The working-class suffragists of 1900

Part three of Jill Mountford’s series on the history of the struggle for women’s suffrage. Part one of this series was published in Solidarity 462 (here) and part two in Solidarity 463 (here). Parts four and five will appear in future issues.

The story of women’s suffrage is conventionally divided into the militant suffrage campaign led by the WSPU and the constitutional one led by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS).

Not until research done during the second wave of feminism, the women’s movement of the 1970s, was a third strand added to the story — the radical suffragists.

Jill Liddington and Jill Norris documented the role of working-class women in the Lancashire and Cheshire mill towns and found they could not comfortably fit these women into either the militant or the constitutional strand. They shared “considerable industrial experience and political radicalism which set them apart...”

This article deals with that working-class women’s movement of the early 1900s. A women’s movement that involved many tens of thousands of women at its peak, that helped break the yoke of Victorian norms and expectations for women of all classes, that shocked and angered Edwardian sensibilities and morals has yet to be surpassed in scale, bravery, creativity, and exhilarating inspiration.

Lazy popular history paints us a picture of a London-based women’s suffrage campaign, led and made up by middle-class “ladies” and women with titles, and dominated at the pinnacle by the self-appointed aristocrats of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the Pankhursts, Emmeline and Christabel.

The storyteller will, often as not, throw in a young woman with little formal education, dishevelled hair, a shawl and clogs, who speaks with an accent from somewhere up north, but overall, working-class women are hidden, dismissed and ignored in the story of the battle for votes for women.

By examining the bigger picture and stepping outside of London, we can find so much more to appreciate, to be inspired by and to understand about this first wave of feminism and the role socialist and working-class women played in it.

There are many stories to be told about where and how working-class women took up the fight: the Lancashire and Cheshire cotton and silk mill women, the women in the wool mills of West Riding. There are, most likely, stories still to be developed and even uncovered about working-class women’s role in the fight for women’s suffrage in Scotland.

The best known story about working-class women fighting for their right to vote is that of the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS) founded and led by Sylvia Pankhurst.

But that is only part of the big picture. It still lacks detail of many of the working-class women involved. A decade before the WSPU was founded, and almost twenty years before the ELFS was set up, working-class women in the north of England were involved in the fight for the right to vote.

With all the burdens and barriers of long hours of work for low pay; periods of grinding poverty and unemployment; domestic drudgery; all too frequent pregnancies and endless child rearing; low or no formal education; and often of marriage to men who held backward ideas about women’s rights and equality, these women still cared about and found the time and energy to campaign for women’s suffrage.

This story begins two hundred miles away from Lancashire and a million miles away from the lives of the working-class mill women. In 1894 a small gathering of middle-class, well educated, constitutional suffrage campaigners, including Isabella Ford and Millicent Fawcett, met in Westminster to discuss and organise a “Special Appeal”, with the intention of dispelling the idea that “women do not care about suffrage”. For the first time they decided they should “appeal to women of all classes”.

In Manchester, a young woman called Esther Roper had just started as secretary for the Manchester Suffrage Society (a post held by Lydia Becker until her death in 1890). Esther was 25 years old, a first generation middle-class woman who had recently graduated from Owens College (forerunner of Manchester University).

She had won a scholarship as part of a trial in research to assess whether university education was bad for women’s physical and mental health, and Esther’s very unconventional life post-university must have cast doubt for some on the conventional case for higher education for women.

Immediately she got news of the Special Appeal she set herself the task “to bring the Special Appeal under the notice of the factory women of Lancashire and Cheshire”.

Women in the textile industries in Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire outnumbered men by 94,000 (311,000 women to 217,000 men). There were more than 96,820 of them in the textile unions compared to only 69,699 men, but mostly they were “represented” by men. Unionised women in the mills made up 83% of all organised women workers in Britain in 1896. At the TUC annual conference in 1900 there were only two women delegates, and neither was from the textile unions.
Esther instinctively knew these were women who cared about their own political representation. She believed they could be rallied to fight for women’s suffrage. Though her father had become a respectable Minister for the Church of England, his three sisters, Esther’s aunts, had all worked as weavers in the cotton mills in Manchester.

Esther considered Lancashire the “natural home for a women’s movement”. She was a quiet and studious young woman, but showed both impressive organising skills and wise political judgement. To achieve her goal she linked up with two working-class women, Mrs Winbolt and Annie Heaton, both mill workers with organising and oratory skills. They went on the knock, visiting women at home, leaving them suffrage literature to read, and leafleting outside the factory gates. During one week in the summer of 1894 there was an open air meeting every night around Manchester. Mrs Winbolt spoke at these meetings alongside other campaigners such as Richard and Emmeline Pankhurst. The Special Appeal had gathered 250,000 signatures from around the country.

In 1896 Esther Roper, while holidaying in Italy, met Eva Gore-Booth. Eva was the younger sister of Constance Markievicz, who in 1918 was to be the first woman elected to Parliament, having escaped the death penalty for her part in the Easter Rising. Elected as a Sinn Fein candidate, Constance never took up her post in Westminster.

Esther and Eva fell in love. In 1897 Eva moved to Manchester to live with Esther and begin a life-long collaboration of fighting for social justice, primarily campaigning with working-class women and always coming from left field when choosing their battles.

The new partnership added fresh energy to a new mood for women’s suffrage, drawing together a “new generation of working-class women who were emerging through the growing labour movement”.

Popular history dates the new mood to be 1903 in the drawing room of 62 Nelson Street, Manchester, or to 1905 after two arrests at a Liberal Party public meeting in Manchester Free Trade Hall. It is more accurate to say the new mood was captured when Esther Roper decided to bring together for the first time trade unions and the campaign for votes for women, and when she sought out Mrs Winbolt and Annie Heaton in 1894.

The work they did showed the world that tens of thousands of women mill workers wanted political rights and representation, and a as means to improve the lot of working-class women, men and their families.

The new mood was further consolidated when Esther and Eva joined forces with Sarah Reddish and Sarah Dickenson in 1900. The two Sarahs were mill workers and seasoned trade union organisers with more than 40 years of experience between them. They were eager to join Esther and Eva in launching a new petition, exclusively aimed at women in the Lancashire cotton mills.

May Day 1900, at an open-air meeting in Blackburn, was the beginning a feverishly hectic year of meetings all over Lancashire, drawing in women from the Independent Labour Party, Social Democratic Federation (SDF), and the newly formed Labour Representation Committee (LRC), Women’s Co-operative Guild, as well as the unions.

The women took the petition into union committees and onto the factory floor. They took motions calling for votes for women to the TUC, ILP, and LRC. The new mood continued to draw in strong resolute women who had learned their negotiating skills, and their ability to persuade and to organise, on the factory floor or in the sweatshop. Selina Cooper, Ethel Derbyshire, Nellie Keaton, Helen Silcock, Ada Neild Chew, Mrs Ramsbottam, Katherine Rowton, Mrs Green and many, many more joined the battle.

According to a report in the Englishwoman’s Review, “Canvassers in fifty places – one, two, three or four in each, according to the numbers of the factory population – were soon at work”. They organised more then 30 major open-air meetings, and countless smaller meetings at ILP branches etc.

They trudged the streets, knocking on doors in the evenings, engaging work-exhausted women usually surrounded by children and trying to cook the evening meal. By spring 1901 they had convinced 30,000 Lancashire mill women to sign the petition for women’s suffrage.