No Surrender is an important social realist novel about the battle for votes for women. It was written in the moment, at the height of the campaign, by an active suffragette, Constance Maud. Maud was a champion of working class women activists in the suffragette movement at a time when they were dismissed and disregarded by the autocratic leadership of the militant, headline grabbing Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Through their graphic novel, Sophie and Scarlett Rickard have taken No Surrender and breathed new life into it for a 21st century readership.
Christabel Pankhurst had little regard for working class women. She saw them as “the weakest portion of the sex… their lives were too hard, their education too meagre to equip them for the contest… We want picked women, the very strongest and most intelligent!”
Despite the views of its leadership, hundreds of working class women got involved in the WSPU and tens of thousands more in broader women’s suffrage campaigns. There were three suffragette novels written at the height of the struggle. The first was The Convert by Elizabeth Robins in 1907, followed by Suffragette Sally by Gertrude Colmore in 1911, and then No Surrender that same year. Interestingly, all three novels have working class women as the main or central protagonists.
The latter two novels were published at the beginning of the period known as The Great Unrest, a time of labour revolt and mass strikes. Suffragette Sally and No Surrender were published a year after the campaign of the Chainmakers of Cradley Heath. This was a struggle organised by Mary Macarthur which culminated in an indefinite strike. Within 15 weeks, the women won a minimum wage.
In the summer of 1911, 15,000 women in the Bermondsey area of South London, again organised by Mary Macarthur, took strike action in 23 different factories. Most returned to work having won victories around pay and conditions.
LOVE STORIES
In No Surrender, Constance Maud is meticulous in her account of real events: the skirmishes, the violence, the solidarity, the personal sacrifices and the mass movement. The cause of votes for women is one of two love stories running through this novel. It is this love story that is the all-consuming passion.
The other is a personal story of love that is doomed because of political differences. Jenny Clegg, the main protagonist, is a millworker from Lancashire. She is a poor, hardworking, plucky and, above all else, a principled young woman who is convinced by her friend Mary O’Neill, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat (in part inspired by Constance Lytton) to join the women’s suffrage movement. Through this relationship, Jenny becomes a committed activist for the cause and as a result faces a major conflict with her boyfriend, labour movement activist Joe Hopton, who is very much against women’s suffrage.
CLASS IN THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT
Maud, like Robins and Colmore, sets out to dispel the popular myth that the suffragette movement was for middle class and aristocratic ‘ladies’.
It is worth examining the life of Constance Lytton, on whom the Mary O’Neill character is in part based, in thinking about class and the suffrage movement. Lytton was an active suffragette, writer, and later a campaigner for prison reform and birth control who showed a great deal of solidarity with working class women. When she was arrested for stone throwing, she was accommodated in the hospital wing of the prison due to her congenital heart condition, while two working class women who were stone throwing alongside her were accommodated in the Third Division and subjected to force feeding.
Lytton was outraged by this and wanted to expose the brutal treatment of her working class sisters. The next time she was arrested she presented herself as Jane Warton, a seamstress, and was treated savagely and humiliated. She was repeatedly force fed. Suspicions about her real identity were raised and she was released from prison. Lytton used this experience to great effect, exposing the lies of the government and prison authorities that force feeding was a ‘special medical treatment’ when, in fact, it was torture designed to punish and intimidate women.
Maud uses Lytton’s experiment in her story. Mary O’Neill is released early from prison and the threat of force feeding her is abandoned, while Jenny Clegg and “her seventeen companions, having no cousins among those in high place, had served out their full sentences to the bitter — very bitter end in spite of weak hearts and fainting fits.”
Working-class women are celebrated in Maud’s novel. Unfortunately, working class men don’t fair so well. They are generally typecast as cruel, selfish, ignorant brutes. No doubt many men were more than capable of being drunken, wife-beating bullies, but I think she labours it a bit and inculcates a wisp of melodrama.
THE PUNISHMENT
While the graphic novel might save us from some overdone prose, using words so sparingly inevitably loses out on the detail of polemical discussions. Where this graphic novel offers something additional, even new, is in conjuring up the dreamscapes and nightmare situations in the chapter entitled 'The Punishment.'
Overall, Scarlet Rickard’s illustrative style has a soft and characterful nature about it, which is apt for telling a very human story. The illustrations convey emotion, energy and atmosphere very well throughout the novel. They do a particularly good job around the force-feeding of hunger-striking suffragettes, where the reader is invited to fall into the horror. Scarlet Rickard’s illustrations of the suffering, humiliation and hallucinations endured by those facing the rape of force-feeding drag the reader in. You are left in no doubt that this vile abuse goes beyond the torture of the body and enters the deepest recesses of the mind. The artwork is reminiscent of Munch’s The Scream and Hitchcock’s dreamscape in 'Vertigo'.
Maud and Colmore write striking, though second-hand accounts of force feeding in their novels. Scarlet Rickard, through illustrations, has added something useful to the understanding of this deeply personal violation.
WONDERFUL TIMES
Maud also shows sensitivity and awareness to the growth of working class women in struggle, no doubt through first-hand observation and certainly reflecting the experience of women involved in the strikes of 1910 and 1911. Maud’s description of Jenny Clegg’s experience is remarkably reminiscent of that of Patience Round, the 79 year old first time striker in the Chainmakers dispute in 1910.
Patience Round said at the time: "These are wonderful times. I never thought that I should live to assert the rights of women. It has been the week of my life — three meetings and such beautiful talking." Maud writes that Jenny Clegg had “never in her life [...] known such happiness. She felt herself growing, unfolding, in this new atmosphere, mentally, physically and spiritually - it was a wondrous sensation.”
If you are interested in this period of women’s and working class history, both the novel and the graphic novel are worth checking out