Votes For Women! Read online

  VOTES FOR WOMEN!

  Praise for Jenni Murray’s

  A History of Britain in 21 Women

  ‘Murray tells their remarkable stories with her own extraordinary wit, passion and piercing insight. She is the perfect guide.’

  Helen Castor

  ‘I can’t think of any more seductive way of learning about the past than meeting its principals as if they were friends in a room. That’s the gift that Jenni Murray gives us; a rare gift because these principals are women. If someone in every country were to write a book like this, scholars might finally admit there are two things – history and the past – and they are not the same.’

  Gloria Steinem

  ‘I was fascinated by this well-researched, informative and entertaining book. I knew the names of many of the women among its pages, but not their stories and it was wonderful to read about them via Jenni Murray’s warm and well-written prose. Entertaining, enjoyable and scholarly.’

  Elizabeth Chadwick, bestselling author of the Eleanor of Aquitaine trilogy

  ‘Jenni Murray has invited us to her feast of extraordinary women … As incomparable host, Jenni lets her guests display themselves lavishly, telling their own noble or quirky stories while she delicately inserts anecdotes from her own distinguished life. This is no closed event. The book invites us all to come in. It’s a feast you won’t want to miss!’

  Janet Todd, professor emerita, University of Aberdeen, and author of Death and the Maidens

  ‘A fresh and very timely way of looking at British history, illuminated by Murray’s own incomparable experience in the world of women’s stories. Her twenty-one vignettes – of well-known and little-known alike – benefit from the blend of warmth and scepticism that has long marked her own contribution to national life.’

  Sarah Gristwood

  ‘A History of Britain in 21 Women is impossible to put down or ignore. The legendary Jenni Murray opens up the lives of great figures living and long dead. The veteran interviewer’s voice is present throughout; probing, challenging but never drowning out her well-chosen subjects. The book is dedicated to the young but offers so much to women and men of all ages.’

  Shami Chakrabarti

  ‘Ideal to press into the hands of young women studying politics and history.’

  Independent

  ‘The value she gives those presently underrated qualities, patience and fortitude, will stand a lifetime’s reference.’

  Telegraph

  Emmeline Pankhurst arrested in front of Buckingham Palace, 1914.

  I thank my Grandmother, Edna Jones, who taught me what I want the next generation of girls to know – your vote counts.

  ‘My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.’

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  ‘[The Government] will tear the stars from the sky before they break the spirit of women in this country.’

  Christabel Pankhurst

  ‘I incite this meeting to rebellion.’

  Emmeline Pankhurst

  ‘Other movements towards freedom have aimed at raising the status of a comparatively small group or class. But the women’s movement aims at nothing less than raising the status of an entire sex – half the human race – to lift it up to the freedom and valour of womanhood.’

  Millicent Garrett Fawcett

  ‘I have all my life felt very strongly the injustice and stupidity of keeping women out of any kind of work, for which they happened to be indubitably fit, and of making any distinction between them and men, once they were admitted.’

  Millicent Garrett Fawcett

  Contents

  Introduction

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Elizabeth Garrett Anderson

  Millicent Garrett Fawcett

  Emmeline Pankhurst

  Constance Markievicz

  Nancy Astor

  … and Ethel Smyth

  I never knew you; never came within the sphere

  Of that most radiant personality

  I rarely thought of you, nor knew I held you dear

  Nor realised for what you stood to me;

  For what I breathed in with my native air

  For womanhood enfranchised, educated, free.

  ‘A Modern Girl to Mrs Pankhurst’

  Introduction

  2018 and it’s one hundred years since women finally kicked down the doors of Britain’s exclusively male Parliament, won the right to vote for their chosen MP and stand for election. In evolutionary terms it’s a very short period of time, and it was to some degree only a partial triumph after a long, hard battle. It has to be described as a partial triumph because the 1918 Representation of the People Act, enacted on 6 February that year, permitted access to the ballot box to only the most privileged women.

  While all men over the age of twenty-one gained the right to vote, women had to be at least thirty, and there were further hurdles. To be included, a woman had to be a member of the Local Government Register or the wife of a member or a property owner or a graduate voting in the constituency of her university. Universal suffrage, which granted equal rights to men and women over the age of twenty-one, would not be won for another ten years.

  Despite the restrictions the electorate rose from 7.7 million to 21.4 million, and women, in the first election to follow the Act, held on 14 December 1918, thronged to the polls. Newly enfranchised, they now made up 43 per cent of the electorate. But why that thirty-year-old rule? Some believed it reflected the still widely held belief that women and children were similarly incompetent when it came to the consideration of the important issues of the day. More likely it was a reaction to the terrible reduction in the number of potential male voters, as so many men had perished in the Great War. As it was clear that, even with the age and property restrictions, the female turnout could have made for 50 per cent of votes cast, something had to be done to keep the numbers down. It would never have done for women to form the majority!

  Nevertheless, the winning of the vote, despite the limitations, was a phenomenal event. And yes, I insist on the use of the words won or winning. We must never make the mistake of diminishing the achievement of the campaigners by assuming women were given or granted the vote. They fought for it! There had been years and years of an ever-more determined and angry drive to ensure that women should enjoy the basic human right to take a full part in the democratic process and choose by whom they were governed. As the American colonists put it in the years before the revolution against British rule, ‘Taxation without representation is tyranny.’

  It was in 1792 that British women were first given the opportunity to read a book that pointed them in the direction of equality with men. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is the first genuinely feminist tome. She rails at women’s lack of education, their difficulty in finding work and want of financial independence, and their reliance on marriage for their comforts and status. As for political engagement, she wrote, ‘There must be more equality established in society, or morality will never gain ground, and this virtuous equality will not rest firmly even when founded on a rock, if one half of mankind be chained to its bottom by fate.’

  It was Wollstonecraft’s work that inspired the women who, a hundred years later, would lead the fight for Votes for Women. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, who would go on to head the suffragist movement, published a new edition of Vindication in 1891 and, in her introduction, Fawcett describes Mary as ahead of her own time, and acknowledges her as the author of the first systematic attack on both inequality and women’s lack of political enfranchisement. Thus I feel justified in claiming it was Wollstonecraft who kicked the whole thing off.

  Fawcett, together with her older sister Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, was lucky, as was the case for so many women who made their mark on the history of Britain, to have a father who supported her education and her ambitions. Elizabeth became a founder member of the Langham Place Ladies, a group often on my mind as I head for Broadcasting House, around the corner from Langham Place itself. These women, to whom she introduced her little sister, Millicent, would form the foundation of the growing Victorian Women’s Movement. Elizabeth became the first woman to qualify as a doctor in Britain, was one of the organisers of the 1866 petition for women’s suffrage and had a profound impact on the nineteen-year-old Millicent, who determined to devote her life to the cause.

  Two groups with identical aims – women’s suffrage – but fundamentally different tactics developed in the late nineteenth century. Millicent Fawcett gathered support across the country, speaking about her suffragist methods of lobbying those powerful men who might be persuaded to change the law in favour of Votes for Women by the strength of logical argument.

  Emmeline Pankhurst, whose Women’s Social and Political Union would be known as the ‘Suffragettes’, took a very different approach. The Union was born in Manchester and gained a great deal of support among women across the classes, but Emmeline, who once referred to herself as a hooligan, was too impatient to rely on persuasive argument. Direct action became her favoured form of campaigning.

  She was determined no one should be hurt as a result of her ‘terrorist’ activities, but damaging property was fair game. She even recruited friends such as the composer Ethel Smyth, a keen cricketer with her brothers as a child, to teach other suffragettes the skill of throwing overarm, but with stones and bricks aim
ed at windows, rather than balls at stumps.

  It’s impossible to deduce whether it was the suffragette or suffragist movement that achieved the desired end. Both gave up their campaigning activities during the Great War, but the point had been made forcefully to those in power and women’s contribution to the war effort could not be ignored when peace came in 1918.

  It’s generally assumed that Nancy Astor was the first woman to be elected as an MP. She wasn’t. That was Constance Markievicz who was one of several women to stand in December 1918. Markievicz was the only one to succeed, but as a Sinn Féin candidate in Dublin she would not take her seat in Westminster. That privilege fell to Nancy Astor a whole year later in December 1919.

  My grandmother was born in 1900. She was too young, at the age of only eighteen, to vote in that first election. She often told me how frustrated she felt at being denied ‘what should have been my right!’ She also talked frequently about the thrill and pride felt ten years later when, at the age of twenty-eight, she was permitted to place her cross on the ballot paper. She never told me which candidate she had supported – ‘It’s a secret ballot!’ she would say.

  In her whole life she never missed the chance to use her vote and impressed upon me my duty to exercise the right that had been so hard won. I, too, have never missed an election and I would urge every woman today to read these stories of the women who made it possible for us to be full and equal citizens, and think of them as you head for the polling station. You owe them. Don’t waste your vote!

  Jenni Murray

  February 2018, London

  ‘I do not want them to have power over men, but over themselves . . . It is not empire, but equality and friendship which women want.’

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  1

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  1759–1797

  I own a lot of books. If there were a fire in my house, only one would be among the few things that must be saved. Three dogs, a cat, a picture of my family and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It cost me a ridiculous amount of money and it is not even a first edition. Mine was published in 1796, four years after the first, published in 1792, became a run-away bestseller.

  The most precious thing I’ve ever held in my hands, wearing white gloves in the old Women’s Library when it was housed at the London Metropolitan University in the East End, was one of the rare surviving first editions of this first, truly great feminist manifesto. It’s now held in the library at the London School of Economics.

  I’m not generally given to a passion for ‘things’, but holding these books, even my inferior third edition, excites me more than I ever thought possible. They seem to give me a direct connection to a woman who, far ahead of her time, dared to write down just about everything I’ve ever believed about what used to be assumed was a woman’s only lot and, at times, still is. She often seems quite critical of her fellow females, railing at them for being obsessed with romance, clothes and being pretty and pleasing to men. She describes them as ‘teeming with capricious fantasies’ and says in A Vindication that ‘all women are to be levelled, by meekness and docility, into one character of yielding softness and gentle compliance’.

  In her most critical passage she declares:

  women’s giddy minds have only one fixed preoccupation: the desire of establishing themselves . . . by marriage. And this desire making mere animals of them, when they marry they act as such children may be expected to act – they dress, they paint, and nickname God’s creatures. Surely these weak beings are only fit for a seraglio!

  She describes marrying for money and security as legal prostitution, but then again she understands the degree to which women are forced into such positions, generally having no rights to an education equal to that enjoyed by boys and rarely an opportunity to earn a living and be financially independent. She does not, in the end, blame women for their own downfall, although she does urge them to drag themselves from the position in which they’ve been placed. She emphasises that it is not nature but culture that renders women ‘weak and wretched’.

  ‘There must,’ she writes, ‘be more equality established in society, or morality will never gain ground, and this virtuous equality will not rest firmly even when founded on a rock, if one half of mankind be chained to its bottom by fate, for they will be continually undermining it through ignorance or pride.’

  Women in the late eighteenth century could assume no rights. Marriage was, for most of them, the best career that could be expected, especially if a husband with a decent amount of money could be found. Once married there was no right for a woman to own a share in property or be protected from domestic violence, and, should a marriage end, the father, not the mother, would be given custody of any children.

  There was no right to vote or hold any political office and it was not until 1929 that a case known as the Persons Case, taken by five Canadian women, persuaded the Privy Council in London to agree that a woman should be defined in law as a person. This had not applied in English law before 1929, even though a limited right to vote had been passed by Parliament in 1918 and full suffrage in 1928. It was the Canadian women who won us the right to be defined, like men, as persons. Wollstonecraft’s theory that women are made not born would later be echoed by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, published as late as 1949.

  Unsurprisingly Wollstonecraft’s views were not widely welcomed in her time. Why would men, accustomed to taking a wife as a housemaid, nanny, social secretary and decorative companion, unused to making demands for herself, want things to change? Horace Walpole, the writer, politician and son of the former Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole, called her ‘a hyena in petticoats’.

  The second most precious possession on my bookshelves is a first edition, described as ‘a new edition’, of a book mistakenly entitled The Rights of Women – the original was decidedly singular, Woman. It was published a hundred years after the original, in 1891, and the introduction was written by one Mrs Henry Fawcett. We now know her rather more correctly as Millicent Garrett Fawcett, one of the leading activists in the suffragist movement (more of her later in the book).

  It is clear from Fawcett’s glowing approval of Wollstonecraft that her Vindication has survived and influenced subsequent generations. Fawcett writes:

  Mary Wollstonecraft was ahead of her time and may be regarded, though opinion has moved in the direction in which she pointed, as ahead of ours. In numerous passages she points out the inseparable connection between male and female chastity. One would have thought the fact so self-evident as to need no asseveration; but as a matter of experience we know that even now the mass of people mete out to the two partners in the same action an entirely different degree of blame, and judge them by entirely different standards . . . Against the essential immorality and injustice of this doctrine and practice Mary Wollstonecraft protested with her whole strength. She exposes the insincerity of those who profess zeal for virtue by pointing the finger of scorn at the woman who has transgressed, while her partner who may have tempted her by money, ease, and flattery to her doom, is received with every mark of consideration and respect.

  Fawcett goes on:

  In one other important respect Mary Wollstonecraft was ahead of her own time in regard to women and in line with the foremost thinkers on this subject in ours. Henrik Ibsen has taken the lead among the moderns in teaching that women have a duty to themselves as well as to their parents, husbands and children, and that truth and freedom are needed for the growth of true womanliness as well as of true manliness . . .

  I have already quoted her saying: ‘I do not want them to have power over men, but over themselves’ . . . ‘It is not empire, but equality and friendship which women want’ . . . ‘Speaking of women at large. Their first duty is to themselves as rational creatures’ . . . The words italicised foreshadow almost verbatim Nora’s expression in the well-known scene in A Doll’s House, where she tells her astounded husband that she has discovered that she has duties to herself as well as to him and to their children . . . Women need education, need economic independence, need political enfranchisement, need social equality and friendship . . . That woman must choose between being a slave and a queen; ‘quickly scorn’d when not ador’d’ is a theory of pinchbeck and tinsel . . . Upon this theory, and all that hangs upon it, Mary Wollstonecraft made the first systematic and concentrated attack; and the women’s rights movement in England and America owes as much to her as modern Political Economy owes to her famous contemporary, Adam Smith.