Suffragettes were not just white middle-class women. The Guardian
The suffragettes weren’t just white, middle-class women throwing stones
The danger of ‘the single story’ of any movement is giving an incomplete picture. Let’s not forget working-class women’s fight for equality
An East London Federation of Suffragettes march passes Bow bus station, June 1914. Photograph: Norah Smyth/Institute of Social History
Monday 12 October 201511.33 BSTLast modified on Tuesday 13 October 201513.18 BST
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“N
ot all the women in the suffrage movement were fighting for degrees. We hadn’t a chance of getting a degree, we were working women, and each of us had our own private thoughts of what we wanted, what we thought was just, and what was worth fighting for.” Interviewed by the BBC in 1978 aged 92, Manchester suffragette Elizabeth Dean took her chance to set the record straight.
Groups such as Sisters Uncut are the modern suffragettes
Ellie Mae O'Hagan
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Voices like hers are sadly missing from many records of the British women’s suffrage movement. For too long the story of women’s battle for the vote has been the story of the Pankhurst family and the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) alone. Though it is without doubt an astonishing, inspiring, important story, there are so many more to be told. Not least that of the Asian women who organised and marched with the WSPU, but also the pacifist, democratic Women’s Freedom League, the trade union activists in the mill towns of the north, numerous rural societies, and the group closest to my heart: the socialist East London suffragettes.
No one has better expressed the danger of “the single story” than Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her magnificent TED Talk about Africa. “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete,” she warns. “They make one story become the only story.” The single suffrage story is about white ladies throwing stones. Not untrue, but desperately incomplete.
Unsurprisingly the new film Suffragette draws heavily on that story. And thefilm’s oblivious publicity campaign hasn’t helped. But the film-makers’ decision to tell it from the point of view of a young, working-class woman – the fictional Maud Watts – is a step forward.
Working women’s activism was key to the foundation of the suffragette movement in the early 1900s. Dissatisfaction with the Labour movement’s patchy support for women’s rights led to the creation of women’s trade unions, which organised for better pay and working conditions alongside political representation. One of the inspirations for the formation of the WSPU in Manchester in 1903 was a 1901 petition for the vote signed by almost 30,000 women working in the north-west’s textile mills.
The first London branch of the WSPU was formed by the docks in Canning Town in 1906 by Yorkshire mill worker Annie Kenney and local activist Minnie Baldock. Most of the big marches and demonstrations in London over the next few years were populated by women from the East End, many of whom routinely gave up their only free day in the week to walk to Westminster and back. Over the next few years the London WSPU’s physical move west was mirrored by a move away from the interests of their first working-class support base, and many early members left.
Melvina Walker and Nellie Cressall. Photograph: Norah Smyth/Institute of Social HistoryBut by the period in which Suffragette is set, there was a thriving and increasingly independent suffragette movement in east London, led by Sylvia Pankhurst and local women including Minnie Lansbury, Melvina Walker, andJulia Scurr. The new east London WSPU branches spoke out on many issues beyond the vote that were relevant to their membership, including housing, wages and work conditions. They regularly shared platforms with other groups and campaigns, including the Irish independence movement. Because they were so “mixed up” with other issues, and because “a working women’s movement was of no value”, in January 1914 they were formally expelled from the WSPU by Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst.
Freed from the autocratic WSPU, the new East London Federation of the Suffragettes (ELFS) flourished. They built a true mass movement for equality that drew support from the whole community, including men. They adopted new tactics that focused more on lobbying and mass mobilisation than individual acts of heroism, as a spell in prison was too high a price to pay for women supporting their family on 25 shillings a week and three weeks behind on the rent.
They set up women’s social centres, and published a newspaper, The Woman’s Dreadnought, which shared first-hand accounts from women of factory work, union activism and daily life at home. They offered public speaking lessons for those who wanted them, and encouraged all their members to speak at meetings and rallies, and join political delegations. During the war they ran community kitchens, a children’s health clinic, a nursery and even a cooperative toy factory. And of course, they continued to protest.
The Suffragettes: now a major motion picture (and a T-shirt)
Catherine Shoard
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If there was a sequel to Suffragette, would we see Maud serving tea in the Bromley suffragette canteen? I like to think so. It’s important to celebrate the contribution of working-class women, as with all the others who have been relegated to the margins, to challenge the single story. It’s not just about fairness, it’s about resistance, to make it easier for the same excluded groups today to argue back when told, “Oh, that’s just the way things are”, or “It’s always been like that”. Sisters Uncut’s disruptive direct action at the premiere of Suffragette acted as a welcome reminder of the continuity between their struggle and ours, and stopped celebration tipping into complacency.
Their missing stories are our loss too, because they have lessons for activists today. Suffragettes in the East End and in the north-west knew first-hand the everyday reality of working women’s lives, and worked to connect individual hardship to structural inequality. They understood that for many the vote was important only as far as it gave greater leverage in the struggle to improve pay and working conditions, secure decent housing, to control their own bodies, or protect their children’s health.
They also took pains to respond to the specific challenges faced by their members. Whether by providing childcare, or a Tea Fund, or setting out in aClarion Van, they didn’t force women to choose between their gender and their class. This inclusive, intersectional approach actively enabled working women not only to participate in the movement but to shape and lead it. It’s time to tell their story too.