In England, at the end of the nineteenth century, women, in
legal terms, barely existed. Under a system known as ‘coverture’, they were the
property of their father until they passed, when they married, to being the
property of their husband. Their own property immediately became than of their
husband and they were not allowed to enter into contracts. Until 1891, a
husband had the legal right to kidnap and imprison his wife. Most careers were
automatically disbarred to women. They also could not vote.
In short, society was so thoroughly patriarchical and sexist
to a degree scarcely believable today.
It in this context that the rise of the female suffrage
movement must be understood. Getting the vote was seen as symbolising and
facilitating many other changes, such as legal independence, the right to
divorce, to be educated and pursue a career. Sarah Gavron’s film, Suffragette, is about one strand of
the women’s suffrage movement, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU),
aka the Suffragettes. In particular, it is about the campaign of violence they
resorted to, comprising arson, setting post boxes ablaze and window-breaking,
when legal means of extending the vote were frustrated. It is also about the
state repression they endured in response; the mass imprisonment and
force-feeding. The films ends in 1913, when one suffragette, Emily Davison, ran out
in front of the King’s horse at the Derby and was killed.
Class
But British society just before the First World War was not
just patriarchical, it was also riven by class. About 80% of society was
working class, and the lower element of that stratum, the unskilled working
class lived in appalling conditions (In 1914, British army conscripts were on
average five inches shorter than their officers). They undertook arduous and
dangerous jobs without any unemployment benefits, old age pensions or
compensation for industrial injuries which were a perennial hazard. There was
no health service. What there was, however, was a distinct working class
culture. Working class areas were marked by their own clubs, libraries, choirs
and nurseries. And there were also two elements completely absent today:
resistance to the way the economy was organised inside factories and solidarity
with others in the same boat.
The problem with Suffragette
is that its overwhelming concentration on one facet of Edwardian society – its
patriarchy – leads it to misrepresent the other element, class. In fact, its
treatment of class borders on the dishonest.
Pandering to widespread ignorance, the film gives the strong
impression that the Suffragettes wanted the vote for all women and that all men
could already vote, neither of which is true. At the time, because of property
qualifications, only around 60% of men were allowed to vote, a proportion which
dropped to under half in working class areas such as the East End of London
where much of Suffragette is set. The
WSPU – with the exception of one notable member - never wavered from aspiring
to the vote for women ‘on the same terms as men’, meaning that a similar number
of women would still have been disenfranchised had the government caved in to
its demands. Mary
MacArthur of the Women’s Trade Union League claimed in 1913 that less than
5 per cent of her members would have got the vote, had the Suffragettes been
successful.
But Suffragette declines
to confront this issue which was very real at the time. And in choosing to
concentrate on a fictional working class suffragette, Maud Adams, who works in
a laundry in the East End of London, the film completely parts company with
historical reality. Although the WSPU did attract working class members in its
early days, it was always dominated by upper middle class women and, as shown
by its opposition to universal suffrage, had a distinct bias against working
class activism. “It is not the toiling mother, the sweated worker … who can
bear the strain and stress of the battle we are fighting for women’s
deliverance today,” wrote one leading Suffragette in 1908.
One stand-out scene in the film has Maud’s husband, Sonny,
sneeringly ask her, after she has become deeply immersed in the Suffragette
movement, ‘What would you do with the vote if you got it?’
‘The same as you as I suppose,’ she replies.
Come again? That sound you can hear is a needle being
abruptly snatched off a record. The problem with this conversation is that it
never would have happened in reality. As an unskilled working class male, Sonny
himself, in this immensely patriarchical society, would still have been
disenfranchised. In turn, Maud, as a fully unpaid-up member of the bottom 40%
of society, would have remained voteless even assuming the WSPU’s campaign had
swept all before it. ‘What would you do with the vote if you got it?’ was a
question they both could have asked themselves.
Syndicalism
What is historically much more plausible is that they would have
been drawn to the syndicalist-inspired
trade union movement which exploded in Britain, and across the world, in the
very years – 1912 and 1913 – that Suffragette
takes place. In 1912, 41 million days were lost to strikes, compared to
less than less than half a million now. In 1920, future foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, described
this as “a period which, if the war had not broken out, would have, I believe,
seen one of the greatest industrial revolts the world ever had seen.” But this
was not just an outbreak of industrial militancy. It was marked, firstly, by
solidarity; the organisation of workers irrespective of their occupation - an
aspiration, originating with the American Industrial
Workers of the World, for ‘one big union’. But also, by the revolutionary
belief that work should be organised democratically. “Every industry thoroughly organised, in the
first place, to fight, to gain control of, and then to administer, that
industry … leaving to the men themselves to determine under what conditions and
how, the work shall be done,” proclaimed a famous document from the Welsh
miners’ union.
But not only does Suffragette
fail to make even the faintest nod to this movement (the non-suffragette
working class are portrayed as either boorish, abusive or in hoc to
monarchism), it elides the splits within the suffragette movement itself. There
is one cursory reference to Sylvia Pankhurst,
Emmeline Pankhurst’s (Meryl Steep in the film) daughter who undertook a
political and economic journey the WSPU never dared to. Sylvia Pankhurst was
one of the WSPU’s most passionate members, imprisoned and force fed numerous
times, but she was nonetheless expelled in 1914 for not taking instructions and
‘walking in step.’
East London Suffragettes
Sylvia Pankhurst had by that time formed the East London
Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS), which intentionally organised among working
class women in the East End of the capital. In fact, her real crime, in the
eyes of her mother and sister, was to oppose the WSPU’s campaign of small-scale
violence in favour of working with
working class women. Thus Maud Adams, an East End laundry worker was, contrary
to Suffragette, far more likely to
have been in the ELFS than the mainstream WSPU. The ELFS, unlike the WSPU, was
committed to universal suffrage, not votes for women ‘on the same terms as
men’. But it was coming of the First World War that really exposed the chasm
that existed with the conservative WSPU. The WSPU instantly backed the war,
demanded conscription and changed the name of its newspaper to Britannia. Emmeline and Christabel
Pankhurst contributed to the war effort by handing out white feathers to men
who they thought should have been fighting at the front (irony alert – many of
the soldiers who did volunteer and were later drafted, were not entitled to
vote).
Sylvia Pankhurst’s ELFS, by contrast, was opposed to war,
which in the midst of an outbreak of mass jingoism took some bravery, and
represented the interests of working class women whose lives were turned
upside. Their husbands were frequently whisked away in a matter of hours
leaving them with several children to feed and they were exploited in official
sweat shop factories. The ELFS opposed rent and food price hikes and evictions
and arranged deputations of women to put their case to the Prime Minister. It
also set up cut price restaurants and a toy factory, which would nowadays be
called a social enterprise. In March 1916, the ELFS, tellingly (and
democratically), changed its name to the Workers’ Suffrage Federation and
explicitly backed ‘human suffrage’.
But they were alone in that stance. When in 1916 the
government indicated it was finally willing to extend the franchise after the
war was over, women’s suffrage societies met to consider their response. Most
were still in favour of a limited
franchise for women based on a property qualification. Sylvia Pankhurst berated
them as ‘comfortable middle class women’.
Human Suffrage
In the ELFS newspaper, The
Women’s Dreadnought, Sylvia Pankhurst, criticised
suffragists and suffragettes alike for refusing “to set themselves free to
say that universal suffrage must be introduced for all, and hold, instead, to
the merely negative course of opposing universal suffrage for men until women
are enfranchised. “The suffrage question,” she went on “can never be disposed
of until the entire adult population is enfranchised.” This eventually happened
in 1928.
Here is a trailer for a recent documentary about Sylvia Pankhurst:
Meanwhile, the WSPU, transformed itself, at the end of 1917
into the short-lived Women’s Party.
The party proclaimed itself in favour of “equal pay for equal work, equal marriage and divorce laws, the same
rights over children for both parents, equality of rights and opportunities in
public service, and a system of maternity benefits.” It also campaigned for a
fight to the finish with Germany, the expulsion of those with “enemy blood”
from government departments and the abolition of trade unions no less.
If one
family embodied the Suffragettes it was the Pankhursts. But while Emmeline and
Christabel Pankhurst gravitated to the Conservative party, Sylvia eventually
became a council communist, an anti-Leninist political current similar to
syndicalism. The contrast could not have been starker.
Here is part two
