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Women's Suffrage

Statue of Emmeline Pankhurst outside the Houses of Parliament

One of the most remarkable social changes of the last two hundred years involves the role of women in society. In nineteenth century Britain women not only lacked the right to vote; once married they had no rights of individual ownership. Their property was their husband's. George Eliot wrote of the situation of an intelligent, energetic nineteenth century woman in her great novel Middlemarch of 1872. Her heroine Dorothea Burke being ambitious, naturally works hard to be the best. But society at that time deemed that women had to work at being meek. "If Miss Burke ever attained perfect meekness it would not be for lack of inward fire." (P36) The frustration of Dorothea's journey is clear. Inward fire is not compatible with meekness. You cannot strive in an ambitious fiery way to be meek. In fact the harder you try the less meek you'll be. The woman in Middlemarch who works hardest at meekness, and is most successful at it is Rosamund Vincy. But inspite of her quiet beauty and grace, Rosamund is a bit of a monster, who controls her husband with quiet tears, and in effect breaks him on the wheel of her materialistic desires. In reality the idea of achieving meekness is false. After the death of her first husband Dorothea becomes a widow running her own life, while Rosamund ends up quietly running her husband's. One way or another the effort to be meek fails.

On a global scale the move towards women's suffrage is complicated, with countries such as Australia, New Zealand and parts of the United States progressing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries far in advance of Britain. As far as Britain is concerned the women's rights movement really began to gain momentum towards the end of the nineteenth century. John Stuart Mill brought Women's Suffrage up as an issue in 1865, and from that point pressure began to grow. The socialist lawyer Richard Pankhurst drafted an amendment to the Municipal Francise Act of 1869 which allowed unmarried women to vote in local elections. As the nineteenth century continued women themselves became more actively involved. There were the moderates such as Millicent Fawcett who favoured argument. Like many other supporters of the suffragette movement, Fawcett was conservative in other respects. During the Boer War she headed out to South Africa to try and play down reports of brutality coming out of Kitchener's concentration camps. Then there were the more left leaning militants, such as Richard Pankhurst's wife Emmeline, who with her daughter Christabel, founded the Women's Social and Political Union in 1903. Annie Kenny was another prominent member of the group, who in 1906 ended up in Holloway Prison, following a rowdy attempt to force a meeting with the Home Secretary Asquith. It was the example of the Pankhursts and Annie Kenney which led thousands of women to support the suffragettes. Harsh treatment of women arrested for their involvement in the suffragette movement also encouraged public sympathy. During the First World War there was a split in the movement, with Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst calling for a suspension of their efforts for the war's duration, while Christabel's sister Sylvia wished to press on. The war itself, however, helped the women's cause, since the shortage of men allowed women into traditionally male industries, and thus weakened stereotypes.

It was following the war that real political progress was finally made. In 1918 the Representation of the People Act gave the vote to women over the age of thirty, who were householders, or the wives of men who were householders. The following year Nancy Astor became the first woman MP to sit in the House of Commons. Many of the suffragettes, particularly the left wing radicals such as the Pankhursts who had struggled for years for this moment were no doubt a bit disappointed that Nancy Astor had the honour of being the first sitting woman MP. She was the spirited American society hostess at Clivedon and Hever Castle, American wife of billionaire William Waldorf Astor. As a mother, she is described by A.N. Wilson as being "something out of Eugene O'Neill." (After The Victorians P261) Nancy wasn't quite the red hot radical that many of the radical British suffragettes had dreamt would finally storm into Parliament, but the important thing was that she was there. Nancy Astor is a bit like Keir Hardie in that respect. In 1892 Keir Hardie became the first working class MP to sit in the House of Commons, and although his positions and policies are still a bit of a mystery, the fact of his presence was hugely symbolic.

In 1928 women finally achieved full suffrage on the same terms as men.

Strangely through all of this progress powerful women who had already achieved a prominent position in society were often unsympathetic to the situation of other women. George Eliot, for all the frustrated fire of her heroine Dorothea, was not herself a supporter of the cause of women's rights. The best selling nineteenth century novelist Mrs Humphrey Ward, and Beatrice Potter, co-founder of the London School of Economics, could also be mentioned. In the twentieth century Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir were both well known for excluding women from positions of power. I don't claim to be able to explain this, but perhaps it illustrates the fact that power is contradictory. Being powerful by definition depends on others not being powerful. Once authority is attained it doesn't really make sense to share it with others. Going back to Middlemarch we see that real power cannot be legislated for. Rosamund Vincy is no George Eliot or Maragaret Thatcher, and seems so much less powerful than her clever husband Dr Lydgate. He of course has all the advantages of a robust male education, and the vote. But with her play on the expectations of what men should be, Rosamund still manages to control Lydgate: "He wished to excuse everything in her if he could - but it was inevitable that in that excusing mood he should think of her as if she were an animal of another and feebler species. Nevertheless she had mastered him." (P719)

Rosamund's humility is a weapon. Today we might think that certain symbols mean that we have power. If we have the vote we have power. In the day to day reality of life, of course, this is not true. Power relationships continue as unpredictably as ever. Middlemarch was written when Charles Darwin was breaking down the strict hierarchies of the world. Species were no longer created separately to each other. They merge into one another, with, in the words of Darwin "a sense of actual passage." Life was no longer arranged as a simple ladder, with more powerful forms of life sitting on higher rungs than those less powerful. Hierarchies could switch around in a bewildering fashion. Women, the working classes could break out of a society based around the old hierarchies. On the other hand the state of being "free" and privileged had itself become uncertain. You do not automatically move from one state to another by having the vote. Because of stipulations in the will of her jealous first husband, Dorothea at the end of Middlemarch gives up her fortune to marry the love of her life Will Ladislaw. She is in the position of any woman at that time, who all gave up their fortune when they married. And yet for Dorothea this was her triumph. Perhaps in the end George Eliot was interested in the realities of power and not its outward show. Like Dorothea, George Eliot was of too original a frame of mind to think that life can be reduced to such easy symbolism. "I never called everything by the same name that all the people about me did." Seemingly, with Dorothea's marriage, the end of Middlemarch confirms society in its old pattern. Dorothea defies the expectations of her family, and escapes her lonely life with lots of money for her life with Will Ladislaw. Whether this is a triumph or a defeat is debatable in a book that shows that no triumph or defeat is ever final.

The social and working history collection at the Museum of London has one of the best collections of suffragette material in the world. The collection is based on the archive of the Women's Social and Political Union, set up by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. The Pankhurst Centre in Manchester is the former home of the Pankhurst family, and is now a memorial and learning centre dedicated to the Pankhursts and the history of women's rights.