The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860–1930

Abstract

The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860–1930, by Laura E. Nym Mayhall (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2003; pp. xiii + 218. £30). Few topics in modern British history divide historians on ideological grounds as sharply as suffragette militancy. That will doubtless continue to be the case as long as the focus is on its more violent and spectacular activities and their effects in promoting or delaying votes for women. Yet much of the most interesting recent work in suffrage studies has aimed instead to help us understand the nature of the movement in its contemporary context—the many-stranded and overlapping manifestations of militant and constitutional suffrage activism, the formative influence of radical political traditions on their culture and practices. It is in this spirit that Laura Nym Mayhall has carried out her study of suffragette political theory. Her claim is, in fact, that the rationale of militancy for its Edwardian exponents can only be understood in the context of debates about citizenship that flourished in the era of parliamentary reform but more or less came to an end after 1918. The 1832 and 1867 Reform Acts drew women into these debates. Was citizenship a privileged status enjoyed by those with appropriate qualifications, or—as in the classical republican tradition that appealed to radicals—a civic duty? Either tradition could justify votes for women. In the South African War (1899–1902), for example, patriots dwelt on British women's potential for service to the Empire, while ‘pro-Boers’ asserted the duty to resist a war to which citizen taxpayers did not give their consent. It was, however, the classical republican stance that provided inspiration for suffrage militancy. Dora Montefiore's tax resistance protests of 1904–6 were foreshadowed by her refusal to pay income tax in war-time. As a form of civil disobedience this was by no means novel: there were historical precedents for withholding taxes, and contemporary parallels too, as in the campaign waged by nonconformists against the Education Act of 1902. In chapters on militant protests against parliamentary and judicial resistance to women's suffrage before 1912, Mayhall shows that suffragettes based their actions on a political theory that required resistance to tyranny and on carefully studied precedents, placing themselves squarely within the British radical tradition. They invoked the right to petition and post proclamations in defence of that right; to mount demonstrations, question ministers publicly, and intervene in elections in support of women's suffrage. The Tax Resistance League and the boycott of the 1911 census expressed the right to withhold consent from a government that denied women full citizenship. The Pankhursts' WSPU went a step further, arguing that constitutional progress in Britain—from Magna Carta to the nineteenth-century Reform Acts—had not come about without violence. But before 1912 even they treated the law courts with respect, using trials to mount reasoned vindications of the constitutional basis of militancy and expose the overt anti-suffragist bias of the judiciary. In these years there was much common ground between factions that adopted different tactics in pursuit of votes for women. The ‘essence of the Militant creed’, as Emmeline Pethick Lawrence put it, was simply ‘ceasing to approach politics as suppliants entreating favours’. Mayhall goes on to examine the two great causes of disruption within the movement in later years. The arson campaign of 1912–14 was a dreadful mistake, in the eyes of many militants as well as the ‘law-abiding’ suffragist majority, alienating sympathy just at the point when not only parliament but even the government seemed willing to concede votes for women. Equally distressing to some old allies was the Pankhursts' militaristic identification with the war effort from 1914; although there were suffragettes who found ways of keeping the radical tradition alive by work for the civil rights of women and others oppressed by the war-time regime. This is a timely and convincing book, drawing fruitfully on current research in political theory and suffrage history, including the author's own work on the Women's Freedom League. It is not wholly reliable on matters of fact—the terms of the first and second Reform Acts and the 1910 Conciliation Bill are not correctly given, and the term ‘women's organizations’ is applied to bodies with a mixed male and female membership (the Primrose League, the Church League for Women's Suffrage). But as an interpretation of suffrage militancy it opens up new and interesting perspectives.