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From International Socialism, No. 60, July 1973, p. 25.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg, with thanks to Paul Blackledge.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Militant Suffragettes
Antonia Raeburn
Michael Joseph, £4.00
The movement for women’s suffrage in Britain began as long ago as the 1860s. But though the vote had not been won, the movement was drained of its vitality by the turn of the century. The Pankhursts were to change all this. Their Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded in 1903, marked a new era in the fight for votes for women. Its militant methods set it apart from the stuffy suffrage societies of the past.
Antonia Raeburn’s book gives us a vivid and detailed account of the activities of the ‘militants’ from 1905 to the First World War. She describes the clashes with the police and the mass arrests; the window smashing raids and the burning down of MPs’ houses; the hunger strikes in prison and the brave resistance to the Cat and Mouse Act; and the final period when, with warrants out for all the leaders of the movement, the militants were eventually forced into hiding.
Unfortunately the book does no more than that. Antonia Raeburn is uncritical of the Pankhursts to such an extent that the major conflicts which rocked the WSPU are glossed over in a sentence or two. So with the split, between Sylvia on one side and Christabel and her mother on the other, over their relationship to the labour movement. Up to 1907 all the Pankhursts were members of the ILP. Originally the WSPU was set up with the aim of winning the labour movement for women’s suffrage and for the general advancement of women’s conditions in industry and in the home. Keir Hardie was an eager supporter, most of the union’s earliest members were ILP women, and in London its first base was among the working women of the East End.
Sylvia Pankhurst was to stick with the women of the East End. But Christabel and her mother took the view that the movement had to be built on middle- and upper-class women since these were more likely to impress MPs and the voting public. In time the WSPU severed all its connections with the labour movement and limited itself to fighting for the vote for women on the same terms as men. Since all working class men did not obtain the vote until 1929, this in effect meant campaigning on behalf of propertied women alone.
Antonia Raeburn leaves all this out of her account, although inevitably some of the more sordid incidents do come out: for example, the attempt to form an alliance with Carson and the opponents of Home Rule for Ireland. She cannot avoid the base capitulation to chauvinism on the outbreak of the First World War: the campaign for votes for women was dropped and the massive WSPU apparatus enthusiastically turned over to helping the war effort.
The Militant Suffragettes is only of marginal interest to socialists: essentially it belongs to the hagiography of the women’s movement. If you want to know what really happened, Marion Ramelson’s The Petticoat Rebellion is not a bad book – despite its terrible title.
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Last updated on 23.9.2013