# Transcript

MICHAEL PORTILLO
When we talk of suffragettes we’re referring to just one component of the suffrage movement. The main body was the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, called suffragists. It had been formed in 1897 as a political lobbying group uniting the disparate groups that had campaigned for women’s votes since the 1832 Reform Act. But in 1903 an iconic figure in the battle for women’s suffrage established a breakaway movement, as Professor June Purvis explains.
JUNE PURVIS
In 1903 Mrs Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union, or the WSPU as it became known. And she founded that because she was tired of the way women had been campaigning for so long for the vote for women and nothing had ever been produced. So she was tired of committees, she was tired of talk. And what she wanted was a new organisation that was women only and was concerned, as she said, with deeds not words. Initially the WSPU engaged in peaceful campaigning and then gradually, as these means failed, then the peaceful means of campaigning became more militant.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
The WSPU believed in direct action, embracing what they described as the ‘the argument of the stone’. Speaking in 1958, Charlotte Marsh made very plain what the expression meant.
CHARLOTTE MARSH
Well, it was a concerted effort on the part of women all over London to smash windows. It was on the 1st of March 1912 I went across to the station and bought a bunch of violets which I carried in my left hand. And in my right I carried a hammer. I walked down the Strand. When I got to a leather goods shop and then just bang and my hammer through the window. And I continued armed down the Strand for quite a way and did quite a lot of damage.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
The Pankhursts believed that lobbying local MPs and working within the constraints of the law would do little to overcome the bias in the political elite against enfranchising women. This newspaper report from The Times in April 1906 illustrates what they were up against in Parliament. The article quotes William Cremner MP.
READER
He opposed the motion, asserting that according to the last census there were three-quarters of a million more female than male voters. So adult suffrage meant handing the government of the country over to a majority of the electorate who were not men but women – at which there was much laughter in the House.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
In the face of such contempt, the suffragettes of the WSPU brought the campaign to the capital and targeted the government directly. But more protests brought more arrests and more women exposed to the harsh regime of prison. Instances of brutality and force-feeding fuelled the anger of the suffragettes and their action became ever more militant.
KRISTA COWMAN
Bombing came in very much towards the end of the campaign. One of the things that happens after 1912 is that prosecution of suffrage leaders, suffragette leaders, increases massively. Jail sentences increase massively. And the government start to prosecute for conspiracy. And that means that even if you’ve never been involved in militancy you can actually be arrested and you can face a very long prison sentence. Many women then decided, well if we’re going to be prosecuted for not actually doing anything, for just supporting, we might as well go and do something and do it clandestinely. And this is a very dramatic shift.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
As far as we know, militant suffragette actions didn’t claim a single life. But in Edwardian Britain people had been killed by other protest groups using similar methods of violence.
KRISTA COWMAN
Suffragette militancy is happening within a far broader context of political militancy. There is Irish militancy, there has been the Fenian bombing campaign in the late nineteenth century. There is the wave of strikes that sweep the country in 1911 and 1912, where we see the government bringing in the army against strikers. So this is not just women’s militancy, this is a whole spectrum of political militancy which is going on at the time.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
Does this mean that we should now accept that the suffragette movement also had a terrorist wing?
KRISTA COWMAN
One could describe it as a terrorist organisation. I think certainly the suffragettes stand within a broader spectrum of anarchists, of Fenians, of very militant trade unions, who were prepared to use violent means to achieve their ends. And certainly people in their day would describe them in those terms.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
Professor Purvis believes that definition is unfair.
JUNE PURVIS
I don’t agree with that at all. I mean there’s no one universally accepted definition of what a terrorist is. Now, Mrs Pankhurst would be horrified at that sort of means of trying to get your way politically because she never advocated the suffragettes killing anybody. That was really out of the question.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
We take women’s right to vote for granted now and might be prepared to forgive a little violence in pursuit of so just a cause. But Dr Christopher Bearman thinks we should see the campaign for women’s suffrage in the context of the time. Edwardian Britain was far from democratic.
DR CHRISTOPHER BEARMAN
The suffragette campaign happened in a country in which 40 per cent of men did not have the vote, in which no one who was not a householder had the vote. No son who lived with parents could vote. No solider who lived in barracks could vote. It was not then part of citizenship. The manhood suffrage campaign had been going since the 1760s and the 70s but there was no sustained campaign of violence.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
The most extreme militancy of the suffrage movement has been almost entirely forgotten. We’ve inherited images of women being carried away by burly policemen, of Emily Wilding Davison caught on film as she dies trampled under the hooves of the King’s racehorse. We remember suffering and martyrdom inflicted by an oppressive male state. Why don’t we recall arson, bombs and guns? Dr Hilda Keane of Ruskin College, Oxford, is an expert in public history. She thinks the WSPU branch of the suffrage movement was very conscious even at the time of the images it created, knowing that they would pass into history.
DR HILDA KEANE
Women who were active in the suffrage cause were not just involved in a political campaign but saw what they were doing as part of a historic movement, a historical moment in history. They saw this even as they were doing it. Hence the creation of particular iconography, badges, material culture, getting badges if you went to prison, for example. So when you get to the 1920s you’ll have an organisation established called the Suffragette Fellowship which is specifically set up, in their words, ‘to perpetuate the memory of the pioneers’. So they are saying we are making history and we are making sure that it isn’t forgotten.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
Eleanor Higginson, here speaking in 1968, was a suffragette and she saw how important maintaining media profile was to the WSPU leadership.
ELEANOR HIGGINSON
They had been asking for it for 60 years before Mrs Pankhurst started asking for it. And when they asked for it in drawing rooms in a polite manner. And of course that doesn’t attract the press, you see. So when Mrs Pankhurst started, the first thing she found out was sweet are the uses of advertisement and we had to keep the pot boiling.
DR HILDA KEANE
It was this idea of an individual taking a stand and, if you like, being a martyr to the cause. So, for example, on their banners, when they had demonstrations, they would have the image of Joan of Arc and Bodicea. So, militant women and individuals who died for an apparently just cause.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
That was how the WSPU wanted to be remembered, as victims and martyrs rather than as militants who might have killed.
KRISTA COWMAN
I think it probably is the case that we have forgotten a lot of the more violent incidents. I think there are several reasons for this. The first reason is historical. You have to think about why the WSPU campaign ends. It doesn’t end because they’ve succeeded, neither does it end because they’ve decided to stop. It ends because the First World War breaks out. And between 1914 and 1918 Europe sees carnage on such an unprecedented scale that all of the political militancy of that sort of preceding Edwardian code of the years 1900 to 1914 looks like children play acting in comparison with what comes after that. So I think that’s one reason that in the 1920s people aren’t anxious to revisit political militancy of that type because it just, it suddenly seems spurious in comparison with the real violence and the real carnage that’s been suffered during the war.