Women's Social And Political Union Research Articles

Shaping a Collective Identity through Self-Representation: Early Suffrage Autobiographies and the Militant Experience

This essay aims to demonstrate the interdependent relationship between self-representation and collective identity in the militant suffrage campaign by focusing on two early suffragette autobiographies, Emmeline Pankhurst’s My Own Story and Constance Lytton’s Prisons and Prisoners. Both published in 1914, these autobiographies establish a common militant experience in the suffrage campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) through the personal accounts and testimonies of their authors. Transformed into political tools, these autobiographies blur the limits between private experience and public sharing. Constance Lytton and Emmeline Pankhurst indeed share how personal narratives fit with political objectives and manifest a collective purpose: that of promoting and legitimizing the militant suffrage campaign. Studying Lytton’s and Pankhurst’s militant experiences portrayed in their autobiographies, observing the reception of these personal writings, or identifying the way the militant spirit is built through reproductions of personal experiences will therefore demonstrate how self-representation shaped and supported the WSPU’s collective identity. The reproduction of imprisonments, hunger strikes or other militant actions assert defining characteristics of militant experience and contribute to emphasise a collective identity built upon self-sacrifice, devotion, and martyrdom. While these autobiographies demonstrate how the self-representation of individual experiences had a collective purpose and influence over a community, they also describe how notions of self-representation and collective identity are reciprocal. Lytton’s autobiography, for instance, represents her journey as a suffragette who sought to fit in by adapting her militancy to the movement’s collective identity. Therefore, My Own Story and Prisons and Prisoners not only act as platforms to share one’s story of the suffrage movement but also demonstrate the political power of personal experiences in creating a spirituality that included personal militant experiences into a greater collective environment. These early suffrage autobiographies thus become essential tools in questioning and understanding the relationship between personal and collective, private and public.

Early women barristers and the negotiation of professional and political identity

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between first-wave feminist political activism and the professional identities of early women lawyers through detailed contextual consideration of two women: Elsie Bowerman and Chrystal Macmillan. Bowerman was a keen member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). She was Christabel Pankhurst’s election agent for the 1918 general election and founded the Women’s Guild of Empire with fellow suffragette Flora Drummond. Bowerman was called to the Bar in 1924 and practised until 1938. Chrystal Macmillan was a leading member of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), the first woman to plead her case in the House of Lords, and a successful barrister whose feminist politics extended beyond the granting of suffrage to women. Much of her post-World War One activism focused on opposing the practice of assigning married women their husband’s identity. This article illuminates the multiple links between Bowerman and Macmillan’s roles as barristers and political activists, by exploring the ways in which complex societal expectations of women’s behaviour interacted with their wish to challenge gendered inequality. Consequently, it complicates our understanding of women entering the professions, feminist activism, and the relationship between law and politics during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Viewpoint: engaging the public with the Pankhurst home

ABSTRACT 62 Nelson Street possesses is an almost mythical status in the history of British feminism. Home to Emmeline Pankhurst and her family between 1898 and 1907, in 1903 its parlour famously hosted the first meeting of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the militant wing of the women’s suffrage movement. It is now home to the Pankhurst Centre, housing a museum to the history of the Pankhurst family and to women’s activism more generally, and to Manchester Women’s Aid. Despite its prominence in British history, however, supporters and curators have faced a constant battle to sustain the Pankhurst house in the face of limited funding and redevelopment. This reflection on public engagement work undertaken with the Pankhurst Centre through an AHRC Networking grant, 2019–2022 (Ref AH/S010289/1) sets out some of the reasons why engaging the public with the Pankhurst home remains crucial. It argues that the house itself presents a more inclusive history of feminism than is often acknowledged or associated with the Pankhurst family and that it is a useful case study that brings together important yet relatable links between homes and activism that can engage a range of publics and visitors to the house.

Embroidering the Traumatized “Cloth-Skin-Body”: Suffragette Embroidered Cloths Worked in Holloway Prison, 1911–1912

In Holloway Prison in March 1909, in an astonishing act of bodily harm, the suffragette Constance Lytton punctured the membrane of her skin with two needles and a hairpin in order to inscribe the words “Votes for Women” across her skin-body. She used her own skin as the ground cloth for the inscription, and needles, hairpin, skin, body, cloth and pain were all implicated in the act. Instead of using the needle to work cloth, Lytton used it to probe the boundary of her skin-body. Skin became a projected cloth where she materially wrought and discursively wrote the beginnings of a visceral and political suffrage message, demonstrating that her quasi-“cloth-skin-body” was a political site and the locus of trauma. Whilst Lytton did not leave any tangible evidence of hand-embroidering through cloth in Holloway, several suffragette embroideries worked there between 1911 and 1912 have survived. Hundreds of women were imprisoned at this time as the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) turned to breaking windows and the destruction of property. They faced the threat of the hunger strike and forcible feeding. In this paper the relationship between trauma and embroidering through the “cloth-skin-body” is explored with reference to six suffragette embroideries. Leaning on the psychoanalytical writings of Didier Anzieu, Nicola Diamond and Stella North, as well as drawing on my own practice as research, I argue that for imprisoned suffragettes embroidering was autobiographic, situated and embodied. The paper proposes the concept of a “cloth-ego,” which can be psychically projected from the body: hyphenated in its proximity to skin and the body but abstracted and expanded into the world as an embroidered handkerchief, tablecloth, bag or panel. For suffragettes such as the embroiderer Janie Terrero, who registered her own forcible feeding and that of nineteen others on a cloth panel, I argue that embroidering through the cloth-skin-body helped to psychically re-make and repair the self and filter and expel the toxic and invasive “spine in the flesh.” 1 Through the “procedural enactments” 2 of embroidering, I claim that the women processed their somatic and affective experiences. The material practice of embroidering allowed their “absent present” 3 bodies to “speak.” It enabled the body to tell a material story above and beyond the discursive limits of language, beyond the words and images on the cloth. Thus, a story could be articulated before words were found or before feelings were put into consciousness, thought or speech.

ПЕРВАЯ ЭКРАНИЗАЦИЯ «ПРИКЛЮЧЕНИЙ АЛИСЫ В СТРАНЕ ЧУДЕС» (ALICE IN WONDERLAND, 1903)

The article is dedicated to the British silent film Alice in Wonderland by Percy Stow and Cecil Hepworth, which was found and restored in 2010. The 12-minute film was unusually long for early cinema. Almost all of the survived credits annotate several short scenes at once, showing their interconnection or, conversely, apartness from each other. This suggests that some scenes were sold not separately, but as a series of scenes united by a credit. Structurally, each fragment of the film, consisting of 2–3 scenes, is similar to one episode of series. Therefore, the origin of the principles of seriality in cinema can be associated with film adaptations of fairy-tale stories. The concept of space demonstrates the inner duality of the Wonderland. The private part of it looks like an English landscape garden, while the space of the Queen and her entourage is designed as a classicist regular park. In his adaptation (2010) of Carroll’s fairy-tale, Tim Burton will further unfold the theme of duality and conflict inside the Wonderland. In the 1903 film adaptation, Alice was played by May Clark, a grown-up girl who worked at the Hepworth studio. The dreamlike nature of the screen reality is emphasized by the restraint of the amateur performers’ play and the unobtrusiveness of the fantastic, when the screen fantasy world is both similar and different from the everyday life. The marriageable age of the heroine and some of the scenes that look like Alice’s “going through the torments” make us interpret the action as the embodiment of her unconscious. The magic garden, where a young girl is so eager to get, a symbol of the desirable joys of an adult life, becomes a nightmare for Alice. The film was released in the same year as the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was established, and it merged into an era of revision of Victorian ideals and rejection of the perception of women in line with patriarchal values. Tim Burton’s film, created in the era of the new emancipation and reconsideration of gender, largely corresponds to the first screen adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, presenting the Victorian world as a generalized image of a society that suppresses the individual and naturally provokes protest.

Words as well as Deeds: The Popular Press and Suffragette Hunger Strikes in Edwardian Britain

Abstract This article considers how national newspapers reported, portrayed, and narrated the militant suffragism of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Using three popular newspapers, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, and the Daily Mirror and the specific case study of hunger strikes and the government’s response of forcible feeding, it evaluates the various tropes that characterized press coverage of the suffragettes. It investigates how militancy, an approach that prioritized spectacle, was covered in an emerging medium that sought to recast politics in a new and spectacular fashion, thereby extending understanding of how the style and content of popular newspapers evolved in the first decade of the twentieth century. In doing so, it expands existing research into the dynamics of the nascent popular press and its function as an ‘arena’ for fostering extra-parliamentary political debate. The WSPU attempted to take advantage of this opportunity to promote its own arguments on forcible feeding and female suffrage, using correspondence columns and prisoner testimony to elicit empathy, albeit with only sporadic success in receiving a sympathetic hearing from a hostile press, with enmity a consistent feature of editorial argument. Nevertheless, the article concludes that responses to hunger strikes and forcible feeding in the popular press were multifaceted, and whilst the WSPU was unable to reframe patriarchal narratives of political activism, it persisted with words as well as deeds in seeking to co-opt newspapers into its campaign and garner publicity for its cause.

Did militancy help or hinder the granting of women’s suffrage in Britain?

ABSTRACTThis Viewpoint is one of three discussing the question of whether the ‘militant’ tactics of the suffragettes, as member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) were called in Edwardian Britain, helped or hindered the granting of women’s suffrage. In this contribution, it is suggested that militancy embraced a broad range of behaviours, both legal and illegal, that were central to the WSPU campaign and to the granting of the parliamentary vote.

Annie Kenney and the Politics of Class in the Women’s Social and Political Union

Abstract This article argues that an analysis of Annie Kenney’s public representation and private relationships offers a new way of evaluating how class was understood, experienced, and negotiated within the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Annie Kenney was a well-known suffrage activist from Lancashire, usually described as the only working-class woman to achieve prominence in the organization. This article analyses how the WSPU initially made much of Annie Kenney’s social origins, attracting significant press attention. However, it also demonstrates that their assumption that she could effectively speak for all working-class women was problematic, since it assumed a homogeneity of working-class experience. As the WSPU shifted its focus to recruiting more middle-class women, it sought instead to celebrate Annie Kenney’s commitment to the cause. Ironically, she was often more effective in building relationships with wealthier women, forming substitute families that provided significant support and benefits. Yet though the depth of these relationships was extraordinary in the context of contemporary class relations, they remained exceptional rather than typical. This article thus develops the work of scholars including Sandra Stanley Holton, Sue Thomas, and Laura Schwartz, who have analysed how class fragmented and shaped the women’s movement. It demonstrates that the significance of class within the WSPU was fluid and shifting rather than fixed and static and indicates both the potential for, and barriers to, meaningful and lasting cross-class collaboration.

The Campaign for Women’s Suffrage in York and the 1911 Census Evasion

This article examines the history of women’s suffrage agitation in York one hundred years after some women were able to vote for the first time in Parliamentary elections, in December 1918. It concentrates on the period leading up to the evasion of the census on 2–3 April 1911 and places developments in York in the context of national events. Actions and attitudes of the York Women’s Suffrage Society, which was formed in 1889 and affiliated to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, are considered, as well as those of the York branch of the more militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). The WSPU was founded in 1903 and its York branch was not finally established until 1910; its leading figures were the secretary Annie Coultate and its organiser Violet Key Jones. The extent of the 1911 census evasion in York, and the location where evaders spent the night to avoid being counted, are identified for the first time. Four sisters of the Suffield family of Fulford were active suffragettes and were probably among the evaders in York and Scarborough.

WSPU Rhetoric: Justifying Militancy

This article investigates the rhetoric employed by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in the UK during the campaign for women’s suffrage. It argues that the rhetoric, as a result of adopting a militant approach, increasingly served the purpose of justifying the method rather than the cause. Based on an analysis of speeches by leading members of the WSPU, the article finds that the Union rhetoric justified the use of militancy by systematically drawing on democratic and social values, attacking the credibility of the legislators, promoting binary thinking and situating the conflict within the framework of a “just war.”

Setting the Stage for Suffrage

Setting the Stage for Suffrage

The Argument of the Broken Pane

Within the cut-throat world of newspaper advertising the newspapers of Britain's Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) Votes for Women and the Suffragette managed to achieve a balance that has often proved to be an impossible challenge for social movement press—namely the maintenance of a highly political stance whilst simultaneously exploiting the market system with advertising and merchandising. When the militant papers advocated window smashing of West End stores in 1912–1913, the companies who were the target still took advertisements. Why? What was the relationship between news values, militant violence and advertising income? ‘Do-it-yourself’ journalism operated within a context of ethical consumerism and promotionally orientated militancy. This resulted in newspaper connections between politics, commerce and a distinct market profile, evident in the customisation of advertising, retailer dialogue with militants and longer-term loyalty—symptomatic of a wider trend towards newspaper commercialism during this period.

‘Now she’s all hat and ideas’: Fashioning the British Suffrage Movement

In H. G. Wells’ ([1909] 2005) novel Ann Veronica, Ann Veronica’s father and another man reminisce that while the burgeoning Suffragette used to be ‘all hair and legs’, it seems that ‘Now she’s all hat and ideas’. The men’s inability to distinguish between Ann Veronica’s hats and her ideas directly equates with England’s larger concerns over how a woman’s fashion, an outward marker, offers personal insight into her otherwise hidden political and national affiliations. The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) encouraged its Suffragettes to dress fashionably, respectably and well so that their political beliefs and violent techniques never called into question their inherent and true Englishness. The WSPU used women’s fashionable dress to offer an overtly political argument: women could be both fashionable Englishwomen and militant Suffragettes. Further, the WSPU urged working-class Suffragettes to protest in their regional dress – Scottish kilts, Welsh hats, or Lancashire shawls and clogs, for example – to present a visual connection between Women’s Suffrage and British nationalism. When Suffragettes paid particular attention to the outward markers of self and femininity, they did so to claim participation in nation and to maintain association with traditional femininity in order to legitimize their efforts to an audience potentially hostile to their cause. This article argues that Victorian and Edwardian women championing for the Vote chose fashions that adhered to traditional gender and national roles in order to prove that national allegiance and social transgression were synonymous, that the role of Suffragette was not marginal but rather central to the consensus, and that fictional and nonfictional Suffragettes could be both politically and fashionably capable.

The legend of Black Friday

The Women's Social and Political Union (W.S.P.U.) wove around itself a series of legends contributing to a mythology, which continues to be repeated as suffragette history. This article examines this mythology's centrepiece, the legend of ‘Black Friday’, the allegation that suffragettes were brutally attacked by the police during demonstrations between 18 and 23 November 1910. It challenges the accepted story by rigorous use of archive sources – principally contemporary newspapers and National Archives files – and offers conclusions which should lead to a searching reassessment of W.S.P.U. tactics and methods.

Women of the Right Spirit: Paid Organisers of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) 1904–18 – By Krista Cowman

Women of the Right Spirit: Paid Organisers of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) 1904–18 – By Krista Cowman

Shopping for Suffrage: the campaign shops of the Women’s Social and Political Union

This article outlines the contribution of suffrage shops to the campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU); it charts the emergence of stores nationwide, and provides for the first time a full list of WSPU shops. Amidst the WSPU’s various campaign activities, branch shops established new spaces for, and new dynamics in, the votes for women movement from 1909. Recognising these shops’ roles as new, semi‐public campaign spaces, the connections between the image and functions of these new campaign spaces are explored, with the retail image of WSPU shops argued to be central to their role of engaging and attracting the consumer.

Measures and Meanings: Exploring the Ego-Net of Helen Kirkpatrick Watts, Militant Suffragette

In this paper we discuss the personal network or „ego-net‟ of Helen Kirkpatrick Watts, a militant suffragette and one of the founder members of the Nottingham Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Our aims are fourfold. Firstly, we want to make a contribution to the growing literature, briefly reviewed, on the significance of social networks in relation to social movements. Secondly, we want to make a contribution to the academic literature on the suffragettes. Thirdly, at a methodological level, we want to contribute to ongoing efforts, briefly reviewed, to bring qualitative concerns and issues back into social network analysis, generating a dialogue between quantitative and qualitative approaches. Finally, we conceive of this paper as a pilot for a much larger study of suffragette networks. Specifically, it allows us to experiment with ways of drawing network data from an archive and, relating to our third aim, to dry run an approach to network analysis which integrates quantitative and qualitative approaches.

<em>Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing</em>, by Krista Lysack

Reviewed by: Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing Lise Shapiro Sanders (bio) Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing, by Krista Lysack; pp. x + 238. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008, $49.95, $26.95 paper, £44.95, £24.50 paper. In Come Buy, Come Buy, Krista Lysack offers a fresh perspective on the study of consumer culture in Victorian England, examining the significance of shopping through the lens of women's desire and pleasure. Analyzing sources ranging from novels and poetry written by women to a prominent suffrage journal, Lysack argues that these texts represent the woman shopper "going to market on her own, not as an object of exchange but as a subject" and that the emergent discourse of women's consumer agency enabled new and "dissident" forms of identity (12). Each of the five chapters incorporates a historicizing approach to primary sources, a thorough account of recent criticism, and original readings of both canonical and lesser-known literary texts. Thus Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market (1862), often read as a narrative of female homosocial desire and self-sacrifice against the backdrop of a dangerous male marketplace, becomes an examination of women's participation in imperialism, whether as consumers of "Eastern" goods distributed by Liberty's and other department stores of the period, or as the poem's own "poachers" of exotic fruits foreign to English soil, sold by racialized "goblin men." According to this reading, Lizzie transgresses the bounds of proper consumer practice through "visual tactics" (48), looking but refusing to buy on the market's terms. Similarly, the eponymous heroine of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862) offers another form of transgression in her status as a "disorderly" consumer (58)—a version of the pathological shopper who formed the subject of much mid-century anxiety over the dangers of consumption—whose very identity reveals the artificiality of Victorian femininity. In a chapter on Middlemarch (1871–72), Lysack contrasts Rosamond's class-conscious domestic expenditure with Dorothea's thrift, arguing that both women trade against the future in a way that distinguishes their consumption from traditional forms of domestic economy. Although these texts have been much analyzed in Victorian studies, Lysack succeeds in persuading her readers to think differently about the gendered politics of consumption in each case. The focus of the remaining two chapters and a brief afterword on fin-de-siècle and early-twentieth-century writing implicitly reorients the terrain of the Victorian to address, to use Rita Felski's phrase, the gender of modernity. Turning to the poetry of Michael Field, Lysack argues that Field's woman-centered lyrics alter the masculine dynamics of the gaze, substituting an alternative method of consumption based on female same-sex desire. For Lysack, Sight and Song (1892) is an example of a reconfigured literary aestheticism based on connoisseurship, which rejects the logic of possession and exchange for a new economy of pleasure shared between women. Lysack concludes her study with an analysis of Votes for Women (1907–18), the organ of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), and details the journal's coverage of shops designed to sell suffrage in the form of pamphlets, buttons, scarves, and related ephemera. This chapter reads the WSPU's use of consumer culture as a tactical engagement with the public sphere in which women's practice of "shopping for the vote" becomes an act of claiming citizenship on their own terms. In her afterword, Lysack considers Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) as another depiction of the female [End Page 765] shopper, focusing not on Clarissa but on her daughter Elizabeth, whose meandering path through the West End suggests a new set of possibilities for the modern woman. Lysack ultimately locates Victorian women's agency in their resistance to being coded as objects of exchange and their active pursuit of pleasure through shopping. For theoretical support, she turns to Michel de Certeau, who offers "poaching" as an alternative consumer practice (or "antidiscipline"), and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose model of "becoming-woman" reconfigures desire as plenitude rather...

The 1908 Pankhurst Medal: Remembering the Campaign for Votes for Women in Parliament

The house of commons has recently acquired the medal awarded to Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928), founder of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). This acquisition provides a timely reminder in 2008 that it is only 90 and 80 years respectively since women in Britain were granted the vote as well as marking the centenary of the ‘rush’ on the house of commons for which the medal was awarded. The ‘rush’ was just one of many occasions when members of the WSPU brought their campaign and protests to the Palace of Westminster. The palace was a site, both physically and ideologically, of suffragette protest, evidence of which remains on the building itself and, increasingly, as the acquisition of the medal suggests, in gestures of marking and remembrance of women's fight for the vote by parliament.

Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960), suffragette, political activist, artist and writer

In this article, a biographical overview is offered of the life of [Estelle] Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960), suffragette, political activist, artist and writer, in order to provide a context for her 1959 proposal for an Ethiopian women’s college, which is published for the first time in this journal. Sylvia, one of five children born in Manchester, England, grew up in a radical household where she not only attended political meetings but was exhorted to work for a more equal society. As a young woman, she trained as an artist but was soon drawn into the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) founded by her mother in 1903 to campaign for the parliamentary vote for women. Sylvia, a socialist feminist, often found herself at odds with the radical feminist, women‐centred views of her mother and her elder sister, Christabel, the Chief Organiser of the WSPU and their mother’s acknowledged favourite. The tensions between Sylvia and her relatives intensified during the First World War which they supported and she opposed. During the 1920s she became more revolutionary in her politics and in the 1930s increasingly involved in campaigning against fascism, especially in Ethiopia. After Ethiopia was liberated, she went to live there permanently with her son, Richard, in 1956. A crusader all her life, as well as a prolific writer, the publication of her proposal for an Ethiopian women’s college reveals yet another aspect of her diverse interests.