Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere. Jeanette Winterson
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policemen came to force both women to leave. They were dragged down the aisles, men jeering either side. Annie shouted back: ‘If I am forced to leave this hall I shall hold a meeting outside!’
Actually – as she was from Oldham – she said: ‘If ah’m forced t’leev this ’all ah shall ’old a meetin’ ahtside!’
Both women were arrested. Christabel Pankhurst got a week in jail and Annie Kenney got three days.
Jail? For interrupting a meeting?
Clearly, men don’t like being interrupted.
Women, though, had had enough of being ignored or double-crossed by men in power.
It’s often forgotten that the campaign for women’s suffrage started back in 1867. Women are patient – and these women were law-abiding and God-fearing – but, to quote my mother, the late Mrs Winterson: ‘The Bible tells us to turn the other cheek but there are only so many cheeks in a day.’
From that day forward, women went militant. Middle-class women, aristocratic women, working women. Women confronted politicians at meetings, at their homes, even on the golf course.
Women chained themselves to railings. Women blew up letterboxes – the Victorians and Edwardians loved writing letters, and the Empire depended on paperwork – so getting the post blown up was really annoying.
Women smashed windows, hiding hammers in their muffs – and as muffs had sexual connotations, men began to worry about what was coming next.
Women lobbed slates off the roofs of meeting houses where MPs had refused to take a question on Votes for Women – and I want you to think of those women, climbing up in their full skirts, perched on the roof ridge with their axes, probably in their muffs . . .
On one occasion police turned fire hoses full-blast on a pair of slate-smashers because the firemen refused to do it. The women had to spend the night in their cells in soaking clothes.
Women who went to prison and who went on hunger strike were force-fed in the most brutal way, using thick rubber tubes that caused permanent injury to their throats and digestive systems.
Women who went on marches used card-board to pad their ribs to prevent them from being broken by male yobs, or police truncheons.
Who was doing the violence here? The women? Or the men?
There’s still some debate around women’s militancy: did it do the cause any good?
Winston Churchill claimed the militants could never have won the vote. Conventional readings of the suffrage movement opine that only when women had ‘proved’ themselves in the First World War could sufficient support be mobilised in government, and in the country, to recognise women – well, some of them – as full citizens.
Votes for Women fired no shots. Britain sent more than six million men into the First World War. Force, it seems, only becomes violence when it threatens the status quo.
Unreasonably, but unsurprisingly, one of the major arguments put forward by opponents of Votes for Women was that women weren’t called upon to defend country and empire – in other words, to fight. But when women showed that they were more than capable of putting up a fight, their newfound unwomanliness became yet another reason why women must not be allowed the vote.
But there were so many reasons.
Here’s an extract from a 1913 bestseller by medical doctor Sir Almroth Wright called The Unexpurgated Case Against Women’s Suffrage:
No doctor can ever lose sight of the fact that the mind of woman is always threatened with danger from the reverberations of her physiological emergencies . . . It is with such thoughts that the doctor lets his eyes rest on the militant suffragist. He cannot shut them to the fact that there is mixed up with the women’s movement much mental disorder . . .
Mad women, unstable women, violent women . . .
After the Titanic went down in 1912, the British press urgently needed to turn a national fiasco into a story of national heroism. They realised this could be done by having a crack at the crazy women blowing up letterboxes. The famous self-sacrifice of the rule of the sea – to rescue women and children first – morphed into the catchy headline: BOATS OR VOTES.
So women wanted equality with men? asked the papers. Would those same women be happy to go down with the ship instead of being chivalrously lowered into the too-few lifeboats? This tedious bit of triumphalism became a great drawing-room favourite. If they’d had printed T-shirts back then, you can be sure BOATS OR VOTES would have been the latest Edwardian must-have.*
Of course, nobody asked whether putting women in charge of health and safety at big companies like the White Star Line might have resulted in the Titanic carrying enough lifeboats to start with – instead of some important bloke deciding that lifeboats spoilt the view and were a waste of space.
But women were not going to get important jobs in industry because a woman’s place was in the home – except for the millions of working-class women whose place was also in the factory, or in shop-work, or skivvying in someone else’s home.
The reasons why women can’t, don’t, shouldn’t or couldn’t, were legion – and they still are.
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