002), June Purvis’s Emmeline Pankhurst (2002), or Katherine Connelly and Rachel Holmes’ respective biographies of Sylvia Pankhurst (2013 and 2020).

Class v. sex

  • 17 Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) (New York, Intern (...)
  • 18 Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London (...)

13In 1884, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels made an analogy between sex and class: “[The man] is the bourgeois; the wife represents the proletariat”,17 and he explained that women would no longer be oppressed in a classless society. This strongly influenced British socialists’ view of women and their proposals to emancipate them. As a result, according to Barbara Taylor, from the 1880s onwards, most British socialists believed in “the primacy of class-based issues”, and “organised feminism was increasingly viewed not as an essential component of the socialist struggle, but as a disunifying, diversionary force”.18 In 1906, SDF member Harry Quelch thus argued:

  • 19 Karen Hunt, Equivocal Feminists: The Social Democratic Federation and the Woman Question 1884-1911 (...)

We, as Social Democrats, are concerned in maintaining and perfecting the solidarity of the working class. The suffragette agitation is wholly mischievous in its attempt to create a division in that solidarity, by endeavouring to establish in its stead a sex solidarity.19

  • 20 Sandra Stanley Holton, Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain 1900 (...)
  • 21 Catherine Durieux, “Les Femmes dans Nouvelles de Nulle Part” in Martine Faraut and Gilbert Bonifas (...)
  • 22 Leveratt, The Relationship Between Feminism and Socialism, p.95.
  • 23 Ernest Belfort Bax, “Some Current Fallacies on the Woman Question”, Social Democrat, 25 July 1897, (...)
  • 24 David Murray Young, People, Place and Party: The Social Democratic Federation 1884-1911 (PhD disser (...)
  • 25 Ethel Snowden, The Feminist Movement (London and Glasgow, Collins, 1912), p.140.

14Furthermore, as analysed by Holton, even socialist arguments in favour of women’s rights still largely drew on commonplace stereotypes of women’s nurturing and caring qualities.20 Thus, in William Morris’s 1890 utopian socialist novel News from Nowhere, women still favour the domestic sphere after a socialist revolution. To Catherine Durieux, this suggests that Morris could not reconcile his wish for equality and his Victorian belief in gender differences,21 while, to Leveratt, Morris “prefigured a tendency within some sections of the socialist movement [...] whereby the claims of feminists were perceived as secondary to the class struggle”.22 Within the SDF, the debate class v. sex also allowed Quelch and others, especially Belfort Bax, to express openly misogynistic views. Bax made his opinion clear in 1897 in “Some Current Fallacies on the Woman Question”: “As things are, women, by considering themselves in the light of a class, and agitating, not for equality, but for supremacy (the “equality” is a mere pretence) in class-fashion, are really creating a sex-antagonism”.23 SDF member Herbert Burrows disagreed, though, and strongly reacted to Bax’s 1908 pamphlet The Legal Subjection of Men, arguing “A movement on behalf of the majority of the human race will not be extinguished by a six-penny mud squit”.24 Bax went on to join the Men’s Anti-Suffrage League in 1909 and, in 1912, Ethel Snowden lamented that “Mr Belfort Bax is one of the foremost Socialists of his time, but he is a bitter and uncompromising opponent of feminism in all its branches.”25 In 1913, Bax went even further with The Fraud of Feminism, in which he explained that women should be denied the vote because of

  • 26 Ernest Belfort Bax, The Fraud of Feminism (London, Grant Richards, 1913), pp.24-25.

[...] the pathological mental condition peculiar to the female sex, commonly connoted by the term hysteria; the absence, or at best the extremely imperfect development of the logical faculty in most women; the inability of the average woman in her judgement of things to rise above personal considerations.26

  • 27 Karen Hunt, Equivocal Feminists, pp.180-1.

15In the end, according to Hunt, the SDF never took an official stand on the so-called Woman Question, conveniently seen as an issue of conscience.27

  • 28 Sally Alexander, “The Fabian Women’s Group, 1908-52” in Sally Alexander, Becoming a Woman and Other (...)

16For their part, the Fabian Society saw women’s issues in economic rather than political terms. In 1895, in a lecture on women industrial workers, Beatrice Webb expressed the dominant view among Fabians that sex emancipation could not be separated from class emancipation. When the Fabian Women’s Group was formed in 1908 by Charlotte Wilson, Maud Pember Reeves, and Charlotte Bernard Shaw, its first purpose was to “frankly deal with the economic problem from the woman’s standpoint”, and “equality in citizenship” only came second.28

  • 29 June Hannam, “Women and the ILP” in David James, Tony Jowitt and Keith Laybourn (eds), The Centenni (...)
  • 30 Liddington and Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us, p.131.
  • 31 Hannam and Hunt, Socialist Women, pp.108-24.
  • 32 Laura Ugolini, “It is Only Justice to Grant Women’s Suffrage: Independent Labour Party Men and Wome (...)
  • 33 It should be a
  • 34 See Deborah Mutch, “Making Space for Women: The Labour Leader, the Clarion, and the Women’s Column” (...)
  • 35 Hannam and Hunt, Socialist Women, p.90.

17The ILP claimed to be more sympathetic to women’s issues, yet their commitment to women’s emancipation was ambivalent. In 1913, Keir Hardie proudly asserted: “ours is the one political organisation wherein women stand on terms of perfect equality with men”,29 but, in 1927, Margaret McMillan recalled that the ILP “was not formed to champion women. [...] It was born to make war on capitalism and competition”.30 In 1904, William Anderson had dismissed the whole women’s suffrage issue, by asserting in the Labour Leader that it was inconsistent for a “Socialist party to lend its support to a movement which is deliberately attempting to distract the attention of women workers from the wrongs of their class to the wrongs of their sex” — although, by 1912, the same Anderson asserted that the ILP had always been active in “pressing the industrial, social and political claims of women”.31 Indeed, socialist attention to women’s issues often depended on political expediency: Laura Ugolini found that, until at least 1905, the ILP focused on economic questions because they needed the support of male trade unionists, and showed little interest in franchise reform.32 Meanwhile, hostility to the Woman Question was expressed by ILP individuals or even branches. Most women members were confined to gender-specific tasks, and, only a small minority of ILP office-holders were women33 — but there was no Conservative or Liberal party female office-holder at all at the time. True, unlike the SDF weekly Justice, the Labour Leader did not publish openly misogynistic statements, but, in 1906, working-class suffrage campaigner Hannah Mitchell complained about its women’s column34: “we don't want to read about food and clothes [] our lives are one long round of cooking and sewing”.35

  • 36 Liddington and Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us, p.45.
  • 37 Martin Pugh, “Labour and Women’s Suffrage” in K. D. Brown (ed), The First Labour Party, 1906-1914 ( (...)

18When the LRC was formed in 1900, and even when it became the Labour Party in 1906, there was still no agreement on women’s issues. The ILP held views generally more favourable to women than trade unions, but trade unions outvoted the ILP.36 Martin Pugh believed that, of all political parties, the Labour Party supported women the most, but he admitted that the party was still reluctant to give priority to women’s issues when it was not to their political advantage.37

19Isabella Ford had a fond, albeit slightly patronising memory of the visit to a Labour Club in Leeds that encouraged her to join the ILP in 1893:

  • 38 Barry Winter, The ILP Past and Present. Part I (Leeds: Independent Labour Publications, 2023)

[...] the men had been giving a tea party to the women, and had poured out the tea, cut the bread and butter, and washed everything up, without any feminine help and without any accidents! A party, that included the education of men, which had hitherto been so much neglected, as well as the education of women, that gave the one such skill and dexterity, and the other wider and truer views of life, was the party for me I felt, and so I joined.38

20However, misogynistic prejudice among the socialist rank and file, or within local branches, should not be dismissed, and ILP member Hannah Mitchell’s memories differed from Ford’s:

  • 39 Hannah Mitchell, The Hard Way Up (1968) (London, Virago, 1977), p.96.

I soon found that a lot of the Socialist talk about freedom was only talk and these Socialist young men expected Sunday dinners and huge teas with home-made cakes, potted meats and pies, exactly like their reactionary fellows.39

21As for H. T. Muggeridge, founder of the Croydon Socialist Society in 1895 and Labour councillor there from 1911, his son recalled:

  • 40 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p.56.

My father, an early socialist, felt in duty bound to be theoretically in favour of Votes for Women, but in private conversation with his cronies treated the subject with a certain derision. I feel sure that he neither hoped nor expected they would get the vote in his lifetime. The same went for his cronies, who were all fellow-socialists, or socialist sympathisers. They were on the whole a very masculine lot, and spoke with scarcely veiled contempt of male supporters of the suffragists like Pethick-Lawrence.40

22Nonetheless, the view that non-economic women’s issues were to be addressed only once socialism had been achieved was shared by a number of socialist women. In 1895, Eleanor Marx explained her position to Belfort Bax in an open letter published in Justice:

  • 41 Rachel Holmes, Eleanor Marx: A Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p.xiv

I am, of course, as a Socialist, not a representative of ‘Woman’s Rights.’ It is the Sex Question and its economic basis that I proposed to discuss with you. The so-called ‘Woman’s Rights’ question (which appears to be the only one you understand) is a bourgeois idea. I proposed to deal with the Sex Question from the point of view of the working class and the class struggle.41

  • 42 Hannam and Hunt, Socialist Women, p.65.

23In 1897, ILP member Enid Stacy argued that “The true aim of reformers is to consider neither men’s nor women’s rights qua men and women, but to secure to each human being such conditions as will conduce to full development as an individual”.42 In 1910, SLP activist Lily Gair Wilkinson, made it clear that, to her:

[...] the interests of working women are just the same as the interests of the working men — directly opposed to the interests of the members of the capitalist class, women and men alike. The question is one of class, not of sex.

  • 43 Wilkinson, Revolutionary Socialism, pp.5-9 (Wilkinson’s emphasis).

24Like Eleanor Marx, as a revolutionary socialist, Wilkinson also reminded her readers that “The feminist movement, like other reform movements, is of direct interest to the bourgeoisie only”, because, according to her, feminism “claims equal political and social rights for women within the framework of the present social system”.43

  • 44 Katherine Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire (London: Pluto P (...)
  • 45 Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, My Part in A Changing World (London, Hyperion Press, 1938), p.146.
  • 46 Leveratt, The Relationship Between Feminism and Socialism, p.309.
  • 47 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p.100.

25In October 1907, the first issue of the WSPU’s Votes for Women read: “if you have any class feeling you must leave that behind when you come into this movement”.44 This is the reason why, disappointed by the inability of many socialists to move beyond the class v. sex antagonism, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, albeit a socialist herself, had joined the WSPU in 1906. She explained that she had been “awakened to the fact that a system of socialism planned by the male half only of humanity would not touch on some of the worst evils that were engendered by a politically and socially suppressed womanhood”.45 Significantly, when the government’s repression of the suffragettes’ militancy increased in 1913, WSPU Christabel Pankhurst launched what she defined as a sex war: “what is needed for the regeneration of society is not the separation of women into various classes, different parties and divided camps but joint action for a common purpose46. Meanwhile, the NUWSS had come to a diametrically opposite conclusion, as expressed in their weekly Common Cause: “The question of the vote is no longer a question of sex [...] This is a question of democracy”.47

Adult v. women’s suffrage

  • 48 Hannam and Hunt. Socialist Women, p.119.
  • 49 Hunt, Equivocal Feminists, p.153.

26In 1895, Elsie Harker argued in the Labour Leader that the “women who are now agitating make the fact that they own property one of their chief arguments, […] What are they going to do for those who have no property?48 Her question reveals one of the main stumbling blocks that already affected the relationship between socialists and suffragists, and created divisions within both movements: the debate around adult v. women’s suffrage. Adult suffragists supported reforms that would abolish all property qualifications, and campaigned for disenfranchised men as well as women, while those referred to as women suffragists demanded women’s vote on the same terms as men, meaning, at the time, a limited, property-based, franchise. Although there was no agreement on the proportion of working-class women who would get the vote under such a franchise, many socialists believed it would amount to a so-called “ladies’ vote” and benefit the Conservatives. In 1892, SDF member Mary Gray believed that the demand for women’s vote was “a fraud and a snare for the working women of England”.49

  • 50 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p.54.
  • 51 Hunt, Equivocal Feminists, p.166.
  • 52 Teresa Billington-Greig, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Emancipation in a Hurry (London, Frank Pal (...)
  • 53 Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (London, Long (...)

27However, Holton underlined that adult suffrage could “connote [...] merely the extension of the existing sexually exclusive franchise to all adult males,”50 i.e. manhood suffrage — an ambiguity not lost on socialist women. In 1905, when Justice described the Transvaal Constitution as “quite democratic — manhood suffrage, and one man one vote”, Dora Montefiore reacted: “why bother to form adult suffrage leagues when the principle of manhood suffrage seems to be entirely satisfactory, and so ‘quite democratic’ to the SDF male writer?51 As a result, the sincerity of the socialists’ adult suffragist motives was often doubted. Billington-Greig asserted in 1911 that adult suffrage “was obviously raised to postpone our equality measure”.52 Sylvia Pankhurst believed that “a grave mistake was made in leaving the field of adult suffrage ­— the true field of the Labour movement — to those who were either hostile or indifferent to the inclusion of women”.53

  • 54 A popular socialist weekly, launched in 1891 in Manchester by Robert Blatchford. See Mutch, “Making (...)

28Within the ILP, the issue of adult v. women’s suffrage divided women too. In 1896, although ILP member Enid Stacy characterised the women’s movement as a Liberal and individualistic “middle-class fad”, she warned in The Clarion54:

  • 55 Leveratt, The Relationship Between Feminism and Socialism, pp.70-2.

The [Independent] Labour Party inscribes Adult Suffrage on its political programme; but in the mind of several of its masculine members there is a curious half-defined antipathy to it ­[... which] eagerly picks up and exhibits any item of news which is supposed to tell against the “New Woman”.55

  • 56 Liddington and Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us, p.181.
  • 57 Hannam and Hunt, Socialist Women, p.110.
  • 58 June Hannam, “Isabella Ford (1855–1924) and women’s suffrage”, pp.60-77.

29Isabella Ford, for her part, believed that women should have votes on the same terms as men, and so did Eva Gore-Booth, who explained in The Clarion in 1904 that “it would be easier and quicker to get a half-loaf than a whole one” — to which Julia Dawson answered that The Clarionhad no intention of [...] supporting any Bill in Parliament which leaves the oppressed and downtrodden out of the reckoning”.56 Ada Nield Chew and Jennie Baker also supported adult over women’s suffrage within the ILP between 1904 and 1907,57 but they were opposed by Selina Cooper, who sat on the ILP Executive from 1903 to 1907, and argued at LRC Conferences, with Keir Hardie’s support, that a Women’s Enfranchisement Bill was the only possible step towards adult suffrage.58

  • 59 Edward Pease, The History of the Fabian Society (New York, E. P. Dutton and C°, 1916), p.44.
  • 60 Mary Augusta Ward, “An Appeal Against Women’s Suffrage”, The Nineteenth Century, June 1889, pp.781-
  • 61 Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (London, Longmans, Green and C°, 1926), pp.342-3.
  • 62 Pease, The History of the Fabian Society, p.175.
  • 63 Ibid. pp.189-190.
  • 64 Leveratt, The Relationship Between Feminism and Socialism, pp.375-6.

30As for the Fabian Society, in 1916 Edward Pease asserted that they “had always been in favour of votes for women”, quoting their strangely worded Tract n°2 of 1884: “Men no longer need special political privileges to protect them against Women, and the sexes should henceforth enjoy equal political rights”.59 Yet, only two years before Beatrice Webb joined the Fabian Society in 1891, she had signed the “Appeal Against Women’s Suffrage”, published in The Nineteenth Century,60 later justifying this by reference to “the fact that I had never myself suffered the disabilities assumed to arise from my sex”.61 In 1893, the Fabian Society agreed that they should “draw up a tract advocating the claims of women to all civil and political rights at present enjoyed by men”. A committee chaired by Harriot Stanton Blatch was asked to produce it, but the resulting tract was not considered “suitable for publication”, and the committee was disbanded.62 In August 1907, the Second International and first Socialist Women’s International gathered in Stuttgart. Both opposed limited women’s suffrage and called for adult suffrage agitation. As a result, the Fabian Society declared in their new Basis that they were in favour of “equal citizenship of men and women”. Pease recalled that “many demurred to inserting it in the Basis”, including himself, Sidney Webb, Shaw, and Hubert Bland, because “equal citizenship of men and women” was “a question of Democracy rather than Socialism”, but the point was adopted thanks to “the vigorous part taken by the women of the Society under the leadership of Mrs [Maud Pember-] Reeves”. Pease added that almost “all the women of the Society joined one or more of the Suffrage Societies” at the time.63 In 1911, the Suffrage Committee of the Fabian Women’s Group was established to promote the Conciliation Bill “from the standpoint of Adult Suffrage”, while accepting to support any measure of enfranchisement that included women.64

  • 65 Hunt, Equivocal Feminists, p.169.
  • 66 Ibid., p.174.
  • 67 Hannam and Hunt. Socialist Women, p.1.

31It was also in 1907, following the Second International, that the SDF drafted its Manifesto on the Question of Universal Suffrage,65 and called on its branches “to cease to associate themselves with the middle-class propaganda of ‘Votes for Some Women’ and join in an active and militant propaganda for Adult Suffrage and Votes for All Women”.66 However, in 1909, in Justice, Montefiore still wished to remind suffragists: “the obtaining of the vote is not an end in itself [...] that end is the revolutionising of society for the benefit of all who are now exploited and oppressed”.67

  • 68 Caroline Rowan, “Women in the Labour Party, 1906-1920”, Feminist Review 12 (1982), pp.74-91, p.79.
  • 69 Margherita Rendel, “The Contribution of the Women’s Labour League to the Winning of the Franchise” (...)
  • 70 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p.60.
  • 71 Rendel, “The Contribution of the Women’s Labour League”, p.69.

32In 1907 too, the Women’s Labour League agreed to leave its members “free to agitate the [suffrage] question on whatever lines appear to them best68, but, in 1909, its Executive Committee affiliated to the People’s Suffrage Federation. As a result, Ethel Snowden and Billington-Greig resigned. Despard did not, but she warned that adult suffragists were “in many cases actually dishonest in their alleged desire to extend the franchise to women”.69 In 1910, the WLL refused to support the first Conciliation Bill, because it only provided for a limited extension of the franchise, so Ada Nield Chew wrote to Common Causethat to be determined to wait until all women can vote is as reactionary and impracticable as to oppose all reform because it does not go as far on our way as we wish it to go”.70 Eventually, in 1911, the WLL accepted to take part in the Women’s Suffrage Joint Committee of MPs and Societies, that aimed at granting the vote to women on a “democratic” basis.71

  • 72 Hannam and Hunt. Socialist Women, p.109
  • 73 Margaret Mulvihill, Charlotte Despard: A Biography (London, Pandora, 1989), p.196.
  • 74 Hannam and Hunt. Socialist Women, p.110.
  • 75 Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst, p.64.
  • 76 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p.63-4

33Meanwhile, all the main suffrage organisations demanded the franchise “on the same terms as it is or may be granted to men”, and most socialist suffragists committed to this argued that it was compatible with an adult suffrage position: in debating the Women's Enfranchisement Bill in 1904-5, Billington-Greig explained that women’s and adult suffrages should not be opposed because the one was part of the other.72 Despard even withdrew from the Adult Suffrage Society in 1906, to commit to women’s suffrage with the WSPU and, from 1907, the Women’s Freedom League,73 though in a reverse movement, Montefiore left the WSPU in 1907 and joined Margaret Bondfield in the ASS,74 while Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London Federation of the Suffragettes rallied to what she called “womanhood suffrage” — in effect, adult suffrage — in June 1914.75 In fact, according to Holton, adult suffragists always represented a significant minority in the suffrage movement, especially among socialist members, and the People’s Suffrage Federation was created in 1909 to try and unite adult and women suffragists within both movements.76

  • 77 Christabel Pankhurst, Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote (London, Hutchinson, 1959), p.18 (...)
  • 78 Hannam and Hunt. Socialist Women, p.114.
  • 79 Hunt, Equivocal Feminists, p.160.
  • 80 Wilkinson, Revolutionary Socialism, pp.8-9 (Wilkinson’s emphasis).
  • 81 Ibid., pp.18-9.

34For Christabel Pankhurst, however, by 1906, woman’s suffrage, no matter how limited, had become a symbolic end in itself: “Our main concern was not with the numbers of women to be enfranchised but with the removal of a stigma upon womanhood as such”.77 Julia Dawson answered in The Clarion that the suffragettes’ slogan should read: “Votes for some women”,78 and Herbert Burrows accused the WSPU of “purposely delud[ing] the women, especially the working women, to whom they address themselves into the belief that under that Bill they will all be enfranchised”.79 At the opposite end of the debate, in 1910, Socialist Labour Party member Lily Gair Wilkinson said that “the S.L.P. does not share the bourgeois horror of the mildly ‘militant tactics’ of the ‘Neo-Suffragists’”, but she stated her opposition not only to “limited Suffragists”, because suffrage would be granted to women on “a basis of property”, but also to “the illusive claims of the Adult Suffragists”, because, as a revolutionary socialist, she believed that “the suffrage in itself is neither desirable nor undesirable to the workers — its worth depends upon [...] the economic power by which it is backed up.80 Arguing “the impotence of the present Labour Party”, Wilkinson concluded by calling for “the complete emancipation of all, men and women alike, from the power of capital”.81

  • 82 Rendel, “The Contribution of the Women’s Labour League”, pp.57-83.
  • 83 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p.77.
  • 84 Senia Pašeta, Suffrage and Citizenship in Ireland, 1912–18 (University of London School of Advances (...)

35At the time, the Labour Party was still divided on the issue of adult v. women’s suffrage. In July 1910, the first Conciliation Bill passed its second reading with a large majority, including the vote of thirty-two of the forty-two Labour MPs. At the 1910 Labour Conference, Margaret Bondfield moved a resolution that “any attempt to exclude women should be met by the uncompromising opposition of organised Labour to the whole Bill”, but Henderson managed to get the words “to the whole Bill” dropped82 — as was the Conciliation Bill when Parliament was dissolved. In 1911, the second Conciliation Bill, that would have enfranchised more women, was championed by Labour MP Philip Snowden, and received an even larger majority during its second reading, but it was sabotaged by the Liberal government’s Manhood Suffrage Bill — a diversion, for the government knew full well that the Bill would never make it through Parliament.83 Snowden also tried to introduce a women’s local suffrage amendment to the Irish Home Rule Bill in 1912, but his amendment was voted down, including by Irish Nationalist MPs.84

  • 85 Rendel, “The Contribution of the Women’s Labour League”, p.70.
  • 86 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, pp.92-5.
  • 87 Rendel, “The Contribution of the Women’s Labour League”, p.72.
  • 88 Brown, Richard. Sex, Work and Politics: Women in Britain, 1780–1945 (CreateSpace, 2014) p.434.

36In February 1912, the Labour Party, the ILP, the Women’s Trade Union League and the Fabian Society held an adult suffrage meeting in the Albert Hall, whose concluding resolution demanded “Adult Suffrage, conferring full rights of citizenship on all men and women”. In March, the People’s Suffrage Federation organised a conference of working women, with the support of the Women’s Labour League. They agreed to ask for “the enfranchisement of every adult woman equally with every adult man as the only means of giving the workers of every class their due share in the government of the country”.85 That month, the third Conciliation Bill was introduced but, weakened by the Government’s own reform proposal and the WSPU’s increasingly unpopular militancy, it failed to obtain a majority at its second reading. The Liberal Government’s Suffrage Bill was eventually debated in January 1913, with two amendments proposed by Labour MPs: to omit the word “male” from the Bill, and a universal suffrage amendment, but the Bill was withdrawn on a point of order.86 At the Labour Party conference that immediately followed, ILP Harry Dubery’s resolution that no measure should be accepted that did not include women was carried by a large majority.87 Eventually, the Trades Union Congress held in Manchester in September passed Philip Snowden’s resolution “to oppose any Franchise Bill in which women are not included” by a two-third majority.88 Women’s suffragists within Labour had prevailed in the end.

Divisions and alliances

  • 89 Henry Mayers Hyndman, Further Reminiscences (London, Macmillan, 1912), p.290.
  • 90 Young, People, Place and Party, p.94.

37In 1912, Hyndman recalled: “At the time I knew her best [Mrs Pankhurst] was a socialist first and a suffragist afterwards [...] a valuable ‘asset’ of [...] the Independent Labour Party.”89 Richard and Emmeline Pankhurst had joined the ILP in 1893, and befriended Keir Hardie, who had included votes for women in his election addresses at Mid-Lanark and West Ham in the 1890s. In 1897, Emmeline Pankhurst was elected to the National Executive Committee of the ILP, and, in 1901, she was a delegate to the national ILP conference. The Pankhursts also supported George Lansbury when he stood as SDF Parliamentary candidate for Walworth in 1895.90 So, during the February 1903 Labour Conference, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst were disappointed that no mention was made of women’s suffrage. ILP John Bruce Glasier was chairman and recorded in his diary:

  • 91 Leveratt, The Relationship Between Feminism and Socialism, p.293.

A weary ordeal of chatter about woman’s suffrage from 10 p.m. to 1.30 a.m. — Mrs and Christabel Pankhurst belabouring me as chairman of the party for its neglect of the question. At last get roused and speak with something like scorn of their miserable individualist sexism, and virtually tell them that the ILP will not stir a finger more than it has done for all the woman suffragists in creation. Really the pair are not seeking democratic freedom, but self-importance.91

  • 92 Liddington and Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us, p.172.

38As a result, an angry Christabel Pankhurst wrote to The Clarion and Labour Leader: “I hope the women of England will not have to say that neither Liberal, Conservative, nor Labour parties are their friends.”92

  • 93 Krista Cowman, ‘‘‘Incipient Toryism’? The Women’s Social and Political Union and the Independent La (...)
  • 94 Liddington and Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us, p.176.
  • 95 Ibid., p.185
  • 96 Leveratt, The Relationship Between Feminism and Socialism, p.294.
  • 97 Liddington and Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us, pp.181-4.

39It was in this already tense context that the WSPU was launched in October 1903. Yet, as the ILP had no women’s section, the WSPU at first saw themselves as such. Julia Dawson announced in The Clarion that “some women members of the ILP have formed a committee for the promotion of women’s suffrage93, while, in the Labour Leader, the WSPU asked “all women Socialists to join in this movement to press upon the party and the community the urgent need of giving to women the vote”.94 Emmeline Pankhurst was an ILP delegate at the 1905 LRC conference, when the motion to commit the LRC to support a women’s suffrage bill as “an important step toward adult suffrage95 was opposed by Quelch. He moved an adult suffrage amendment carried by 483 votes to 270, arguing that: “it was not the place of the L.R.C. to place sex first; they had to put Labour first in every case”.96 This led to a debate in The Clarion, with Ada Nield Chew arguing that “working women and the Labour Party have surely better work to do than to fight the battles of women rich enough and intelligent enough to do it for themselves”.97

  • 98 Lyndsey Jenkins, “Singing ‘The Red Flag’ for Suffrage: Class, Feminism and Local Politics in the Ca (...)

40Yet, when the WSPU moved to London in 1906, their first branch outside Manchester was in working-class Canning Town, West Ham, in the East End, where Keir Hardie had been returned to Parliament in 1893, and the branch met in the local ILP club. Lyndsey Jenkins researched its minute book and found that ninety or so working women, led by Minnie Baldock and Alice Knight, made up the bulk of the membership. They took part in WSPU meetings and marches to Downing Street and Parliament that year, and a number of them ended up in prison. However, they began to worry that they would not get the vote if the demand was for women’s suffrage on equal terms with men. So, in January 1907, they decided to write to Keir Hardie to that effect. Not knowing that their letter had not been sent yet, Christabel Pankhurst made up an answer from Keir Hardie, suggesting that the branch members were too ignorant to understand the issue. Unsurprisingly, the branch collapsed at the end of 1907, though several members later joined Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London Federation of the Suffragettes.98

  • 99 Liddington and Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us, p.207.
  • 100 Brown, Sex, Work and Politics, pp.391-2.

41Actually, the question of adult v. women’s suffrage had already led to a split between the WSPU and the socialist movement. In August 1906, Robert Smillie stood as Labour candidate at the Cockermouth by-election in Cumberland. Christabel Pankhurst, Billington Greig, Mary Gawthorpe and Marion Coates-Hanson, all of them WSPU members, travelled there for the campaign — but Smillie was an adult suffragist, so they refused to support him, and the Conservative candidate won.99 The resulting tension between pro-ILP WSPU members and Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst reached breaking point in September 1907, when most of the socialist suffragettes joined the breakaway Women’s Freedom League. Their aim was still to secure women’s suffrage “on the same terms as it is or may be granted to men”, but the WFL constitution also called for “equality of rights and opportunities between the sexes; and to promote the social and industrial well-being of the community”.100

  • 101 Andrew Rosen, Rise Up, Women! The Militant Campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union 1903- (...)
  • 102 Krista Cowman, Mrs. Brown is a Man and a Brother:Women in Merseyside's Political Organisations, 189 (...)
  • 103 Cowman, “‘Incipient Toryism’?”, p.131.
  • 104 Ibid., p.142.

42Andrew Rosen argued that the WSPU then became an elitist, middle-class organisation.101 Locally, however, the relationship with socialists was not always severed: Cowman showed that the Liverpool branch of the WSPU, launched in 1905 by ILP member Alice Morrissey, still campaigned for Labour candidate John Hill during the Kirkdale by-election in September 1907, against the WSPU’s official position.102 As late as January 1913, when the Liverpool WSPU opened their new offices, the main speaker was ILP and Fabian John Edwards,103 who also organised the local memorial gathering for Emily Wilding Davison, the suffragette killed at the 1913 Epsom Derby.104

  • 105 Jill Liddington, Rebel Girls: Their Fight for the Vote (London, Virago, 2006), p.47.
  • 106 Liddington and Norris One Hand Tied Behind Us, p.213.
  • 107 See Holton, Feminism and Democracy, pp.76-96.
  • 108 Millicent Garrett Fawcett, What I Remember (London, T. F. Unwin, 1924), p.207.
  • 109 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p.97.
  • 110 Ibid., p.68.

43Meanwhile, since the NUWSS was established by Fawcett in 1897, its policy had been to support pro-women’s suffrage candidates in elections, regardless of political party. According to Liddington, the NUWSS long remained “irrationally optimistic about the Liberal Party”,105 yet, as early as 1907, socialists Ethel Snowden and Isabella Ford sat on the NUWSS Executive, while, in Lancashire, organisers were chosen among working-class ILP women.106 In April 1912, after the third Conciliation Bill failed and the Labour Conference carried the motion that no franchise reform should be accepted that did not include women, NUWSS Kathleen Courtney wrote to Henderson to negotiate an alliance.107 In May, as recalled by Fawcett, the NUWSS announced they would “strengthen any party in the House of Commons which adopts women’s suffrage as part of its official programme”, which amounted to a “declaration of support of the Labour Party, which was the only party which had made women’s suffrage part of its programme”.108 The NUWSS then launched the Election Fighting Fund to offer Labour candidates financial support, if they pledged to include women’s suffrage in their election address, to press the government to introduce a women’s suffrage bill, and to oppose any extension of the franchise that excluded women.109 The EFF was coordinated by ILP member Margaret Robertson.110

  • 111 Cowman, Mrs. Brown is a Man and a Brother, p.75.
  • 112 Leah Leneman, “A Truly National Movement: The View from Outside London” in Joannou Maroula, and Jun (...)
  • 113 Fawcett, What I Remember, p.208.
  • 114 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p.85.
  • 115 See “Suffrage-Labour Campaigning 1913-1914” in Holton, Feminism and Democracy, pp.97-116.

44Not all NUWSS branches were happy with this alliance, however. Cowman showed that “The Liverpool branch, with its strong leaning towards Liberalism, was outraged”.111 NUWSS support for the Liberals was also still strong in Glasgow and in South Wales, where suffragists were “rigidly opposed to the whole idea of the EFF”, as Leneman put it.112 Even Fawcett saw the alliance in strategic terms only, writing later: “we had not abandoned our non-party position [...] if another party made Women’s Suffrage part of its programme, we should have to revise our position”.113 Conversely, some among the Labour Party, especially MacDonald, feared that it might seem that the party had been bought by the NUWSS. So, it was decided that the EFF would sponsor individual candidates, not the party itself.114 The first EFF campaigns took place in the by-elections at Holmfirth, Hanley, Crewe and Midlothian, and were conducted by experienced suffragists and socialists Ada Nield Chew, Selina Cooper, and Annot Robinson. Between 1912 and the outbreak of war in August 1914, the Liberals lost eight by-elections. Although the Labour Party did not win any of them, the EFF clearly contributed to those defeats.115

  • 116 Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst, p.50.
  • 117 Leveratt, The Relationship Between Feminism and Socialism, p.312.
  • 118 Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst, p.51.
  • 119 Verna Coleman, Adela Pankhurst: The Wayward Suffragette 1885-1961 (Melbourne University Press, 1992 (...)
  • 120 Leveratt, The Relationship Between Feminism and Socialism, p.307.

45In a reverse movement, in September 1912, Christabel Pankhurst announced that since the Labour Party supported the Liberal Government, its candidates were to be opposed. In October, she wrote in the weekly The Suffragette that “a women’s war upon the Parliamentary Labour Party is inevitable”, unless Labour MPs voted against all Liberal Government Bills, even Home Rule for Ireland.116 In November, Keir Hardie wrote to Emmeline Pankhurst arguing that “the Labour Party, with all its shortcomings, is yet the only force in politics upon which the Women’s movement can depend”, and he declared the WSPU’s policy “suicidal”.117 No matter, in October 1913, Christabel Pankhurst asserted in The Suffragette that Labour were in such “servitude” to the Liberal Government, that the only hope for women’s suffrage was a Conservative victory at the next general election.118 Adela Pankhurst led the Sheffield WSPU, and was a fervent socialist, so, in 1912, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst forbade her from speaking on behalf of the WSPU. She emigrated to Australia in January 1914, never to return.119 Frederick and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence’s continued support for the Labour Party also led to their expulsion from the WSPU in October 1912. They owned the weekly Votes for Women, and, henceforth, the focus of the paper moved on to working women’s issues, the ILP and the Labour Party.120

  • 121 John Shepherd, George Lansbury: At the Heart of Old Labour (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp.103- (...)
  • 122 Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, p.438.
  • 123 Les Garner, “Suffragism and Socialism: Sylvia Pankhurst 1903–1914” in Ian Bullock and Richard Pankh (...)
  • 124 Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst, p.56.

46Labour MP George Lansbury, for his part, remained an enthusiastic supporter of the WSPU. In November 1912, he resigned his seat at Bow and Bromley, in the East End of London, to fight the resulting by-election on the issue of “Votes for Women”. James Keir Hardie and Phillip Snowden defied the official Labour Party line to support him, but the Conservative candidate was returned with the support of the Anti-Suffrage League. It took Lansbury ten years to regain the seat.121 Although a socialist, Sylvia Pankhurst was still loyal to the WSPU then, but Lansbury’s campaign made it possible for her to re-establish a WSPU branch in the East End of London.122 Throughout 1913 she developed relationships with local socialists. When suffragette meetings were banned and The Suffragette censored, the East End suffragettes protested together with trade unionists and socialists on Trafalgar Square in August. Keir Hardie, Will Thorne, and Dora Montefiore addressed the crowd.123 In November, Sylvia Pankhurst took part in a meeting in the Albert Hall, in support of Dublin’s locked-out workers and of James Larkin, the general secretary of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, who had been sent to prison. The meeting was organised by the Herald League, a socialist group gathered around Lansbury’s Daily Herald. Sylvia Pankhurst appeared on the platform alongside Lansbury, Charlotte Despard, Frederic Pethick-Lawrence, Dora Montefiore and James Connolly, in open defiance of her sister Christabel.124 As a result, in January 1914, Sylvia Pankhurst was summoned to Paris, where Christabel had fled, to be told by the latter, with Emmeline Pankhurst’s approval, that the East London branch could no longer be affiliated to the WSPU.

Conclusion

  • 125 Garner, “Suffragism and Socialism”, p.76.

47By 1914, Christabel Pankhurst was working against the tide, for, as Beatrice Webb explained in The New Statesman in February, “the whole of the women’s movement finds itself side-stepping almost unintentionally, into Labour and Socialist politics”.125 Holton agreed that, in the last few months before the war, “a major section of the suffrage movement was moving into an even deeper alliance with the Labour Party”. Webb was commenting on a meeting organised in the Albert Hall by suffragists, trade unions, Labour councils and ILP branches, during which over £6,000 had been donated to a Women’s Suffrage Mandate Fund to fight the next general election.

  • 126 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p.100.

48In the early summer of 1914, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and George Lansbury toured Scotland on behalf of the United Suffragists, and were warmly received by local WSPU branches. In view of this, Holton argued that Sylvia Pankhurst’s ELFS should be viewed as part of a general closer association of the militant wing of the suffrage movement with what she described as “the rebel socialist movement around the Daily Herald League”.126 The association might have been even broader, as NUWSS Catherine Marshall wrote to Liberal MP Francis Acland at the time:

  • 127 Ibid., pp.128-9.

The present state of things is creating a revolutionary spirit in the women’s movement (quite apart from militancy) which will inevitably help to stimulate and join hands with the revolutionary element in the Labour movement. [...] It affects not only this country but the whole of Europe, because the Women’s Movement, with the Socialist Movement, tends to develop strongly on international lines.127

  • 128 Ibid., pp.125-126.

49In the context of the Great Unrest, the disruptive potential of this suffragist and socialist alliance may explain Prime Minister Asquith’s reception of the deputation of East End suffragettes in June 1914, and the fact that, just before war was declared, Lloyd George, with Asquith’s approval, began negotiations with Sylvia Pankhurst and George Lansbury. Lansbury later claimed that an agreement had been reached, with Lloyd George promising that he, Edward Grey and John Simon would pledge to refuse office in any government that did not take up women’s suffrage.128

50Knowing this, it might be argued that women’s war effort was not the reason why they were granted a limited parliamentary suffrage in 1918, but that the war had actually postponed what would probably have been a wider women’s suffrage, after the general election that should have taken place in 1915. In 1911 already, Teresa Billington-Greig concluded her essay on The Militant Suffrage Movement on the revolutionary power of the alliance between suffragists and socialists that she believed was coming:

  • 129 Billington-Greig, The Militant Suffrage Movement, p.214.

The germ of the political virus is in the air. It is a mad, strange world, and we women are as mad as the rest of its inhabitants. Just when all the signs of the times point to the breakdown of Parliamentary systems, when the hollowness of the party sham, and the ineffectiveness of governing machinery is becoming impossible of denial, we find the new clamour set up by workers and women to get their rights in the political arena. If their getting them will mean a clean sweep of present ineptitudes and stupidities then we may hope much from their success.129

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Pankhurst, Sylvia, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (London, Longman, Green and Co., 1931).

Pašeta, Senia, Suffrage and Citizenship in Ireland, 1912–18 (University of London School of Advanced Study, Institute of Historical Research Shorts, 2019).

Pease, Edward, The History of the Fabian Society (New York, E. P. Dutton and C°, 1916).

Pethick-Lawrence, Emmeline, My Part in A Changing World (London, Hyperion Press, 1938).

Pugh, Martin, ‘Labour and Women’s Suffrage’ in K. D. Brown (ed), The First Labour Party, 1906-1914 (London, Croom Helm, 1985) pp.233-253.

Purvis, June, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (London, Routledge, 2002).

Rendel, Margherita, ‘The Contribution of the Women’s Labour League to the Winning of the Franchise’ in Lucy Middleton (ed.), Women in the Labour Movement: The British Experience (London, Croom Helm, 1977), pp.57-83.

Robinson, Annot, ‘Labour and the W.S.P.U’, Labour Leader (31 October 1912) p.7.

Rosen, Andrew, Rise Up, Women! The Militant Campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union 1903-1914 (London, Routledge, 2012).

Rowan, Caroline, ‘Women in the Labour Party, 1906-1920’, Feminist Review 12 (1982), pp.74-91.

Rubinstein, David, Before the Suffragettes. Women's Emancipation in the 1890s (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1986).

Shepherd, John, George Lansbury: At the Heart of Old Labour (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002).

Snowden, Ethel, The Feminist Movement (London and Glasgow, Collins, 1912).

Taylor, Barbara, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London, Virago, 1983).

Thane, Pat, ‘Women in the Labour Party and Women’s Suffrage’ in Myriam Boussahba-Bravard (ed.), Suffrage Outside Suffragism: Women’s Vote in Britain, 1880-1914 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp.35-51.

Terrier, Marie, ‘Annie Besant’s Struggles against Political and Social Inequalities: From Radicalism to Socialism (1874–1890)’ in Muriel Pécastaing-Boisssière, Annie Besant (1847-1933): Struggles and Quest (London, Theosophical Publishing House, 2017), pp.151-194.

Ugolini, Laura, ‘It is Only Justice to Grant Women’s Suffrage: Independent Labour Party Men and Women’s Suffrage 1893-1905’ in Claire Eustance, Joan Ryan and Laura Ugolini (eds.), A Suffrage Reader: Charting Directions in British Suffrage History (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1999), pp.126-145.

Ward, Mary Augusta, ‘An Appeal Against Women’s Suffrage’, The Nineteenth Century (June 1889), pp.781-3.

Webb, Beatrice, My Apprenticeship (London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1926).

Wilkinson, Lily Gair, Revolutionary Socialism and the Woman's Movement (Glasgow, Socialist Labour Party, 1910).

Winter, Barry, The ILP Past and Present. Part I (Leeds, Independent Labour Publications, 2023).

Young, David Murray, People, Place and Party: The Social Democratic Federation 1884-1911 (PhD dissertation, Durham University, 2003).

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Notes

1 Annot Robinson, “Labour and the W.S.P.U”, Labour Leader, 31 October 1912, p.7.

2 June Hannam, “Isabella Ford (1855–1924) and Women’s Suffrage”, in June Purvis and June Hannam (eds), The British Women’s Suffrage Campaign: National and International Perspectives (Abingdon, Routledge, 2021), pp.60-77.

3 Isabella Ford, Women and Socialism (London, Independent Labour Party, 1904), p.3.

4 Karen Hunt, “Fractured Universality: The Language of British Socialism before the First World War” in John Belchem and Neville Kirk (eds), Languages of Labour (1997) (London, Routledge, 2017), pp.65-80, p.42.

5 Lily Gair Wilkinson, Revolutionary Socialism and the Woman's Movement (Glasgow, Socialist Labour Party, 1910), p.3.

6 See Marie Terrier, “Annie Besant’s Struggles against Political and Social Inequalities: From Radicalism to Socialism (1874–1890)” in Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière, Annie Besant (1847-1933): Struggles and Quest (London, Theosophical Publishing House, 2017), pp.151-194.

7 Mark Bevir, “Fabianism, Permeation and Independent Labour”, The Historical Journal 39.1, March 1996, pp.179-196, p.179.

8 June Hannam and Karen Hunt, Socialist Women: Britain, 1880s to 1920s (London, Routledge, 2002), p.2.

9 Annie Besant, Women and Politics: The Way Out of the Present Difficulty (London, Theosophical Publishing Society, 1914), p.11.

10 See David Rubinstein, Before the Suffragettes. Women’s Emancipation in the 1890s (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1986).

11 A condescending term coined by Charles E. Hands in the Daily Mail of 10 January 1906, but embraced by the WSPU, to distinguish themselves from NUWSS suffragists. Elizabeth Crawford, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, 1866–1928 (London, UCL Press, 1999) p.452.

12 Olive Banks, Faces of Feminism: A Study of Feminism as a Social Movement (1981) (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986), p.122.

13 Mandy Leveratt, The Relationship Between Feminism and Socialism in England, 1883-1914 (PhD dissertation, Australian National University, 1991), p.270.

14 Pamela Graves, Labour Women: Women in British Working-Class Politics, 1918–1939 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p.14.

15 Joannou Maroula and June Purvis (eds), The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives (Manchester University Press, 1998), pp.6-7.

16 Laura E. Nym Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860-1930 (Oxford University Press, 2003), p.38.

17 Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) (New York, International Publishers, 1892), p.61.

18 Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London, Virago, 1983), pp.xv-xvi.

19 Karen Hunt, Equivocal Feminists: The Social Democratic Federation and the Woman Question 1884-1911 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.169.

20 Sandra Stanley Holton, Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain 1900-1918 (1986) (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.57.

21 Catherine Durieux, “Les Femmes dans Nouvelles de Nulle Part” in Martine Faraut and Gilbert Bonifas (eds), Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, William Morris, 13.1, 2004, pp.2-5.

22 Leveratt, The Relationship Between Feminism and Socialism, p.95.

23 Ernest Belfort Bax, “Some Current Fallacies on the Woman Question”, Social Democrat, 25 July 1897, pp.201-205.

24 David Murray Young, People, Place and Party: The Social Democratic Federation 1884-1911 (PhD dissertation, Durham University, 2003), p.95.

25 Ethel Snowden, The Feminist Movement (London and Glasgow, Collins, 1912), p.140.

26 Ernest Belfort Bax, The Fraud of Feminism (London, Grant Richards, 1913), pp.24-25.

27 Karen Hunt, Equivocal Feminists, pp.180-1.

28 Sally Alexander, “The Fabian Women’s Group, 1908-52” in Sally Alexander, Becoming a Woman and Other Essays in 19th and 20th Century Feminist History (London, Virago, 1994), pp.149-158.

29 June Hannam, “Women and the ILP” in David James, Tony Jowitt and Keith Laybourn (eds), The Centennial History of the ILP (Halifax, Ryburn Publishing, 1992), pp.205-228, p.205.

30 Liddington and Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us, p.131.

31 Hannam and Hunt, Socialist Women, pp.108-24.

32 Laura Ugolini, “It is Only Justice to Grant Women’s Suffrage: Independent Labour Party Men and Women’s Suffrage 1893-1905” in Claire Eustance, Joan Ryan and Laura Ugolini (eds), A Suffrage Reader: Charting Directions in British Suffrage History (Leicester University Press, 1999), pp.126-145.

33 It should be a

34 See Deborah Mutch, “Making Space for Women: The Labour Leader, the Clarion, and the Women’s Column” in Alexis Easley, Clare Gill and Beth Rodgers (eds), Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s-1900s: The Victorian Period (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. 365-378.

35 Hannam and Hunt, Socialist Women, p.90.

36 Liddington and Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us, p.45.

37 Martin Pugh, “Labour and Women’s Suffrage” in K. D. Brown (ed), The First Labour Party, 1906-1914 (London, Croom Helm, 1985) pp.233-253.

38 Barry Winter, The ILP Past and Present. Part I (Leeds: Independent Labour Publications, 2023)

39 Hannah Mitchell, The Hard Way Up (1968) (London, Virago, 1977), p.96.

40 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p.56.

41 Rachel Holmes, Eleanor Marx: A Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p.xiv

42 Hannam and Hunt, Socialist Women, p.65.

43 Wilkinson, Revolutionary Socialism, pp.5-9 (Wilkinson’s emphasis).

44 Katherine Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire (London: Pluto Press, 2013), p.29.

45 Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, My Part in A Changing World (London, Hyperion Press, 1938), p.146.

46 Leveratt, The Relationship Between Feminism and Socialism, p.309.

47 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p.100.

48 Hannam and Hunt. Socialist Women, p.119.

49 Hunt, Equivocal Feminists, p.153.

50 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p.54.

51 Hunt, Equivocal Feminists, p.166.

52 Teresa Billington-Greig, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Emancipation in a Hurry (London, Frank Palmer, 1911), p.23.

53 Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (London, Longman, Green and C°, 1931), p.248.

54 A popular socialist weekly, launched in 1891 in Manchester by Robert Blatchford. See Mutch, “Making Space for Women: The Labour Leader, the Clarion, and the Women’s Column”, pp. 365-378.

55 Leveratt, The Relationship Between Feminism and Socialism, pp.70-2.

56 Liddington and Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us, p.181.

57 Hannam and Hunt, Socialist Women, p.110.

58 June Hannam, “Isabella Ford (1855–1924) and women’s suffrage”, pp.60-77.

59 Edward Pease, The History of the Fabian Society (New York, E. P. Dutton and C°, 1916), p.44.

60 Mary Augusta Ward, “An Appeal Against Women’s Suffrage”, The Nineteenth Century, June 1889, pp.781-3

61 Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (London, Longmans, Green and C°, 1926), pp.342-3.

62 Pease, The History of the Fabian Society, p.175.

63 Ibid. pp.189-190.

64 Leveratt, The Relationship Between Feminism and Socialism, pp.375-6.

65 Hunt, Equivocal Feminists, p.169.

66 Ibid., p.174.

67 Hannam and Hunt. Socialist Women, p.1.

68 Caroline Rowan, “Women in the Labour Party, 1906-1920”, Feminist Review 12 (1982), pp.74-91, p.79.

69 Margherita Rendel, “The Contribution of the Women’s Labour League to the Winning of the Franchise” in Lucy Middleton (ed), Women in the Labour Movement: The British Experience (London, Croom Helm, 1977), pp.57-83.

70 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p.60.

71 Rendel, “The Contribution of the Women’s Labour League”, p.69.

72 Hannam and Hunt. Socialist Women, p.109

73 Margaret Mulvihill, Charlotte Despard: A Biography (London, Pandora, 1989), p.196.

74 Hannam and Hunt. Socialist Women, p.110.

75 Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst, p.64.

76 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p.63-4

77 Christabel Pankhurst, Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote (London, Hutchinson, 1959), p.186.

78 Hannam and Hunt. Socialist Women, p.114.

79 Hunt, Equivocal Feminists, p.160.

80 Wilkinson, Revolutionary Socialism, pp.8-9 (Wilkinson’s emphasis).

81 Ibid., pp.18-9.

82 Rendel, “The Contribution of the Women’s Labour League”, pp.57-83.

83 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p.77.

84 Senia Pašeta, Suffrage and Citizenship in Ireland, 1912–18 (University of London School of Advances Study, Institute of Historical Research Shorts, 2019), pp.11-2.

85 Rendel, “The Contribution of the Women’s Labour League”, p.70.

86 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, pp.92-5.

87 Rendel, “The Contribution of the Women’s Labour League”, p.72.

88 Brown, Richard. Sex, Work and Politics: Women in Britain, 1780–1945 (CreateSpace, 2014) p.434.

89 Henry Mayers Hyndman, Further Reminiscences (London, Macmillan, 1912), p.290.

90 Young, People, Place and Party, p.94.

91 Leveratt, The Relationship Between Feminism and Socialism, p.293.

92 Liddington and Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us, p.172.

93 Krista Cowman, ‘‘‘Incipient Toryism’? The Women’s Social and Political Union and the Independent Labour Party, 1903-14”, History Workshop 53,1, 2002, pp.128-148, p.135.

94 Liddington and Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us, p.176.

95 Ibid., p.185

96 Leveratt, The Relationship Between Feminism and Socialism, p.294.

97 Liddington and Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us, pp.181-4.

98 Lyndsey Jenkins, “Singing ‘The Red Flag’ for Suffrage: Class, Feminism and Local Politics in the Canning Town Branch of the Women’s Social and Political Union, 1906–7” in Alexandra Hughes-Johnson and Lyndsey Jenkins (eds.), The Politics of Women's Suffrage: Local, National and International Dimensions (London, Institute of Historical Research, 2021), pp.59-85.

99 Liddington and Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us, p.207.

100 Brown, Sex, Work and Politics, pp.391-2.

101 Andrew Rosen, Rise Up, Women! The Militant Campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union 1903-1914, (London, Routledge, 2012), pp.84-85.

102 Krista Cowman, Mrs. Brown is a Man and a Brother:Women in Merseyside's Political Organisations, 1890-1920 (Liverpool University Press, 2004), pp.57-87.

103 Cowman, “‘Incipient Toryism’?”, p.131.

104 Ibid., p.142.

105 Jill Liddington, Rebel Girls: Their Fight for the Vote (London, Virago, 2006), p.47.

106 Liddington and Norris One Hand Tied Behind Us, p.213.

107 See Holton, Feminism and Democracy, pp.76-96.

108 Millicent Garrett Fawcett, What I Remember (London, T. F. Unwin, 1924), p.207.

109 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p.97.

110 Ibid., p.68.

111 Cowman, Mrs. Brown is a Man and a Brother, p.75.

112 Leah Leneman, “A Truly National Movement: The View from Outside London” in Joannou Maroula, and June Purvis (eds.), The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives (Manchester University Press, 1998), pp.37-50, p.46.

113 Fawcett, What I Remember, p.208.

114 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p.85.

115 See “Suffrage-Labour Campaigning 1913-1914” in Holton, Feminism and Democracy, pp.97-116.

116 Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst, p.50.

117 Leveratt, The Relationship Between Feminism and Socialism, p.312.

118 Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst, p.51.

119 Verna Coleman, Adela Pankhurst: The Wayward Suffragette 1885-1961 (Melbourne University Press, 1992), pp.48-52.

120 Leveratt, The Relationship Between Feminism and Socialism, p.307.

121 John Shepherd, George Lansbury: At the Heart of Old Labour (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp.103-137.

122 Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, p.438.

123 Les Garner, “Suffragism and Socialism: Sylvia Pankhurst 1903–1914” in Ian Bullock and Richard Pankhurst (eds.), Sylvia Pankhurst: From Artist to Anti-Fascist (New York, St Martin’s Press, 1992), pp.58-86, p.74.

124 Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst, p.56.

125 Garner, “Suffragism and Socialism”, p.76.

126 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p.100.

127 Ibid., pp.128-9.

128 Ibid., pp.125-126.

129 Billington-Greig, The Militant Suffrage Movement, p.214.

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References

Electronic reference

Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière, ““I am a Suffragist and a Socialist”: The Relationship between the British Socialist and Suffrage Movements, 1884-1914”Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique [Online], XXX-1 | 2025, Online since 13 January 2025, connection on 20 April 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/13398; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/133dl

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About the author

Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière

Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière is a Senior Lecturer in British Civilisation at Sorbonne University. Her current research focuses on the links between feminism, socialism, and alternative spiritual movements in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. She is the author of the biography Annie Besant (1847-1933): Struggles and Quest, published in London by TPH in 2017.

Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière est Maîtresse de conférences en Civilisation britannique à Sorbonne Université. Sa recherche actuelle porte sur les liens entre féminisme, socialisme, et spiritualités alternatives, aux époques victorienne et édouardienne. Elle est l’auteure de la biographie Annie Besant (1847-1933) : Struggles and Quest, publiée à Londres chez TPH en 2017.

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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