A Generous Feeling of Solidarity
They simply couldn’t believe it.
Our wonderful demonstration, lamented Emmeline Pankhurst, had made no impression whatever on him.1
Following the Hyde Park demonstration, Christabel had written to Prime Minister Asquith forwarding the resolution framed and passed by the mammoth crowd on the day: that a women’s enfranchisement bill be passed at the next session. Had there ever been more popular support, more publicly demonstrated, for a government reform? Christabel asked What action the Government would take in response to the demand?
Asquith’s response was swift and characteristically stalwart. On 23 June, only two days after the demonstration, Asquith replied: he had nothing to add to his promise of a reform bill made in May. The proposed bill would not include a womanhood suffrage clause, but would be worded in such a way as to allow an amendment if any member of the Commons chose to move one and if the public proved desirous of one. Nothing, in Asquith’s mind, had changed since May. The people have been contemptuously ignored, declared Sylvia Pankhurst. As far as the WSPU was concerned, the Hyde Park demonstration had proved, once and for all, the uselessness of peaceful propaganda.2
The constitutionalists—the NUWSS—had tried to win the hearts of the government through their ladylike display of fine artwork, marching bands and tens of thousands of well-behaved women striding shoulder to shoulder through London’s streets.
The militants—the WSPU—had replicated the spectacular procession a week later, and upped the ante with a public outdoor demonstration attracting hundreds of thousands of people, the size of which England had never seen before for any political reform movement.
Together, they had followed Home Secretary Gladstone’s advice to the letter. Power belongs to the masses, he had told Emmeline, and through this power a Government can be influenced into more effective action than a Government will be likely to take under present conditions.3 Well, present conditions now included that force majeure by which men had already won a popular widening of the franchise. But still Asquith would not make good on his own undertakings. It made no sense. He was an avowed social reformer and self-proclaimed man of the people. The House of Commons had now approved four women’s suffrage bills by majority consent since 1870—the most recent in February 1908, by a resounding 271–92—only to be stymied by government obstruction.4 This was understandable, if infuriating, under Tory governments but Asquith’s personal vendetta against the cause was seemingly inexplicable.
What was to be done? What could possibly change the mind of a man so two-faced as to see 360 degrees, and yet be entirely blind to reason?
Muriel Matters had not participated in either Suffrage Saturday or Women’s Sunday. The Australian actress, now thirty-one years old, had chosen to align herself with the Women’s Freedom League under the leadership of Charlotte Despard. Like Dora Meeson Coates, Muriel responded to the WFL’s brand of democratic activism, identifying herself as a ‘militant suffragist’ rather than a ‘suffragette’. Perhaps the organisation suited her bush-bred temperament. The WFL was more adventurous than the NUWSS, but less dogmatic than the WSPU. Despard herself had described the sweet spot between the two dominant organisations: Militancy to the WFL is an elastic weapon. We can use it or we can refrain.5
There was another factor in Muriel’s allegiance, apart from the question of tactics. As her sister-in-law, Mrs Leonard Matters, noted: Muriel had a keen sense of humour, a quickness of repartee and in everything a deep and convincing sincerity.6 The WSPU, under the Pankhurst family’s iron fist, was dynamic but dour. Muriel wanted to fight against the established order of things, but she had an abiding playfulness, as well as an outsider’s capacity to look at things from another angle. First of all she is an Australian, reckoned her sister-in-law, with all of the Australians’ incapacity of understanding why the people of England should not do as the Australians do in matters political.7 If Asquith’s motivations were incomprehensible to the English, his unwillingness to see the future in the eyes of the young made even less sense to the culturally confident Muriel.
After its formation in late 1907, the WFL had adopted Dora Montefiore’s trademark tactic as its first campaign strategy: tax resistance. Members would refuse to pay their tax bill on the grounds of conscientious objection and have their goods seized by the bailiffs, to be purchased back at auction by other WFL members. It was a merry lark. Other strategies included sandwich-boarding in prominent London locations and handing out leaflets championing not just the suffrage issue, but also the wider purpose of social and industrial liberation for working women and their communities. This too suited Muriel, who always felt her calling to the cause was linked with a wider social critique. Like many Australians, Muriel had been shocked by the level and visibility of poverty in London, where the white slave trade, including girl slaves, was rife.8 Believing from the start, she reflected,
That the present social and industrial structure was inimical to the well-being and development of the masses of this people, it was but natural that within a short time of my arrival I should be taking part in the women’s agitation for political freedom.9
The WFL’s motto was Dare to be Free. Muriel instinctively understood that courage was the key to freedom. The women’s movement was but a phase of the greater evolutionary and spiritual movement taking hold in the world. It was human rights, not merely the vote, that would ensure universal uplift.
It did not take Muriel long to make her mark in WFL circles. Physically attractive, diminutive but with an actress’s gift for commanding a space, the little Australian, as she soon became known, was an enormous asset to the nascent organisation.10 We debated how best we could use her gifts, remarked Marion Holmes, a member of the WFL national executive, her enthusiasm, her eloquence, her wonderful, magical voice—for the cause.11
Muriel was first put to use in a by-election campaign; the WFL had adopted the same policy as the WSPU of targeting Liberal candidates at regional by-elections. In April 1908, Muriel travelled to Manchester to participate in one of the highest-profile of these spoiling campaigns, this time aiming to stymie the re-election of Winston Churchill. Churchill had won the seat in the landslide Liberal election of 1906, but was forced to recontest when he was elevated to a cabinet position after Asquith’s ascendancy. The WSPU were also targeting Churchill, but Muriel added a novel twist to the now-familiar by-election tactic. She casually approached the mayor and asked whether a woman could nominate for election. No one had thought to ask this question before, and for a time, no one could furnish a response. It was all a bit of fun, with no concrete outcome other than a media scrum that followed Muriel around for the rest of the pestering campaign. The COURIER remarked favourably on the WFL’s feats of derring do. Churchill was defeated.12
Later that month, ever-mindful of the plight of vulnerable actresses, Muriel participated in a workplace relations dispute at a restaurant in central London, supporting striking waitresses who had no union support to achieve better pay and conditions. The protest attracted huge publicity, and large public donations—resulting in the waitresses opening their own restaurant, run by the women as a co-operative. By the summer of 1908, Muriel was recognised in press reports as one of the very prominent members of the Women’s Freedom League.13 In Muriel, the WFL knew it had found a recruit of rare courage and initiative.14
In May, while the WSPU and NUWSS were preparing for their upcoming processions, the WFL took a different tack. Instead of bringing suffragists to the city, centralising the movement in a spectacular tour de force of colour and movement, why not quietly take the suffrage message to the regions? This would achieve two purposes: for one, it would potentially attract members to the newly founded and cash-strapped league.15 The NUWSS had built its financial capacity as an umbrella organisation for a phalanx of local suffrage societies. Conversely, the WSPU was bankrolled largely by a handful of wealthy, well-connected members like the Pethick-Lawrences.
But it wasn’t only about the money. Gladstone’s original advice to suffrage leaders had been not just that women needed to assemble in great numbers, but that they needed to do it all over the country—as male agitators for political reform had done in the 1830s, ’60s and ’80s. The WFL needed to take its message out of the metropolis. And going by rail, as the protesters did when they attended by-elections, would not suffice. Travelling station-to-station bypassed the women of England’s backblocks: the millions of potential voters who lived in the counties.
It’s not clear who came up with the idea of a horse-drawn covered wagon that could tour the regions for months at a time, but it was an excited Muriel Matters who put up her hand to play the gypsy for a season. She would ‘go vanning’ with Mrs Lilian Hicks, a veteran suffrage campaigner almost twice Muriel’s age: experience and audacity teaming up. Their caravan, painted in the WFL’s new colours of green, white and gold, covered in Votes for Women slogans and fitted out with two little beds, set off in mid-May, pulled by a dawdling horse called Asquith. Destination: the densely populated southeastern counties of Kent, Surrey and Sussex.
The van proved enormously popular with passing crowds, a travelling circus offering plenty of sideshow voyeurism. Cyclists would on occasion ride alongside the caravan, adding to the holiday mood. When Muriel and Lilian pulled in to towns and villages, they held meetings and rallies, bringing the gospel of the need for women’s enfranchisement as Muriel put it.16 At Hastings, they staged a meeting at the Fish Market, amongst the weather-beaten old sailors and fisher folk.17
Some audiences were hostile, blowing whistles, shouting insults, releasing rats and mice at meetings (on the assumption that women were afraid of rodents) and generally putting Muriel and Lilian’s safety at risk. The attack on Nellie Martel and Emmeline Pankhurst in February had proven that being an activist for the cause could have potentially fatal consequences. Eggs and mice were one thing, but fists and fire were another. The little wooden van wouldn’t stand a chance against an arson attack in a distant field. The women could be roasted alive in their beds, with only Asquith to provide a whinny of warning.
But they pressed on regardless, speaking from the back of the van at open-air meetings or booking town halls with the help of local suffragists. In her speeches, Muriel took a leaf out of Nellie Martel’s book, playing ‘the Australian card’ to great effect. I know the power of the vote, she would begin, I know how in Australia, the status of women went up immediately they had it. And they used it well too.18 She reeled off the various improvements that had been made to women’s and children’s lives through social legislation passed since 1902. She made it clear that it was for these equivalent advances in the well-being of the British masses that we are making ourselves objectionable.19 The end of her speeches contained a request, half plea, half gibe: if you want to be on the right side then come over and join us.
Though the meetings sometimes descended into chaos, Muriel was mostly heartened by the reception. She was particularly pleased when:
in some small town, an Australian would come forward and, after my speech, add a few words to champion our cause. Sometimes it was only an encouraging ‘coo-ee’ to let me know I had friends nearby.20
As May turned to June and then to July—a notoriously hot summer for the English but simply pleasant for an Adelaide girl—Muriel had no trouble finding friends. The Caravan Campaign was strenuous and laborious but, as Lilian Hicks reported, from Godalming to Haslemere, from Grayshott to Petersfield, the women made many kind friends who help us on our way…their helpful sympathy and pecuniary support will be long remembered.21
Muriel reported back to WFL HQ that beyond those ruffians who rang the inevitable bell and dispersed strong smelling chemicals there was no trouble.22 Converts recruited. Literature sold. Collections taken. Everything promises well.
Dora Montefiore was not in London for that steamy summer of discontent either. She was not even in England. From 15–20 June 1908—the week between Suffrage Saturday and Women’s Sunday—the globe-trotting socialist possum-stirrer was in Amsterdam for the third biennial congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance.
She was not there as a delegate of an Australian suffrage organisation. No one was, not even Vida Goldstein. The IWSA accepted only delegates from national organisations, and Australia didn’t have one. Although the Australian suffrage societies were arguably the most successful in the world, they had remained constituted along colonial then state lines. But Dora did not attend as the WSPU’s delegate, either, as she had the two previous congresses in 1904 and 1906. Had she renounced internationalism, then?
No way. She had, in fact, given up on the WSPU. In 1907, Dora parted ways with the militant society she had helped to establish in London, having become desperately unhappy with its organisation. Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, with whom Dora was close, saw the trouble brewing as early as October 1906, on the eve of Dora’s short-lived imprisonment.
Whenever she and I…were alone, it was one continuous wail of discontent against everybody else. Everything other people did was wrong, everybody slighted her—nothing she did was recognized or acknowledged… she did nothing but find fault all the way with everybody and everything connected with the W.S.P. & U. Movement. They undertook to do things but left all the doing to her. 23
Mrs Elmy was driven nearly round the bend by all this fault finding and blaming of the absent. It hadn’t always been this way. Dora had been fierce and never suffered fools, but she was not thus self-absorbed, and egotistic and pathetic of old. Mrs Elmy recognised that there had been an awful change in her.
Four elements, perhaps, contributed to the sudden shift in Dora’s demeanour from heroic to pathetic. One was the arrival in London in 1906 of Emmeline Pankhurst. Both Emmeline and Dora liked to be queen of the castle. Their thunderous personalities probably clashed at close quarters. Second, some time in 1906, Dora’s affair with George Belt ended. Perhaps she believed that, at fifty-five, her days of enjoying a muscular bond with a man were over. Third, Dora was concerned about the effects of her militant actions on her children. Florence was married by 1907 but was not at the moment in very good health. Gilbert was working in an engineering business in Rochester and I also wished to save him from more trouble than I realised he was bound to have on my behalf. She had asked neither her daughter nor her son to come to the court during her trial or visit during her imprisonment, not wishing to add to [their] sufferings.24
But Mrs Elmy wondered about another reason for Dora’s personality swing. A mutual friend told her that to his mind Dora’s awful change was due to her extravagant use of cocaine lozenges. Dora claimed to take the lozenges for a persistent cough but, as Mrs Elmy knew, the popular remedy easily becomes quite as dangerous and demoralizing as the ‘morphia’ habit.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, cocaine was the over-the-counter drug of choice, readily recommended by doctors as a remedy for sore throats, haemorrhoids, indigestion, teething and fatigue. It was used, unregulated, as an ingredient in soft drinks, wine and cigarettes. In 1900 a Belgian pharmacy marketed cocaine drops and lozenges as indispensable for singers, teachers and orators.25 It would be no surprise if suffragists, who could speak at up to fourteen meetings a week, became cocaine addicts.
Mrs Elmy confided the likelihood of Dora’s affliction in a letter to a fellow suffragist—not as gossip but from a desire to get Mrs Montefiore medically warned of the danger. The WSPU leadership was less sympathetic. For them it was not about the lozenges, nor the old scandal; they simply would not have her on any terms. Self aggrandisement seems to be inseparable from her. While she can lead an admiring entourage all goes well.26 Perhaps Dora jumped from the WSPU before she was pushed. Certainly, a final meeting with Emmeline after her release from prison was heated and Mrs Pankhurst spoke plainly—as she can!
Dora retired from the WSPU before Charlotte Despard packed up her own bat and ball and started the WFL. But she didn’t join the new league like fellow expats Dora Meeson Coates and Muriel Matters. Instead, Dora Montefiore held to the one political principle that had always truly separated her from the WSPU regardless of any personality clash: adult suffrage. As early as 1901, Dora had written that she preferred the term adult suffrage to woman suffrage; it was not only less open to misunderstanding but also a necessary part of a democratic programme.27
Dora believed absolutely in votes for women, but she was first and foremost a socialist. She toured Europe regularly, speaking on behalf of a variety of associations, including the Socialist Democratic Front and the Adult Suffrage Society. At the Socialist International Congress in Stuttgart in 1907 she had made the acquaintance of Frederick Engels, with whom she discussed the colonial question and the dilemma of our proletariat being necessarily, and to some extent unconsciously, fellow exploiters with our bourgeoisie of our coloured colonial dependencies.28
The WSPU’s acceptance of a property qualification for the female franchise was always a stumbling block for Dora. Some of her stauncher socialist comrades snubbed her for having joined the WSPU at all; she was certainly well aware that beneath the suffragette skirt peeps the cloven hoof of extension of political power to property and privilege.29 But she’d initially been open to the WSPU’s argument that a campaign for the franchise on the same terms with men was the most likely to succeed in conservative England. Now she feared that democracy was less important to the suffragettes than equality for wealthy white women.
So, no: Dora had not lost any of her commitment to the internationalism that had encouraged her eager acceptance of the WSPU’s invitation to represent it at the 1904 and 1906 IWSA congresses. It was only that now, in this summer of 1908, she went under her own steam.30
At the Hague, she was met by Mrs Madge Donohoe and Mrs Emily Dobson, official delegates of the Australian government, which had paid for their expenses. Though Australia still did not have a viable national women’s organisation, Alfred Deakin’s government had seen fit to appoint women to represent its national interests. Vida Goldstein had also been invited to represent Australia, but had once again declined, due to her ongoing battles with premier Tommy Bent in Victoria.
And of course Australia was the international poster child for woman suffrage, along with Finland (then still a grand duchy of the Russian Empire). Women had won the vote there in 1906 and the following year nineteen of them had been elected to the legislature.31 At a reception where the flags of Finland and Australia were conspicuously placed in the centre, that especial honor might be done the full suffrage countries, Dora listened to speeches praising her former home.
The delegate from the Cape Colony, for example, revealed that the Australian experience shaped South African women’s sense of the possibilities when it came to the union of its four colonies. South African suffragists were considering the same understanding that the women of Australia had with their men, that if they helped to bring about federation they should be given suffrage. It was not only Australian women’s act of good faith that guided this strategic decision. The men of Australia kept their word, said the Cape Colony’s delegate, and we believe the men of South Africa would do the same.32
Carrie Chapman Catt expressed the appreciation that was due to our Australian and New Zealand sisters who had come from the antipodes…to help the women of the less favoured countries. Their selfless actions showed a generous feeling of solidarity against a common enemy, concluded Catt, whose name is not man, but conservatism. It was against this foe that our international army was fighting. 33
Vida couldn’t be there at the Hague in 1908 with Dora Montefiore, whom she’d never met, and Carrie Chapman Catt, with whom she’d spent many stimulating days in Washington. But Vida did send a report, containing her heartfelt advice. Don’t worry about your enemies. Concentrate on your supposed friends. Spend the conference talking about tactics, Vida counselled, of laying down a clear, definite election policy. This strategy would be of more practical good than the endless discussion of principles or even the outcomes of suffrage. She had learnt this from bitter experience in Victoria, where suffragists had decided:
they would sooner have a hundred parliamentary opponents to deal with than enjoy the gelatinous support of a hundred members who, on the platform, prate about the eternal justice of women’s suffrage, but who, in the House, never give the slightest evidence that they mean business.34
Convincing theories, convincing results, even convincing majorities—none of these things counted a jot in the face of wobbly politicians.
It didn’t matter what colours peeped from beneath your suffrage skirt. According to Vida, all MPs, regardless of nationality or party, were the same: the Ins want to stay In, and the Outs don’t want to stay Out.