In Our Time - Suffragism

Episode Date: April 16, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests Krista Cowman, June Purvis and Julia Bush discuss suffragism, a name for the various movements to get the vote for women in the 19th and early-20th century. On the 4th June 1913 the Epsom Derby was underway. King George V was there watching his horse Anmer, ridden by Herbert Jones. Also watching was a young woman called Emily Davison. As the horses thundered towards the finish line, Emily Davison stepped through the barrier and threw herself in front of the King's horse and died of her injuries four days later. Davison was a suffragette, a campaigner for the woman's right to vote and her death is perhaps the most powerful image of that entire movement. Emmeline Pankhurst and her Suffragettes are famous for their militant campaign of suicide, violence and direct action, but Suffragism was a broader movement involving letter writing, reasoned argument, journalism and parliamentary petition - all played out across biology, medicine, law, psychology, politics and the military amidst the rising tide of democratic ideas.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, on the 4th of June, 1930, the Epsom Derby was underway. King George V was watching his horse, Anmer, written by Herbert Jones. Also watching was a young woman called Emily Davison.

As the horse's thundered towards the finish, Emily Davison stepped through the barrier and threw herself in front of the king's horse. She died of her injuries four days later. Emily Davison was a suffragette, a campaigner for the woman's right to vote, and her death is perhaps the most powerful image of that entire movement. But is it fair to distill the movement into this one image of desperate militancy? How was universal suffrage for women actually achieved? And what was the nature of the opposition to granting women equal rights with men?

with me to discuss suffragism are Krista Kauman, Professor of History at the University of Lincoln, June Purvis, Professor of Women's and Gender History at the University of Portsmouth and Julia Bush, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Northampton. Krista Khamman is difficult to know where to begin, but let's begin in June 1866 with a petition handed into the House of Commons by John Stuart Mill. What did the petition ask Parliament to do? The petition was asking Parliament to give women the vote on the same grounds that men were getting the vote. We have to look at it, I think, in a context of parliamentary reform.

Britain have moved reasonably rapidly from a system with a very small contained elite government towards a far more participatory form of politics. So in 1832 there was a Reform Act, which enfranchised far larger numbers of men and returned more MPs to Parliament. It was clear that there was going to be another Reform Act. Another Reform Act was very, very much on the cards. and one of the things that women were saying at the time was if the vote is now going to rest on a property qualification, lots of women own property. Therefore, is it fair that they should know that they should be excluded from the franchise

should they not have the vote on the same grounds as men? Mill's election was quite significant for the embryonic feminist movement at the time because he actually mentions women's suffrage in his election address. Mill had been quite active in radical circles and he had feminist interests, his wife and previous longer-term partner was very active in the feminist movement, and he'd sort of published and written and spoken on this topic. So in a way it was quite predictable that he would sort of slip it into the election address. But it's the first time that this is actually mentioned publicly during an election campaign.

One of the results of this is that the very small group of women who would define as feminist or who we would define as feminist in the period latch on to this. He knows them all anyway. they're his kind of social circle, if you like, his friendship group. And they help in his election campaign. They go around the streets of Westminster, sort of knocking on doors, handing out some leaflets on his behalf, and help to get him elected.

When he's elected, it's kind of payback time for many of them. So a small number go and knock on his door and say, would you be prepared to present a petition to Parliament on this, given that you put it in your address? Mills' response is initially a little bit equivocal. He says, well, I'll present a petition, but only if you can come up with 100 signatures because I'm not going to make a fool of myself

and raise something for which there's no demand. So a group of women in London and in other parts of Britain then start organising around this. They get a petition together with 1,49 signatures and this is what Mill presents to the House of Commons. So if nothing else, it shows that there is a degree of support for the measure that it's a popular question.

What reaction did it have when you presented it? It gets a lot of reaction. in the press. Mills referred to as the man who wants girls in Parliament. So I think it's amused reaction, not taken terribly seriously at the time in parliamentary circles. But one of the things that it does do

is start women all over the country talking about the issue and starting up small local suffrage societies to organise in their own cities and towns. As I understand it, the petition didn't come out of Beno. It was masterminded by someone called Barbara Bodichon. Yes.

And she'd already been campaigning for this in London with her Langham Place Circle. Can you tell us about the Langham Place Circle, its numbers, its composition, and why she was important in getting this to Mill? Yes, the Langham Place Circle is named because it meets around the corner from Broadcasting House at 19 Langham Place, where they have a meeting room, a reading room, and particularly where they maintain a register for women's employment. Baudershon is involved in lots of different campaigns. at the time. She's from a very radical background. She's the illegitimate daughter of a radical Liberal MP and with her friend Bessie Rainer Parks she has co-founded the English Woman's Journal which is one of the first feminist periodicals in the country. Bo Deshawn is also involved in things

like campaigning to open up higher education for women. She's run a school herself as a headmistress, a small secular school and she is one of the women who bankrolls Emily Davis when she founds Garten College at Cambridge, so she has concerns around women's education, she has concerns around women's employment, and increasingly, she's involved in campaigns for married women's property, extending the rights of women to maintain rights over their own property after they get married. And then increasingly, in the 1850s and 1860s, she starts to move towards the vote, which she sees as a means of actually getting these other reforms in place. June Purvis, can you give us any idea of the size of this movement?

this Lange and Place Circle, and also some specific examples of the inequalities that women faced at that time, just to refresh our listeners' memory on that, in the 1860s. In the 1860s, the Langen Place Circle was quite a small group of very influential women, but they had a number of important followers who joined.

It's quite difficult to get the numbers, I should say, about 80 to 100 women were involved in that. But there were tremendous equalities for women in the 19th century, particularly in regard to the law, family and divorce, for example. When you married, you were a single woman and you married, you lost your legal right to be an independent individual and your legal personality was assumed in that of your husband. And he took over all your property and you had no possessions of your own.

So that was a key thing that many feminists in particular campaigned actively on. There were also tremendous inequalities for women in regard to divorce. Divorce was rare and expensive and in practice only for rich men. And there was inequality in education, access to education too, as I understand. Yes, particularly in regard to higher education. Women were ill-equipped to enter higher education because the standard of girls' schools was so much poor. than that for boys. Emily Davis spearheaded the movement for women's higher education.

She established a college at Hitchin in Hertfordshire in 1869 to prepare women for the entrance examinations for Cambridge University. And then later the college was moved from Hitchin to Gerton and became what is well known now as Gerton College, Cambridge. The first university to award women degrees on equal terms with men was the University of London in 1878. But some were really late. I mean, Cambridge University didn't offer women equal degrees on same terms as men until 1947. So we're inching forward very slowly in the second half of the 19th century. What about the deeper origins? Can we look at that for a moment? Can we trace the movement back to, say, Mary Wollstonecraft, with her abindication of the rights of women in 1792. She had borrowed. quite a lot from Tom Payne, just a few years before her. But let's stick with Mary Walsencroft. It was a tremendous book and eventually an influential book,

but it took a long time for its influence to grow and show, didn't it? Yes. Vindication of the rights of women, which argued for women to have equal rights with men in regard to employment, education, the vote. It was greeted with a lot of hostility because it was considered much too radical, but much more importantly, because she had what people considered a rather scandalous personal life,

you find that quite a few of the feminists who came after her didn't want to be associated with her. And most people probably know this story that she went to France after the French Revolution. She fell passionately in love with an American Captain Gilbert Imlay. They lived together. She had a child out of wedlock. He abandoned her.

She's desperate. She comes back to England after a tour of Scandinavia, and she tries to commit suicide. And then she meets again with a philosopher she's known William Goodwin who writes her life story. So people can buy this book and read about this woman, this scarlet woman, this hyena and petticoats, as Walpole called her.

And so a lot of feminists you will find in the 19th, after her, we're rather concerned about being given this brash of being associated with free love. Julia Bush, there's opposition, as the women's movement, if we can call it that generally, suffragism is growing. The opposition responds when it feels it has to, mostly it doesn't feel it merits a great deal of attention really. But when it does respond, it brings in the heavyweight. Gladson, the Prime Minister, was opposed to the movement. What were his arguments and the arguments of others, against what women were trying to achieve?

I think we shouldn't be surprised by Gladstone's opposition to votes for women. He had, after all, been responsible for the third great parliamentary reform act. He had doubled the male electorate, and that I think to the vast majority of people, men and women in this country, probably seemed to a fairly radical measure and going quite far enough at one leap. But in terms of the arguments that Gladstone used, I think there were three main arguments.

First of all, he did feel that it was significant that the majority of women probably didn't actually want to vote. He was used to being under pressure to expand the male parliamentary electorate, and he didn't, despite the existence of an active suffragist movement, he didn't feel that there was an overwhelming public support. So he sensed as a politician that the pressure just wasn't there in terms of votes for women. But secondly, I think Gladstone did share

what was probably the most common gender prejudice of his times, which was simply that women were not suited to taking part in parliamentary politics. Their occupations were not those which would equip them to not only vote, but to potentially become members of parliament and make decisions, particularly in areas such as the regulation of trade and business or foreign policy or running the British Empire

or most particularly making decisions about war and peace. In all those areas, Gladstone felt that women were simply not suitable potential voters. But I think the third argument is perhaps the one which weighed most heavily with Gladstone himself. As we all know, he was somebody who was extremely concerned about moral imperatives in politics. and he felt that the women of Britain represented a sort of reservoir of moral power and influence which should be carefully conserved and preserved and that if women were to get sort of down and dirty with party politics they would potentially be weakening their moral influence over the men of the country and therefore there would be a tremendous risk there in terms of Britain's status as a nation

and Britain's ability to run its affairs and its international policies in a moral sort of way. Do you ever face up to the paradox that if you were saying it was a demeaning business to be in politics that he himself was part of the demeaning of politics that never passed through the mighty brain of Gladstone? I think that Gladstone put women on a pedestal, starting perhaps with his own wife.

That's always very much, no. and that there was no contradiction. What he believed him was a differentiation between the functions of men and women, and therefore there were complementary and different roles, and he thought that should be reflected in the political life as well. But it wasn't only men as represented most strongly by Gladson and many other men.

It was also women who were against this movement, weren't there? Let's take quite a lot of women. And when he said most women didn't want it, he could assume maybe he was insofar as there was collective statistics in those days, that seemed to be what was going on. And Mary Ward, the anti-suffragist, epitomise that. Can you talk about her a little? Yes, Mary Ward in some ways, helped to hone Gladstone's arguments, I think.

Mary Ward was the main author of an important published appeal against women's suffrage, which was published in the 19th Century Journal in 1889. She gave the lead to a group of women who became the first organised anti-sufferrorism. group of women. There is some debate amongst historians as to how far this group of women came together spontaneously with their own arguments and how far they were actually being manipulated

and sort of pushed forward by men as being rather an effective argument against suffrage the women themselves don't want it and here are the women saying that they don't want it. We're proving their subservient by manipulating them to being anti what they want. But I would say that my own research has suggested that the women had far more

sort of agency and independence and views of their own than some of the historians have suggested. They did have a point of view. I mean, she recruited quite an organisation, did she? It was a big, powerful outfit. First of all, she organised this appeal, which was supported by the signatures of 104 prominent women.

She did not go on then to found an organisation as such. I think she was simply complacency. She didn't think it was necessary, and she had higher priorities. She was putting into practice her belief that women had more important things to do and meddling with parliamentary politics. It wasn't until 1908 that she actually did become the leading figure in founding the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League. We haven't got there yet.

In 1897, Millicent Garrett Fawcet did found a movement called the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. They were known as suffragists. Can you tell us what that was designed to do? And again, if you can give us some idea of its composition and numbers. I think the NUWSS is it's a coordinating body, it's a unifying body. We've come on 30 years now since the Langham Place Group and the first petition, and there are small suffrage societies in many major British cities,

Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Edinburgh, throughout the country. One of the things that Millicent Forsett believes is that this will be a far more successful move if it is actually unified if they can speak together with one voice. And interestingly, a lot of these local societies refer to themselves as national societies. So there's a bit of sort of competition amongst them as well. So I think largely what Millicent Fawcett is trying to do is to coordinate these efforts. But these are constitutional campaigners. So to a large extent, although it's going national and it's moving onto a bigger scale,

it's replicating the methodologies of the previous 30 years. So they are interested, particularly in persons of influence. If you think, for example, about the Liverpool Society, they explicitly aim their petitions at what they call people of influence. They don't want a whole sort of mishmash of numbers of signatories to their petitions. They want the influence. They want the MPs. They want the clergy.

They want the civic leaders. So it's a smaller movement in terms of trying to construct popular appeal. Having said that, National Union does have a large membership, and particularly in the northwest of England, it recruits quite a working class membership as well. They recruit many factory workers and work to a different constituency. So by the time we're moving into the 20th century, it's a very, very large movement. It's got a membership in the hundreds of thousands, and it's got quite a cross-class membership as well. But it's still, we're talking about persuasion, we're talking about influence,

we're talking about non-violence, we're talking about getting to the moves, and shakers. The movers and shakers are not very moving or shaken at the moment. Julie Bush, just briefly, we're talking about this as if this were entirely focused on the vote,

but it was, women wanted a great deal more, as June said earlier, they broadened it, they wanted to bring a great deal more into play, didn't they, in their arguments, in their pamphlets, and their speeches. Can you give us some idea of that? Yes, I think it's time for us to address something which was

known in the late 19th century as the Woolbur question, which was a very broad question, as you rightly say, went well beyond the question of whether women should vote in parliamentary elections. I think that the intellectual and to some extent popular debate about gender roles in the late 19th century focused partly on what women were capable of. Were they physically unsuited to certain roles, including for the parliamentary voting, for the anti-sufferatives? But were they? in some senses handicapped or victims of their own biology. There was a lot of discussion of what one of the anti-suffrage doctors

called the physiological emergencies that women frequently suffered from, such as menstruation, childbirth, menopause and so forth, whether this actually made them periodically unstable, not only physically but mentally. Of course, hysteria was a disease of the womb, which made women fairly unsuborably. unsuited to a whole number of roles in public life and possibly to certain sorts of employment as well. So there's not a debate about what women were capable of.

But there were also very serious debates about how women could best serve society. What was their most suitable role in terms of their responsibilities for underpinning the social fabric? And there were a great deal of idealisation of maternity, it has to be said, whether or not one was actually a mother if one was a woman, one had maternal duties both within the family and in the local society. June Purvis, can you tell us how this changed with the entrance of Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst

and her daughter? Yes, Emmeline Pankhurst, she had, after her husband died, she had been a registrar of births and deaths in the city of Manchester and she worked amongst the poor there and she was heartbroken. That's no other way to describe it really

about some of the cases that came before her of poverty. Women coming to register births of children, you know, 10 or 12 children, little girls of 12 coming to register the birth of a baby where the father was the girl's own father or an uncle or somebody. And so she had first-hand knowledge of the dreadful conditions of working-class women

in Manchester and she was also deeply concerned about the inequalities that women had in the law, that they couldn't vote and so she decided that women had been talking for too long and sitting on committees for too long about the women's suffrage question

so she founded the women's social and political union, the WSPU, on the 10th October 1903 a women-only organisation because they thought that was important. And Emmeline and her eldest daughter, Christabel, who were the co-leaders of the suffragette movement,

they thought it had to be women only because women had to develop their own backbone, and they had to be assertive and campaign for their own rights. And Christabel, in particular, believe that men would never voluntarily give up their power. And so they had to be forced to give up power. And so she became very militant in assisting on, assertive methods. Christopher Cameron, can you explore that further?

This woman and a daughter set up this. It's compared with the suffragists, these are now called the suffragettes. So compared to the suffragists, they're a very small organisation. But they make their boss felt and their actions felt, you take it on. What do they do that hadn't been done and how effective were they? We're starting in 1903.

Well, one of the things that's interesting about the suffragettes and suffragette militancy is that to begin with, it's picking up on some of the things that Julia raised, they do exactly what men have done to get the vote, but because it's women doing it, it's considered to be outrageous. So part of suffragette militancy is really just being inappropriate. This starts with the very, very, very first actions. Although we normally, historians normally look at the Free Trade Hall incident,

which is when Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenny heckled at a Liberal Party meeting and were thrown out for heckling. And this is generally given as the start of militancy. This is in 1905. But Christabel herself actually says that her first militant action was when she asked a question in a much more restrained way at a public meeting about a year previous to this. And for her, she's very explicit about this.

She said it's the hardest thing I've ever done to walk from my place in the hall in the face of all the civic leaders of Manchester and to actually effectively do something that a woman wasn't supposed to do to address a question in an arena where I wasn't expected to address and raise a question. And this form of militancy actually carries on. It doesn't go away all the way through the campaign.

So, for example, you have women interrupting cinema performances, interrupting theatre plays, getting thrown out of church services for interrupting, getting thrown out of Lyons Corner House for standing up on chairs and having little impromptu meetings. But militancy also takes on other forms. it takes on forms of direct action, which start with large demonstrations when women will not be turned back by the police,

but sort of grapple and battle with the police, and then it moves on in other forms as well to criminal damage. Can we go back to you, June, on this, and the way it moves on there, adopted the slogan, deeds, not words. And Chris has taken us to a certain point, but we then began to talk about serious direct action. We talked about hunger strikes, vandalism,

and then we come on to Emily Davison. but can you take us through the hunger strikes, the vandalism and the imprisonment? Yes, the hunger strike was initiated in July 1909 by a member of the rank and file of the WSPU, Marion Wallace Dunlop. And she went on hunger strike because she'd been sent to prison and sentenced to the second division in prison where common criminals were placed and she hadn't been treated as a political offender, which meant that she would have been treated.

had been placed in the first division. So this was a form of passive resistance, a hunger strike against the government's treatment of her. Well, she was released after 96 hours of fasting. And then other suffragettes took up the hunger strike because I thought, well, this is a quick way to be released. But in fact, the government responded by the end of September by forcible feeding.

And this was the most horrendous thing for a liberal, government to do because you had rubber tubes which are often too wide. They might be pushed up your nostril and down into your stomach or else they could be put through the mouth and trying to get it into the mouth

was very difficult. Your mouth was widened by still gags that were pushed in and then your mouth was widened as much as possible. These tubes were stuck down inside you and then this horrible sort of greasy liquid of Bobvril, sometimes brandy and milk, which pushed down you.

Now, of course, you struggled when you were forcibly fed, and this struggling, this overpowering physical force on you, pushing these tubes into you made the suffragettes feel that it was akin to rape. So the word rape wasn't around then. They used the word outrage or violation of our bodies. And I think what's important about that is they always felt that they're speaking, rose above the experience. So even though a male government, an all-male government,

may want to control women's struggling bodies, they couldn't control their spirit because their cause was just. So that was a very, very important form of passive resistance. Now, from 1912, when this very stubborn liberal government still hadn't granted the vote to women, and Lloyd George was very sort of, tricky about this, as we all know. They took two more violent forms of action.

For example, mass window smashing of shops in London's West End, burning votes for women with acid on men's golf greens, burning letters in pillar boxes. And the aim of all that was to force the government to grant women the vote. And it made them, of course, very unpopular with the public. And about that time, Judy Bush, suffragism, in particular the suffragettes became more prevalent. There's a similar peak in the anti-suffrage movement, as you indicated earlier.

In 2010, the National League for Opposing Women's Suffrage comes along. Now, what's happening there, and how big is that? Yes, it's true that there's a close reciprocal relationship between the peaks of the suffrage and suffragette movement and the peaks of organized anti-suffrage activism. As I mentioned before, the women led the way, in fact, in terms of an organisation to counter the suffrage campaign. They did so because they felt that the threat of enfranchisement of women, as they saw it, was in fact becoming a real one by 1908.

And they also did so because they were absolutely horrified by the militant actions, which June has just been describing in a very empathetic and detailed way. from the perspective of anti-suffrage women, this simply fulfilled some of the fears that they had had for a long time about the dangers of sex war, as they called it, if women were to become overly assertive in the political arena. And also, of course, they were able to claim

that acts such as Emily Davison's death at the Derby were examples of female hysteria. So really the peak of military, He did provide the anti-suffrage movement, both with reasons for organising to try and oppose it, but also with some powerful arguments for opposing it. Sorry to be come back to numbers. It seems to be the infection of the times. But are other numbers on each side about equal, or what are we talking about?

Well, I can give you figures. In 1914, the National League for Opposing Women's Suffrage, which was the successor to the Women's League, it was a mixed-sex organisation, that had 42,000 paid up members, and it had, of course, acquired all those members over quite a short campaign, whereas the National Union of Women Suffrage Societies had been around for much longer.

But I think that it is important to not get too hung up on the figures. I think what we should be perhaps considering is the degree of commitment of the people who were paid up members. The numbers are impressive for the anti-suffrage League, but the degree of activism was much less than I think for the majority of the members of the suffrage organisations. So this is probably why the anti-suffrage organisations really haven't made their mark on history in the way that the women's suffrage organisations have. Krista Khamman, can we come to what's seen as a crucial, I'm not going to use iconic,

crucial act, Emily Davison, the Derby throwing herself in front of the King's Horse, few days later dying over injuries. What effect did that have? And did that sort of action create tensions within the suffragist movement and the suffragism movement itself? I think it's quite difficult in a way to unpick the effect at the time. Because one of the things that historians now concur around is that Emily didn't actually intend to commit suicide. she intended to make a different form of protest. And the thing that's always cited as evidence for this

is that she buys a return train ticket, which is very sad, actually. She dies with a return train ticket in her pocket. Obviously, it brings people up short to a certain extent. And her funeral, which responds marvelously to the modern media, so it is photographed and it is on cine film and shown in cinemas all over the country. I think brings people up short to a certain extent and makes people sort of examine where the campaign is actually going.

But by this time, the WSPU is operating, the Sepragette movement, is operating on two separate levels, almost really. You have a leadership which is partly in exile, and you have illegal actions being closely coordinated, and you also have legal forms of militancy, if you like, the other sort of process. What does leadership in exile? Well, Christabel Pankast has left the country and gone to Paris under threat of arrest. Prison sentences are getting longer and longer and longer.

And also women are increasingly being prosecuted for indirect actions, if you like, for conspiracy. And there's a feeling within the movement, this is where the window smashing that June mentioned originates from. There's a feeling within the movement that if we're going to go down for six months anyway, then we're going to go down for doing something. we're not going to go down for something small. So Christabal is in Paris. She is keeping in very, very close touch with what goes on. She's got women coming over to keep her informed,

and she's sending letters back. But there is a feeling by this time that she's finding it difficult to keep her finger on the pulse, and a lot of women are taking independent actions as well. So I think the whole thing is slipping to a certain extent. Julie, can we bring in class? It's almost absurd not to talk about this without referring to class.

We have almost been given, probably through me, the impression that this is mainly middle-class women coordinating it and maybe one or two-a-class women, come in and so on. Where's the rest of women? No, I mean, that's an old-fashioned view, I may say to you. I know, but I'm just saying that's what has come across so far. We haven't actually brought in the idea of the spread of it.

No, I mean, all the new research indicates that the suffragette movement was very much cross-class. You get working-class women coming in, factory workers from Yorkshire, you get domestic servants, and at the other end you also get aristocratic ladies like Lady Constant Lytton. And when Mrs Pankhurst founded the WSPU in 1903, she said it was to be women of all political persuasions, it didn't matter if you were liberal, conservative or socialist, and women of all social classes and grouping. So she tried to found a movement that was above party politics. How effective was she, both in that and in the class spread?

Well, she was a very charismatic leader, one of the great women of the 19th century, and she had a deep compassion for the plight of women. And in particular she was fired by the inequalities that women experienced at that time. And another point that I should make as well, it wasn't just about the parliamentary vote, the suffragette movement.

It was she in particular wanted wider reforms for women and improvement in women's status and position. And she gives this marvellous speech in 1908 where she dissects the inequalities that women had in the law in regard to the family, in regard to divorce, in regard to making a will. She makes the point that a husband could make a will, and if he wanted to, he could not leave his property to his wife, but to anybody else.

So it was a wider reform movement than just a campaign for the parliamentary vote. Can I ask you where we were, we're coming up to the war, How far have we got, as it were, Krista? In a sense, a long way and in a sense nowhere at all. That's a sort of feeling, isn't it? Yes, I think one of the things about the suffrage movement, and we've all talked around this, it's not just about the vote.

But the reason that it becomes so myopic around the vote is because women have realised over a period of 100 years that all the reforms that they want require legal acts and therefore they have to take place in Parliament, so therefore they can't do it. themselves they're beholden on men. But in another sense, I think things have changed and unfortunately this doesn't work on radio, but the best way of illustrating this is just to look at the pictures, the visual differences between Barbara Budasham, Bessie Raina Parks, very

typical mid-Victorian women with their sort of wide skirts and elaborate herdos. And then the women of the WSPU, the new women, the Edwardian women with shorter skirts, with riding bicycles in sort of, you know, different environment, using the cinema, using telejournalism, things like The Daily Mirror. So in a sense, it's a very, very different world, but yet this thing of the vote is still eluding. And I think by the outbreak of the First World War, I think it really has got to this point

where all the attitudes in public opinion seem to be shifting, where the parliamentary votes for private members bills are increasing. I know Julia's going to say something different about the, about the opposition. And yet, it's still not there. Well, June and then Julia, both like to come in. You're going to? Yes, I think by 1914, I think the suffragettes

were relieved in one way with the outbreak of war that Mrs. Pankhurst could suspend militancy, but also the government was relieved because by 1914 there were most horrendous operations going on on this forcible feeding. You know, women were being forcibly fed

by the vagina, and by the rectum. Now, in no way can you save a woman's life by forcibly feeding her in that way. So there was the feeling that doctors were being used in prisons to punish the women, that they were being the tools of the government, that they had an over-cozy relationship with the liberal government.

So I think the government was also relieved as well that it could grant an amnesty to suffrage prisoners. Where did your Mary Ward and her people stand? as the war is about to break out. Do they feel, oh, we've stopped it in its tracks? Do they feel we're getting defeated? This might seem rather simplistic, but it's still, it's a fairly, it's a decent question. I think they still had, the anti-suffrage, organized anti-sufferatives, including Mary Ward,

still had some grounds for optimism. I think they felt that although, as has been said, society had changed pretty fundamentally in many ways in the early 20th century and the suffrage movement had escalated beyond recognition over the previous decade. I think that in 1914 we shouldn't underestimate the kind of deep wells of social conservatism. The anti-suffragists were quite fond

of referring to somebody who they called the ordinary woman. They didn't call her the working class woman, but the ordinary woman was somebody who prioritised her home and family over public affairs and she was still around in 1914. And then we have the war, and after the war, universal suffrage for men, and women over 30 get the vote, and then in 1928, universal suffrage for women, and it's on its way.

There's a lot more to do in the 20th century, but it's on its way. After all that, was it the war, Krista, that was the transfiguring event? I'm going to come down on the fence and say yes and no, because it's impossible to say what would have happened without the war because we did have the war. a lot of research which has suggested that the vote would have come sometime around at about 1915, 1916, through the channels that were being pursued, had the war not broken out. When the war did break out, the government, of course, introduces conscription the first time

that this has happened in Britain. At the end of the war, they enfranchise all men. The 1918 act is about votes for men. That's really what it's about. They cannot send people out to fight and then not give them the vote. It is unthinkable, given the size and scale of the suffrage campaign, will enfranchise men in 1918 and not enfranchise some women. So that's the spirit in which it happens. What part does the war play as far as you're concerned? Well, I think what we've got to remember is when the war broke out,

Emily and Christopal Pankas didn't stop campaigning for votes for women. If you read their speeches, you will find the notion of women engaging in war work was an important theme. And they said that if women did this work, then they would earn their citizenship. So you find notions about votes for women, citizenship, war service, all tied up together. And so I don't see it so much as a clean break.

I see a different context within which the campaign continues. And finally, to you, Julia, what do you think? Yes, I would agree with June that there were very important continuities over the war period. The war did open up new opportunities to women, and it's certainly quite noticeable that a number of leading anti-suffrage men and women actually changed their mind on the issue of the vote during the war, notably Henry Asquith, the free war prime minister.

But I think that we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the war also did reinforce some kinds of gender conservatism. There was a very strong desire at the end of the war to get back to normal, which meant getting women back into the home and getting men back into the workplaces. and that could be used in terms of arguing that there should be continuity in political terms as well, that we shouldn't have a gender revolution in Parliament to cope with as well as everything else that had to be coped with during the reconstruction period after the war. So anti-suffragism continued to the bitter end,

organised anti-suffragism indeed, until the passage of the representation of the People Act in 1918. And there was some support for the anti-suffrage cause. that the war had in some ways changed the landscape, but the continuities continue. Well, they were there right through the 1920s and 30s, certainly throughout the interwar period. Gender conservatism was still an important force in this country. But they got the vote, and that was a big shift forward. Well, thank you very much. Krista Kerman, June Purvis and Julie Bush, and next week we'll be talking about the building of St. Petersburg.

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