Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2014
May some definition be given of the word “militant”? (Chelsea delegate Cicely Hamilton)
Scholarship on the women's suffrage movement in Britain has reached a curious juncture. No longer content to chronicle the activities or document the contributions of single organizations, historians have begun to analyze the movement's strategies of self-advertisement and to disentangle its racial, imperial, and gendered ideologies. Perhaps the most striking development in recent scholarship on suffrage, however, has been the proliferating discourse on militancy among literary critics, a development with which few historians have engaged. Yet, while militancy has spawned a veritable subfield in literary studies, continually generating new articles and books, these accounts portray the phenomenon in similarly reductive terms. After 1903 the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), under the leadership of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, revitalized a genteel and moribund women's suffrage movement. The WSPU introduced the use of militancy, first interrupting Liberal Party meetings and heckling political speakers, then moving to the use of street theater, such as large-scale demonstrations, and ultimately to the destruction of government and private property, including smashing windows, slashing paintings in public galleries, and setting fire to buildings and pillar-boxes. Once the Liberal government introduced forcible feeding as an antidote to the suffragette hunger strike, militants created a visual activism, dependent upon the exhibition of women's tortured bodies as spectacle. By this account, the activities of the WSPU became exemplary of what critic Barbara Green has called “performative activism” and “visibility politics” in early twentieth-century feminist praxis, creating “almost entirely feminine communities where women celebrated, suffered, spoke with, and wrote for other women,” and that “allowed women to put themselves on display for other women.”
1 Transcript of the third annual conference of the Women's Freedom League, held at Caxton Hall, London, 1 February 1908, Fawcett Library, London Guildhall University (hereafter Fawcett Library), p. 12.
2 Contrast, e.g., Rosen, Andrew, Rise Up, Women! The Militant Campaign of the Women's Social and Political Union, 1903–1914 (London, 1974)Google Scholar; with Tickner, Lisa, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907–1914 (London, 1987)Google Scholar; and Burton, Antoinette, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994)Google Scholar.
3 This account draws from the following works: Green, Barbara, Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage, 1905–1938 (New York, 1997), pp. 1–27Google Scholar; Howlett, Caroline, “Writing on the Body? Representation and Resistance in British Suffragette Accounts of Forcible Feeding,” in Genders Twenty-Three: Bodies of Writing, Bodies in Performance, ed. Foster, Thomas, Siegel, Carol, Berry, Ellen E. (New York, 1996), pp. 3–41Google Scholar; Norquay, Glenda, “Introduction,” in Voices and Votes: A Literary Anthology of the Women's Suffrage Campaign, ed. Norquay, Glenda (Manchester, 1995), pp. 1–38Google Scholar; Lyon, Janet, “Women Demonstrating Modernism,” Discourse 17, no. 2 (Winter 1994–1995): 6–25Google Scholar; Kaplan, Joel and Stowell, Sheila, Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 152–84Google Scholar; Corbett, Mary Jean, Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women's Autobiographies (New York, 1992), pp. 150–79Google Scholar; Marcus, Jane, “The Asylums of Antaeus: Women, War and Madness—Is There a Feminist Fetishism?” in The New Historicism, ed. Veeser, H. Aram (New York, 1989), pp. 132–51Google Scholar, and “Rereading Suffrage and the Pankhursts,” in Suffrage and the Pankhursts, ed. Marcus, Jane (London, 1987), pp. 1–17Google Scholar.
4 Green, , Spectacular Confessions, pp. 16, 30, 56–57Google Scholar.
5 Marcus, , Suffrage and the Pankhursts, p. 2Google Scholar.
6 See Purvis, June, “A ‘Pair of … Infernal Queens’? A Reassessment of the Dominant Representations of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, First Wave Feminists in Edwardian Britain,” Women's History Review 5, no. 2 (1996): 259–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mayhall, Laura E. Nym, “Creating the ‘Suffragette Spirit’: British Feminism and the Historical Imagination,” Women's History Review 4, no. 3 (1995): 319–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kean, Hilda, “Searching for the Past in Present Defeat: The Construction of Historical and Political Identity in British Feminism in the 1920s and 1930s,” Women's History Review 3, no. 1 (1994): 57–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Mayhall, , “Creating,” pp. 321–22Google Scholar.
8 As Krista Cowman compellingly argues, to emphasize, as historians have done for the past decade, the interconnections among suffrage organizations at the local level “can sometimes ignore the fact that there were very real differences in policy and tactics between the suffrage organizations of Edwardian Britain” (“‘A Party between Revolution and Peaceful Persuasion’: A Fresh Look at the United Suffragists,” in The Women's Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Pespectives, ed. Joannou, Maroula and Purvis, June [Manchester, 1998], p. 78)Google Scholar.
9 Fletcher, Ian Christopher, “‘A Star Chamber of the Twentieth Century’: Suffragettes, Liberals, and the 1908 ‘Rush the Commons’ Case,” Journal of British Studies 35, no. 4 (1996): 504–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Holton, Sandra Stanley, Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement (London, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Baker, Keith Michael, “Introduction,” in his Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990), p. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Vernon, James, “Notes Towards an Introduction,” in Re-reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England's Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Vernon, James (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 1–21Google Scholar; Epstein, James A., Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (New York, 1994), pp. 3–28Google Scholar.
12 Cottini, Stefan, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 60–90Google Scholar.
13 Barrow, Logie and Bullock, Ian, Democratic Ideas and the British Labour Movement, 1880–1914 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 9–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ward, Paul, Red Flag and Union Jack: Englishness, Patriotism and the British Left, 1881–1924 (Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, 1998), pp. 11–36Google Scholar.
14 Much of Sandra Stanley Holton's recent work addresses the nineteenth-century roots of early twentieth-century militancy; see “Now You See It, Now You Don't: The Women's Franchise League and Its Place in Contending Narratives of the Women's Suffrage Movement,” in Joannou, and Purvis, , eds., Women's Suffrage Movement, pp. 15–36Google Scholar, “From Anti-slavery to Suffrage Militancy: The Bright Circle, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the British Women's Movement,” in Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives, ed. Daley, Caroline and Nolan, Melanie (New York, 1994), pp. 213–33Google Scholar, and “To Educate Women into Rebellion’: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Creation of a Transatlantic Network of Radical Suffragists,” American Historical Review 99, no. 4 (October 1994): 1113–36Google Scholar.
15 Millicent Garrett Fawcett contrasted “the perfect order and good temper” of the demonstrations and meetings for women's suffrage held in the 1870s with the agitation of male radicals for franchise reform in the 1860s, suggesting that the men's protests might provide historical examples in the future: “The remark, so common at the time, that women themselves do not want the suffrage, is silenced by these huge demonstrations; but how long it will be before the legislature listens to the demands of those who urge their claims without blowing up prisons or knocking down park rails is a question that only the future can solve”; see “England: The Women's Suffrage Movement,” in The Woman Question in Europe: A Series of Original Essays, ed. Stanton, Theodore (London, 1884), pp. 14–15Google Scholar.
16 And while my argument here focuses upon specific engagements between the WSPU and the WFL, my analysis could and should be widened to include the numerous other organizations enacting militancy, including the Men's Political Union, the Women's Tax Resistance League (WTRL), the East London Federation of Suffragettes, the United Suffragists, the Suffragettes of the WSPU, and the Independent WSPU. Stanley and Morley's examination of Emily Davison remains the best resource for understanding suffragette networks as sites for the articulation of militant practice: Stanley, Liz and Morley, Ann, The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison (London, 1988), pp. 172–85Google Scholar. See also Joannou, and Purvis, , eds., Women's Suffrage MovementGoogle Scholar; John, Angela V. and Eustance, Claire, eds., The Men's Share? Masculinities, Male Support, and Women's Suffrage in Britain, 1890–1920 (London, 1997)Google Scholar; and Holton, Suffrage Days.
17 For treatments of the WFL as one of many “splits,” see Liddington, Jill and Norris, Jill, One Hand Tied behind Us: The Rise of the Women's Suffrage Movement (London, 1978), p. 209Google Scholar; and Rosen, , Rise Up, pp. 86–94Google Scholar. Accounts that discuss the WFL in a more expanded context include Claire Eustance, “Meanings of Militancy: The Ideas and Practice of Political Resistance in the Women's Freedom League, 1907–1914,” in Joannou, and Purvis, , eds., Women's Suffrage Movement, pp. 51–64Google Scholar; Harrison, Brian, Prudent Revolutionaries: Portraits of British Feminists between the Wars (Oxford, 1987), pp. 45–60Google Scholar; Garner, Les, Stepping Stones to Women's Liberty: Feminist Ideas in the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1900–1918 (Rutherford, N.J., 1984), pp. 28–43Google Scholar; and Linklater, Andro, An UnhusbandedLife: Charlotte Despard, Suffragist, Socialist and Sinn Feiner (London, 1980), pp. 121–96Google Scholar.
18 This analysis originated with Billington-Greig, Teresa, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Emancipation in a Hurry (London, 1911)Google Scholar, reprinted in McPhee, Carol and FitzGerald, Ann, eds., The Non-violent Militant: Selected Writings of Teresa Billington-Greig (London, 1987), pp. 135–222Google Scholar.
19 On suffragists' challenges to liberal political ideology, see Rendall, Jane, “Citizenship, Culture and Civilisation: The Languages of British Suffragists, 1866–1874,” in Daley, and Nolan, , eds., Suffrage and Beyond, pp. 127–50Google Scholar; Riley, Denise, “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis, 1988), pp. 67–95Google Scholar; Kent, Susan Kingsley, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914 (Princeton, N.J., 1987), pp. 3–23Google Scholar; and Holton, Sandra Stanley, Feminism and Democracy: Women's Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain, 1900–1918 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 9–28Google Scholar.
20 Brian Harrison makes the case for the WFL's weakness as a result of its democratic organization (Prudent Revolutionaries, pp. 41, 50–51), Les Garner for its strength (A Brave and Beautiful Spirit: Dora Marsden, 1882–1960 [Brookfield, Vt., 1990], p. 25Google Scholar).
21 Each branch was permitted one representative for its first twelve to fifty members and one for each twelve to fifty members thereafter; see the WFL Constitution, 1912, Fawcett Library, WFL Papers, box 59.
22 Stanley and Morley have demonstrated the extent to which individual members of the WSPU initiated militant action. Specifically, they point to the first hunger strike, undertaken by Marion Wallace Dunlop in 1909, and to Emily Wilding Davison's martyrdom at the Derby in 1913, arguing that Christabel Pankhurst “harnessed the initiative and energy of WSPU members in the service of the organization”(Morley, and Stanley, , Life and Death, pp. 151–54Google Scholar).That individual members initiated acts of militancy should not obscure the point that the leadership of the WSPU strove to limit the range of political activism pursued by members and to limit organization-wide discussion of the principles upon which the practice of militancy rested.
23 Public statements made at the time of the split, as well as the WFL's subsequent development, refute the WSPU's assertion that those women forming the WFL did so in order to maintain organizational ties to the Labour Party after the WSPU had broken with all political parties. Great diversity existed in the party affiliations of WFL members; it is impossible to state categorically that the WFL was affiliated with Labour. It is fair to say, however, that members of the WFL resented the discipline with which the WSPU attempted to limit political activity to the struggle for the vote. A WSPU member, Annie Kenney, records the discipline Christabel Pankhurst administered in order to exclude women from the WSPU who did not fit her definition of appropriate political activity(Annie, Kenney, Memories of a Militant [London, 1924], pp. 110, 227Google Scholar).
24 See “Mrs. Billington-Greig at Caxton Hall,” Women's Franchise, 27 June 1907, p. 8Google Scholar.
25 Accounts of these events are, not surprisingly, partisan. See Emmeline Pankhurst, “Letter Sent to Enquirers,” issued from Clement's Inn, September 1907, in British Library, Maud Arncliffe Sennett Collection (hereafter cited as MAS), 2: 2/3; the letter is reprinted in Marcus, , Suffrage and the Pankhursts, pp. 163–65Google Scholar. For the WFL perspective, see Provisional Committee to Mrs. Earengey, 16 September 1907, McIlquham (13), Fawcett Library, Fawcett Autograph Collection. The breach was debated openly in the pages of the Scottish newspaper Forward in 1907; see Bell, Lily, “The Woman's Movement and Democracy,” 2 November 1907Google Scholar; Phillips, Mary, “Thoughts on Democracy,” 2 November 1907Google Scholar; and Billington-Greig, Teresa, “The Difference in the Women's Movement: Autocracy or Democracy,” 23 November 1907Google Scholar. My thanks to Leah Leneman for bringing this newspaper to my attention.
26 Uncovering the extent of WFL and WSPU membership in 1907 and 1908 remains difficult. Both organizations claimed to carry the majority of original WSPU members. For the WSPU's claims, see Pethick-Lawrence, Frederick, Fate Has Been Kind (London, 1943), p. 75Google Scholar; and Pankhurst, E. Sylvia, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (London 1931Google Scholar; reprint, London, 1977), p. 265. Amy Sanderson and Teresa Billington-Greig, WFL members, claimed that the majority of the WSPU's Scottish branches went with the WFL. Further complicating matters, as late as 1910, many women belonged to both organizations. See Sanderson, Amy, “The Division in the Women's Movement: A Protest in the Name of Democracy,” Forward, 26 October 1907, p. 6Google Scholar; and Teresa Billington-Greig, “‘The Split,’ 1907,” Fawcett Library, Teresa Billington-Greig Papers (hereafter cited as TBG Papers), misc. manuscript notes, n.d., box 399.
27 Nevinson, Margaret Wynne, Life's Fitful Fever: A Volume of Memories (London, 1926), p. 196Google Scholar; Martyn, Edith How, as quoted by Billington-Greig, Teresa, Report of the Second Annual Conference of the Women's Social and Political Union (Now the Women's Freedom League) (London, 1907), p. 5Google Scholar.
28 The classic articulation of suffragette militancy as political irrationality was penned by Dangerfield, George in The Strange Death of Liberal England (London, 1935)Google Scholar. It lives on in recent works by Pugh, Martin, Women and the Women's Movement in Britain, 1914–1959 (New York, 1993), pp. 4–5Google Scholar; and Harrison, Brian, “The Act of Militancy: Violence and the Suffragettes, 1903–1914,” in Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain, ed. Harrison, Brian (Oxford, 1982), pp. 26–81Google Scholar. A substantial body of scholarship examining militancy as the creation of a political subjectivity for women has emerged; see Joannou, Maroula, ‘Ladies, Please Don't Smash These Windows’: Women's Writing, Feminist Consciousness, and Social Change, 1918–1938 (Oxford, 1995)Google Scholar; Miller, Jane Eldridge, Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel (London, 1994)Google Scholar; Sypher, Eileen, Wisps of Violence: Producing Public and Private Politics in the Turn-of-the-Century British Novel (London, 1993)Google Scholar; Lyon, Janet, “Militant Allies, Strange Bedfellows: Suffragists and Vorticists before the War,” differences 4 (1992): 100–33Google Scholar; Corbett, , Representing Femininity, pp. 157–62Google Scholar; and Holton, Sandra Stanley, “‘In Sorrowful Wrath’: Suffrage Militancy and the Romantic Feminism of Emmeline Pankhurst,” in British Feminism in the Twentieth Century, ed. Smith, Harold L. (Amherst, Mass., 1990), pp. 7–24Google Scholar. For a recent articulation of the connection between suffrage activism of the early twentieth century and radical feminism of the 1970s, see Purvis, , “‘Infernal Queens,’” p. 259Google Scholar.
29 Carol McPhee and Ann FitzGerald make a case for this distinction in the introduction to their collection of Billington-Greig's, writings, Non-violent Militant, pp. 1–24Google Scholar.
30 See Joyce, Patrick, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 27–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 176–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vernon, James, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 295–330Google Scholar.
31 See Elmy, Elizabeth C. Wolstenholme, Woman's Franchise: The Need of the Hour (London, 1907), p. 3Google Scholar.
32 Belchem, John, Popular Radicalism in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New York, 1996), p. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 Swan Sonnenschein and Company published its first edition of the text after one thousand copies of a “brochure” on the subject had been printed for the women's suffrage societies the previous year; Stopes, Charlotte Carmichael, British Freewomen: Their Historical Privilege (London, 1894)Google Scholar. Sonnenschein and Company published a second, and slightly expanded, edition of the book later that year and yet another expanded version in 1907. Stopes's other publications, which made similar arguments in less detail, were also sold widely and include The Constitutional Basis of Women's Suffrage (Edinburgh, 1908)Google Scholar, and “Man” in Relation to That of “Woman” in the Constitution (London, 1907)Google Scholar. For an example of Stopes's publication of research in progress, see The Englishwoman's Review, 15 January 1901, pp. 74–75Google Scholar.
34 Stopes, , British Freewomen, p. 99Google Scholar.
35 Ibid., pp. 21–22.
36 See, e.g., the testimony of Florence Elizabeth Macaulay in the trial of the “rush” case; Pethick-Lawrence, F. W., “The Trial of the Suffragette Leaders (1908),” reprinted in Marcus, , Suffrage and the Pankhursts, p. 109Google Scholar.
37 Teresa Billington-Greig, misc. manuscript notes, n.d., TBG Papers, box 399.
38 Taylor, Helen, “The Claim of Englishwomen to the Suffrage Constitutionally Considered,” Westminster Review (1867)Google Scholar, reprinted in Before the Vote Was Won, ed. Lewis, Jane (London, 1987), pp. 24, 36–37Google Scholar.
39 McIlquham, Harriet, Women's Suffrage, An Ancient Right, A Modern Need (London, 1891), pp. 5, 8Google Scholar; Stopes, , British Freewomen, pp. 136–37Google Scholar; Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, Home and Politics: An Address Delivered at Toynbee Hall and Elsewhere (London, 1890), pp. 2–3Google Scholar.
40 The annual women's parliaments of the WSPU were not opportunities for the organization to discuss issues and debate policy; rather, they served as symbolic enactments of women's exclusion from the “Men's Parliament” and as staging grounds for the presentation of petitions to Parliament and the king; see Pankhurst, Christabel, Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote, ed. Pethick-Lawrence, F. W. (London, 1959; reprint, London, 1987), pp. 75–84Google Scholar.
41 Here, I am drawing from Vernon, Politics and the People, in which he argues that competing groups in nineteenth-century Britain articulated their own understanding of the public political sphere through the discourse of popular constitutionalism (p. 7). See also Clark, Anna, “Gender, Class and the Constitution: Franchise Reform in England, 1832–1928,” in Vernon, , Re-reading the Constitution, pp. 239–53Google Scholar. That such a reading had racialized implications is clear; see Burton, , Burdens of History, pp. 52–59Google Scholar. This suggests that militancy incorporated, rather than challenged, the narratives of constitutionalism; for a different view, see Holton, Sandra Stanley, “British Freewomen: National Identity, Constitutionalism and Languages of Race in Early Suffragist Histories,” in Radical Femininity: Women's Self-Representation in the Public Sphere, ed. Yeo, Eileen Janes (Manchester, 1998), pp. 163–67Google Scholar.
42 See Blackburn, Helen, Women's Suffrage: A Record of the Women's Suffrage Movement in the British Isles (London, 1902), pp. 82–88Google Scholar.
43 Treatments of this protest are found in the following autobiographical accounts: Pankhurst, E. Sylvia, The Suffragette: The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905–1910 (London, 1911), pp. 260–321Google Scholar; Lytton, Constance, Prisons and Prisoners: Some Personal Experiences (London, 1914), pp. 18–30Google Scholar; Pankhurst, Emmeline, My Own Story (London, 1914), pp. 116–30Google Scholar; Pankhurst, E. Sylvia, Suffragette Movement, pp. 288–93Google Scholar; Pethick-Lawrence, Emmeline, My Part in a Changing World (London, 1938), pp. 194–207Google Scholar; Pethick-Lawrence, F. W., Fate Has Been Kind, pp. 79–80Google Scholar; Pankhurst, Christabel, Unshackled, pp. 102–12Google Scholar.
44 The Times, 14 October 1908.
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49 The Times, 22 October 1908.
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51 Ibid., p. 49. For a provocative and innovative discussion of the rhetorical strategies of the WSPU in the later years of militancy, see Jorgensen-Earp, Cheryl, The Transfiguring Sword: The Just War of the Women's Social and Political Union (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1997)Google Scholar.
52 My thanks to one of the anonymous readers of this article for pressing me on this point; see also McWilliam, Rohan, “Radicalism and Popular Culture: The Tichborne Case and the Politics of ‘Fair Play,’ 1867–1886,” pp. 44–64Google Scholar; and Tanner, Duncan, “Ideological Debate in Edwardian Labour Politics: Radicalism, Revisionism and Socialism,” pp. 27–93Google Scholar, both in Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour, and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914, ed. Biagini, Eugenio F. and Reid, Alistair J. (Cambridge, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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57 Daily Graphic, 17 October 1908; see also The Times, 13 October 1908.
58 AR1908, pp. 10–11; The Times, 29 and 30 October 1908.
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62 Burton, , Burdens of History, pp. 63–96Google Scholar. The phrase comes from Billington-Greig, Teresa, “The ‘Grille’ Protest,” Women's Franchise, 5 November 1908, p. 211Google Scholar.
63 Green, , Spectacular Confessions, p. 7Google Scholar.
64 The “grille protest” occasioned a formal breach between the WFL and the organization led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett, the NUWSS, which used the WFL's October 1908 protest as justification for ending its affiliation with Women's Franchise, the newspaper carrying news of suffragist activism between 1907 and 1909. The NUWSS continued to distance itself from the methods of the WFL in public statements and letters to Members of Parliament (see Women's Franchise, 21 January 1909; and The Times, 12 and 20 November 1908).
65 Rosen, , Rise Up, pp. 118–21Google Scholar.
66 “The Besieged House,” Women's Franchise, 8 July 1909, p. 673Google Scholar. The WFL's petition is found in “Women's Social and Political Emancipation: The Suffragette Fellowship Collection in the Museum of London” (hereafter Suffragette Fellowship), Museum of London, Harvester microfilm, reel 12, 50.82/588, p. 11; and Women's Franchise, 15 July 1909, p. 686Google Scholar.
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68 “‘The Humble Petition and Advice,’” Women's Franchise, 15 July 1909, pp. 685–86Google Scholar. At that meeting, Gladstone informed the women that it was “a new point of law to argue for the King's acceptance of a deputation under the Act of 1661”; see the transcript of this meeting in the Home Office files: Public Record Office (PRO), Home Office (HO) 45/10338/139199/63a. See also correspondence between the Home Office and the WFL: PRO, HO 45/10338/139199/64 and /67, 23 July, 3 and 9 August, 1909.
69 See The Times, 10, 13, 17, and 24 July 1909.
70 The longest a single deputation waited was on 14 July, when the women remained on the pavement from 2:50 p.m. until the House rose the next day at 9:15 a.m. (Report of the Women's Freedom League for the Year 1909 and of the Fifth Annual Conference [London, 1910], p. 45Google Scholar; hereafter AR1909).
71 The petition was a mainstay of early nineteenth-century radical protest; see Epstein, , Radical Expression, p. 15Google Scholar.
72 K. M., “History-Making and Magisterial-Heckling,” Women's Franchise, 22 July 1909, p. 698Google Scholar.
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74 Nelson, M., “The Siege,” Women's Franchise, 29 July 1909, p. 709Google Scholar, and “The Siege,” Women's Franchise, 12 August 1909, p. 727Google Scholar.
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76 See Tickner, , Spectacle of Women, p. 226Google Scholar.
77 Wells described the women of the picket as “women of all sorts, though of course the independent worker-class predominated,” in Wells, H. G., The New Machiavelli (London, 1911), pp. 430–31Google Scholar.
78 On the gendering of suffrage militancy, see Holton, Sandra Stanley, “Manliness and Militancy: The Political Protest of Male Suffragists and the Gendering of the ‘Suffragette’ Identity,” in John, and Eustance, , eds., The Men's Share, pp. 110–34Google Scholar. On the gendering of citizenship, see Clark, Anna, “Manhood, Womanhood, and the Politics of Class in Britain, 1790–1845,” pp. 263–79Google Scholar; and McClelland, Keith, “Rational and Respectable Men: Gender, the Working Class, and Citizenship in Britain, 1850–1867,” pp. 280–93Google Scholar, both in Gender and Class in Modern Europe, ed. Frader, Laura L. and Rose, Sonya O. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997)Google Scholar.
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80 “The Besieged House,” Women's Franchise, 8 July 1909, p. 673Google Scholar.
81 “Humble Petition and Advice,” Women's Franchise, 15 July 1909, p. 685Google Scholar.
82 “Correspondence with the Prime Minister,” Women's Franchise, 19 August 1909, p. 735Google Scholar.
83 The Times, “Suffragists at Downing Street,” 19 August 1909; “In Parliament,” 20 August 1909; and “Women Suffragists and the Prime Minister,” 28 August 1909.
84 Healy, T. M., Right of Petition: The Defence at Bow Street (London, 1909), p. 1Google Scholar.
85 Ibid., pp. 2–4, 10–11.
86 Ibid., p. 16; see also The Times, 4 September 1909.
87 The two women remained at large until their appeal was heard (“The Women and the Case,” Women's Franchise, 9 September 1909, p. 765Google Scholar); the WFL's appeal to the Lord Chief Justice was dismissed in January 1910; see AR1909, p. 15.
88 Martyn, Edith How, letter to The Times, 29 October 1909Google Scholar.
89 Since the 1870s, the ballot box had been the object of popular constitutional scrutiny; see Vernon, , Politics and the People, pp. 155–58Google Scholar.
90 According to Edith How Martyn, the liquid was “an alkaline solution of pyrogallol and its use was decided upon only after many experiments had been made with it” (letter to The Times, 29 October 1909). At a pretrial hearing held 4 November, Alice Chapin maintained that “she had been told that the fluid was absolutely harmless, and she honestly believed that it could not hurt anyone.” At the same hearing, Dr. Francis, ophthalmic surgeon, Guy's Hospital, testified that the “injury was caused by a strong irritant, possibly an alkaline solution.” The appearances were compatible with pyrogallic acid (The Times, 5 November 1909). See also Wodehouse (metropolitan police) to Gladstone, 28 October 1909, reporting that, in the opinion of the police divisional surgeon, the mixture was composed of ink and ammonia; British Library, Herbert Gladstone Papers, Add MS 46067, fols. 256–57.
91 Central Criminal Court, Sessions Paper, first session, 24 November 1909, PRO, CRIM10/100, pp. 200–203.
92 Women were excluded from the court during the trial; see Mr. Justice Grantham to E. Troup, 25 November 1909, PRO, HO 144/1047/185574/13.
93 Neilans, Alison, The Ballot Box Protest: Defence at the Old Bailey (London, 1910), pp. 4–6Google Scholar.
94 While imprisoned, Neilans went on hunger strike to protest her status in the second division; see Neilans to Edith How Martyn, 27 December 1909, Militants (20D), Fawcett Library, Fawcett Autograph Collection. Neilans was released on 1 February 1910. Chapin was granted a pardon when it was confirmed that Thorley's injury had been caused by the ammonia used in rinsing his eyes and not the solution Chapin had flung into the ballot box. Chapin was released on 3 February 1910, three weeks before her sentence expired; PRO, HO 188/5/1910/2.
95 Transcript of the WFL's fifth annual conference, held 29 January 1910 (hereafter Transcript 1910), pt. 2, pp. 8–9, 15.
96 WFL National Executive Committee Minutes (hereafter WFL NEC), 20 June 1910, Fawcett Library, box 54A, p. 212.
97 The Bermondsey protest drove a wedge between those women devoted exclusively to passive resistance and those desiring to employ a combination of strategies. The evidence suggests that the formation of the WTRL as a separate and distinct organization resulted from disillusionment with the direction of WFL policy (WFL NEC, 8 December 1908 and 20 November 1909, box 54A, pp. 14, 117; WTRL minutes, 22 October 1909, Fawcett Library, box 59; see also Transcript 1910, pp. 5, 9).
98 Billington-Greig, , in McPhee, and FitzGerald, , eds., Non-violent Militant, pp. 171–78Google Scholar.
99 Philippa Strachey to Marion Phillips, 4 November 1909; statement by the Election Committee of the London Society for Women's Suffrage, forwarded to the Executive of the NUWSS, WS (1F), Fawcett Library, Fawcett Autograph Collection.
100 The Times, 6 November 1910.
101 Ibid., 29 October 1909.
102 “What We Think,” The Vote, 11 November 1909, p. 25Google Scholar; Despard, Charlotte, “Our Responsibility,” The Vote, 11 November 1909, p. 34Google Scholar.
103 Morley, and Stanley, , Life and Death, pp. 153–55Google Scholar; see also Green, , Spectacular Confessions, p. 93Google Scholar.
104 The WFL's NEC discussed the possibility of invalidating a by-election as early as January 1909 (WFL NEC, 30 January 1909, box 54A, p. 34). Alison Neilans claimed the organization had discussed the prospect of such a protest for two years, crediting Billington-Greig, Teresa with the idea (The Times, 1 November 1909)Google Scholar.
105 For a nuanced discussion of why neither militancy nor women's war service resulted in the enfranchisement of women, see Grayzel, Susan R., Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999), pp. 190–225Google Scholar; see also Pugh, , Women and the Women's Movement, pp. 34–42Google Scholar.
106 The odd dissident from the WSPU is documented; on Dora Marsden, see Garner, Brave and Beautiful; and on Billington-Greig, Teresa, see McPhee, and FitzGerald, , eds., Non-violent MilitantGoogle Scholar; and Harrison, Prudent Revolutionaries. Yet few scholars have explored contemporary critiques of WSPU militancy in any depth, and many of those who have tend to reject outright the criticisms of the WSPU's contemporaries; see Corbett, , Representing Femininity, pp. 171–79Google Scholar; and Green, , Spectacular Confessions, pp. 89–93Google Scholar. Harrison, , Prudent Revolutionaries, pp. 52–59Google Scholar, remains the exception. Morley and Stanley's evaluation (Life and Death) remains the most thorough, although the WSPU remains central to their story.
107 Holton, , “Manliness and Militancy,” p. 110Google Scholar.
108 Hunt, James D., “Suffragettes and Satyagraha: Gandhi and the British Women's Suffrage Movement,” The Indo-British Review (Madras) 9, no. 1 (1981): 65–77Google Scholar. See also his Gandhi in London (Springfield, Va., 1993)Google Scholar. For Gandhi's impressions of early suffragette passive resistance, see Gandhi, Mohandas, “Deeds Better than Words, 26 October 1909,” in Gandhi on Women: A Collection of Mahatma Gandhi's Writings and Speeches on Women, compiled by Pushpa Joshi (Ahmadabad, 1988), pp. 3–7Google Scholar. For Gandhi's later assessment, see his Satyagraha in South Africa, trans. Desai, Valji Govindji (1928; reprint, Stanford, Calif., 1954)Google Scholar.
109 Vicinus, Martha, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (Chicago, 1985), p. 262Google Scholar.
110 Debate on feminisms has characterized the last decade of feminist scholarship; for influential arguments, see Cott, Nancy F., The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn., 1987)Google Scholar; and Offen, Karen, “Defining Feminism: A Comparative Approach,” Signs 14 (Autumn 1988): 119–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
