At the end of the first decade of the 20th Century, British women were still disenfranchised. The suffragettes stepped up their militant campaign drawing attention to their cause through acts of civil disobedience, asset and wailings.
In 1914, most suffragettes threw their weight behind the war effort. Using funding from the government, leader Emmeline Pankhurst organized a parade of 30,000 to encourage businesses to employ women so men could leave for the front. The war divided the Pankhurst family. Daughter Christabel followed her mother’s lead but her sister Sylvia was a pacifist and formed the women’s peace army to campaign for negotiating settlement to the war. Sylvia also opened four mother and baby clinics in London observing that more babies have died in the first year of the war than British soldiers. Another sister, Adela, fell out with her family and immigrated to Australia where she joined the peace movement, became an active communist and then defected to a fascist organization.
The war had a huge impact on women’s position in British society. The number of women in employment rose from 3 million to almost 5 million by the end of the war. In 1918, parliament passed the law extending voting rights to women aged over 30, however, it was another ten years before British women achieved the same voting rights as men.
The first woman elected to the British parliament was Countess Constance Markievicz, a famed activist who was serving a prison term with her anti-conscription activities. She refused to take up her seat in the House of Commons as it would have involved swearing an oath of allegiance to the king. The first woman to actually enter the parliament was the Viscountess Nancy Astor who won the 1919 violation.
In 1953, former suffragettes gathered to celebrate their achievements and remember the bitter struggle that saw many of them jailed. They include Mary Richardson who displayed the middles commemorating the prison hunger strike. Eileen Casey and Lilian Lenton went to jail six times. The brave people who defied contention to fight for female rights were fated as heroes and heroines.
At Westminster, a statue of Emily Pankhurst stands as a memorial to the suffragettes’ struggle. The activist herself died in 1928, just a few weeks after women were given equal voting rights to men. The recent exhibition at the Women’s Library in London celebrated the 100th of Emily Pankhurst’s women, social and political union by charting the history of the suffragette movement. Sourced from a wide range of private and public collection, the architecture of how women at the time means everything done with the latest printing techniques to spread their demands for equality.
One Australian suffragette even distributed pamphlets over London from an air show. Muriel Matters visited Britain in 1908 and gained public notoriety when she was arrested for chaining herself to the grille when they closed the Ladies’ Gallery in the House of Commons. Muriel was sentenced two months in jail but the grille was permanently removed.
Antonia Byatt: If you say it to most people in this country now, “Do you know it’s only 75 years since women had to vote on the same terms of men?” They’ll say, “What?” And particularly younger women, they’re absolutely flabbergasted when they realized it’s within their grandparents’ or the great grandparents’ memory that women became equal citizens. So in it’s incredibly important really that people have that sense of their history, and also just really energizing. I think some people rarely go out on the lien for what they believe in and to get equal rights and I really respect that.
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