 | The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline .(March 2018) |
This is an overview of Women's Suffrage activism and local politics as experienced in Leigh, Lancashire between 1900 and 1914.
| The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline .(March 2018) |
This is an overview of Women's Suffrage activism and local politics as experienced in Leigh, Lancashire between 1900 and 1914.
In October 1900 Mrs A Urmston of the Leigh Co-operative Women's Guild, [1] wrote to Leigh's MP, C. P. Scott asking him to vote favourably on Women's Suffrage Bills. He answered in the affirmative. [2] In 1908 Henry Yorke Stanger, Leigh County Court Judge and MP for Kensington North, introduced a private member's Women's Suffrage Bill. [3] [4]
On 15 July 1909, Women's Social and Political Union activists, Annie Kenney, Jennie Baines, Mabel Capper, Charlotte Marsh and Florence Clarkson attempted to force their way into Leigh Co-operative Hall to disrupt the Liberal Party's guest speaker, Lewis Harcourt. [5] After a violent struggle, Clarkson of Oxford Road, Manchester was arrested and bailed at £10. [6] The next day when tried in Leigh Police Station's Day Room, [7] she refused to pay the 20 shilling fine imposed and was sentenced to fourteen days in the second division at Strangeways Gaol in Manchester. [8] There she went on hunger strike but did not serve her full sentence without food, denying herself food for 65 hours. [9]
During the General Election of January 1910, members of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) visited Leigh to collect signatures for their Voters’ Petition. [10] They aimed to prove that male voters were in favour of votes for women. With the cooperation of local suffragists, 2,843 signatures were collected at Leigh polling stations. [11] After which, a banner stating "2,843 Men of Leigh Demand Women’s Suffrage" was used to advertise suffrage meetings in the town. [12] A similar banner, bearing the same legend was used in the "Prison to Citizenship Constitutional Demonstration" in London on 18 June 1910. [13]
From September 1910 the North of England Society for Women's Suffrage began a consciousness raising campaign in Leigh. [14] In October 1910 the Leigh branch of the NUWSS, the Leigh Women’s Suffrage Society, was formed. Its first secretary was Miss F.P. Hindshaw BA, [15] followed by Miss L. Cook of 13 Railway Road. [16] Membership of the Leigh branch was not gendered and non party. The campaign took the form of a series of public meetings and debates led by prominent pro-suffrage workers, supported by local interested parties and out of town speakers, including the Liberal Association President, and editor and proprietor of the Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott. Other key speakers included Mrs F.T. Swanwick, suffragist and editor of the NUWSS paper the Common Cause: Kathleen Courtney, secretary of the North of England Society for Women’s Suffrage; Lisbeth Simms of the Women’s Labour League; Margaret Robertson BA Manchester Society/NUWSS organiser: and a Manchester councillor, Margaret Ashton, founder member of the Women’s Trade Union League and chairperson of the NUWSS. The women spoke on why women needed and deserved the vote whilst attempting to discredit opponents' arguments. They stressed their non militancy, non party and law abiding credentials to address a degree of fear by women of becoming identified with the "shrieking sisterhood" (WSPU). Locally there were immediate and legitimate reasons for unease and fear. When Margaret Robertson spoke at a National Union of Teachers Association meeting in Leigh, some male members in the audience "moodily twirled their moustaches and gazed at the floor" and the chairman "kept a few from that energy of opposition that often ends in blows". [17] This latent aggression on occasion resulted in violence, and in one instance was condoned by the local press. When a socialist in Tyldesley was mobbed for hanging out a ‘Votes for Women’ banner, Leigh Chronicle opined "he asked for it" and "deserved what he got". [18]
A proportion of the town's women had organised into political associations before the campaign. The Leigh Women’s Liberal Association was particularly large. Three hundred women were taken by train from Westleigh to Lowton, to be thanked for their part in MP Peter Raffan's 1910 Parliamentary election campaign. [19] From 1910 to 1914 the women held tea meetings where between 100 and 200 attendees were addressed by speakers. [20] Female Conservatives organised in either Women’s Unionist or Conservative Associations. These were large organisations, with sufficient kudos to attract the Rt Hon Austen Chamberlain MP. [21] Though the Labour Party was in its infancy, it was formed in July 1908, [22] it had an active women's section. [23]
The Women's Labour League was a Labour Party pressure group, formed in 1906. [24] It promoted and supported both male and female candidates for parliamentary or municipal office and Boards of Guardians. [25] From 1911 WLL branches were established at Bamfurlong, Ashton in Makerfield, Golborne, Lowton, Leigh and Tyldesley. [26] The Leigh Labour Party was ambitious. Tom Greenall was its first Parliamentary candidate for the General Election of January 1910 and it was increasing its membership of Leigh Council.
The Lowton and Leigh WLL branches had a committed and able leader, Mrs G Mottram, who was a founder and secretary for the Lowton and Leigh branches. [27] The branches were small, 20 in Lowton and 60 in Leigh, [28] but they made an impact during Leigh’s municipal elections. Mrs Mottram stood, unsuccessfully, as a candidate for Leigh Rural District Council and the Leigh Guardians' elections in 1913. [29] She attended WLL Conferences – at Earlestown she argued for equal pay for women and she was a member of the Leigh Insurance Committee. [30] During WW1 she agitated for Municipal Lodging Houses for women munitions workers, was a member of the Leigh War Emergency Workers Committee. [31] She was a member of Leigh’s Naval and Military War Pensions Committee and helped devise systems to aid Leigh’s Disabled Soldiers and Sailors. [32]
Like Ellen Wilkinson, who became a Labour MP, cabinet minister, and leader of the Jarrow Marchers, working in Tyldesley, [33] Mrs Mottram was both a WLL and NUWSS organiser. [34] In 1910 the NUWSS launched its Friends of Women's Suffrage Scheme. [35] It enabled people who could not afford membership fees to become members simply by pledging their allegiance which widened the demographic and increased the membership. From a membership of 21,571 in 1910, by 1913 39,000 "friends" had enrolled. [36] From 200 branches in 1910 there were 602 in 1914. [37] At this time NUWSS leaders, particularly in the North, increasingly identified with the working classes and for an industrial town like Leigh this was particularly pertinent.
Mrs Mottram’s feminism and Labour politics came together during Leigh’s 1912 and 1913 municipal elections. Mr J L Prescott, the successful Labour candidate for St Mary’s Ward in 1912, acknowledged that the work of Mrs Mottram and the Women’s Labour League co-workers had been a big factor in his success against the Liberal J. Sargent. [38] It is possible that Mrs Mottram’s co-workers were drawn from the women’s sections of all Leigh’s political parties.
In 1912 Mrs Nessie Egerton Stewart Brown, President of the Lancashire and Cheshire Women’s Liberal Association warned that its members were losing patience with the Lancashire and Cheshire Liberal Association’s refusal to discuss the question of Women’s Suffrage. [39] At the same time Leigh’s Liberal women were offered an alternative. The NUWSS, which contained a large Liberal contingent, disappointed by the Liberal Party’s continual rejection of women’s suffrage reached an agreement with the Labour Party. [40] The Labour Party was the only party to pledge its complete support for Women’s Suffrage, the NUWSS agreed to support Labour Parliamentary and municipal candidates. [41] The Conservative Party in the main, were anti-women’s suffrage. In the 1913 St Mary’s Ward, Conservative Councillor W.R.Boydell fighting for re-election in 1913 had no women helpers, despite there being a large Women’s Unionist Association in the ward. The victor, Labour’s J.H. Wright, when praising the WLL canvassers, commented that Boydell had had to do "all the spade work himself". [42] W.R. Boydell and George Hunter, Liberal Councillor for St Mary’s in 1911, was a proven women’s suffragist. In 1911, at the request of the NUWSS, Leigh Council was one of 146 County, Borough and District Councils, to petition Parliament in support of enfranchising women householders. In council, it was Councillor Hunter who moved the resolution with Councillor Boydell seconding. [43]
Throughout this period the NUWSS called on its member societies to take part in the mass demonstrations and rallies. As a significant proportion of the participants were northern working women, prominent among these being pit brow women and mill workers, in all probability some Leigh women were represented. Despite details of ordinary women’s personal involvement being hard to find, there is evidence that members of the Leigh Women’s Suffrage Society spent weeks making goods to sell on the Leigh, Wigan, Farnworth and Eccles stall at the 1912 NUWSS fund-raising bazaar at the Midland Hotel, Manchester. [44] [45]
Margaret Grace Bondfield was a British Labour Party politician, trade unionist and women's rights activist. She became the first female cabinet minister, and the first woman to be a privy counsellor in the UK, when she was appointed Minister of Labour in the Labour government of 1929–31. She had earlier become the first woman to chair the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC).
Leigh is a town in the Metropolitan Borough of Wigan, Greater Manchester, England, on low-lying land northwest of Chat Moss.
Helena Maria Lucy Swanwick CH was a British feminist and pacifist. Her autobiography, I Have Been Young (1935), gives a remarkable account of the non-militant women's suffrage campaign in the UK and of anti-war campaigning during the First World War, together with philosophical discussions of non-violence.
The National Union of Women Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), also known as the suffragists was an organisation founded in 1897 of women's suffrage societies around the United Kingdom. In 1919 it was renamed the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship.
The United Procession of Women, or Mud March as it became known, was a peaceful demonstration in London on 9 February 1907 organised by the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), in which more than three thousand women marched from Hyde Park Corner to the Strand in support of women's suffrage. Women from all classes participated in what was the largest public demonstration supporting women's suffrage seen up to that date. It acquired the name "Mud March" from the day's weather, when incessant heavy rain left the marchers drenched and mud-spattered.
Ethel Bentham, was a progressive medical doctor, a politician and a suffragist in the United Kingdom. She was born in London, educated at Alexandra School and College in Dublin, the London School of Medicine for Women and the Rotunda Hospital.
A movement to fight for women's right to vote in the United Kingdom finally succeeded through acts of Parliament in 1918 and 1928. It became a national movement in the Victorian era. Women were not explicitly banned from voting in Great Britain until the Reform Act 1832 and the Municipal Corporations Act 1835. In 1872 the fight for women's suffrage became a national movement with the formation of the National Society for Women's Suffrage and later the more influential National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). As well as in England, women's suffrage movements in Wales, Scotland and other parts of the United Kingdom gained momentum. The movements shifted sentiments in favour of woman suffrage by 1906. It was at this point that the militant campaign began with the formation of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).
The Open Christmas Letter was a public message for peace addressed "To the Women of Germany and Austria", signed by a group of 101 British suffragists at the end of 1914 as the first Christmas of the First World War approached. The Open Christmas Letter was written in acknowledgment of the mounting horror of modern war and as a direct response to letters written to American feminist Carrie Chapman Catt, the president of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), by a small group of German women's rights activists. Published in January 1915 in Jus Suffragii, the journal of the IWSA, the Open Christmas Letter was answered two months later by a group of 155 prominent German and Austrian women who were pacifists. The exchange of letters between women of nations at war helped promote the aims of peace, and helped prevent the fracturing of the unity which lay in the common goal they shared, suffrage for women.
Sir Andrew William Barton was a British Liberal politician and businessman.
Helen Miller Fraser, later Moyes, was a Scottish suffragist, feminist, educationalist and Liberal Party politician who later emigrated to Australia.
Nessie Stewart-Brown JP was a British suffragist and Liberal Party politician. Her name and picture is on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square.
Thorley Smith was Britain's first Parliamentary candidate to stand on a platform of women's suffrage. He stood in the 1906 general election in Wigan, Lancashire. He lost to the Conservative candidate, but polled more votes than the Liberal.
The Liverpool Women's Suffrage Society was set up in 1894 by Edith Bright, Lydia Allen Booth and Nessie Stewart-Brown to promote the enfranchisement of women. The society held its first meeting in a Liverpool temperance hall, with Millicent Fawcett, head of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), as its guest speaker. The society set up headquarters in Lord Street. The group became affiliated with the NUWSS in 1898, it held meetings in cafés which included talks, poetry and dance recitals. Members were recruited from prominent members of society and they distanced themselves from working class suffrage societies such as Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).
Women's suffrage in Wales has historically been marginalised due to the prominence of societies and political groups in England which led the reform for women throughout the United Kingdom. Due to differing social structures and a heavily industrialised working-class society, the growth of a national movement in Wales grew but then stuttered in the late nineteenth century in comparison with that of England. Nevertheless, distinct Welsh groups and individuals rose to prominence and were vocal in the rise of suffrage in Wales and the rest of Great Britain.
Margaret Hills was a British teacher, suffragist organiser, feminist and socialist. She was the first female councillor on Stroud Urban District Council and later served as a Councillor on Gloucestershire County Council.
Alice Morrissey was a British Catholic, socialist leader and suffragette activist from Liverpool, who was imprisoned in the campaign for women's right to vote.
Margaret Aldersley (1852–1940) was a British suffragist, feminist and trade unionist.
Edith Mary Sutton (1862–1957) was the first woman to become a councillor in England, the first female mayor in Reading, and a suffragist.
Harriet Emma Mahood (1860–1940), known as Hattie or Harriett, was the first female deacon in the Baptist Church, a British constitutional women's suffrage campaigner and a strong supporter of the Temperance Movement. A Blue Plaque has been installed in her home town, and her work is also commemorated on a suffrage statue in Liverpool.
Alice Low, (1877–1954) was a British suffragist, who spoke up for peaceful means of achieving women's rights to vote, and fairer laws, including reducing sweated labour. She was a leader in Edinburgh and Berwickshire National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and a touring speaker in the early twentieth century. She was also a lead member of Queen Mary's Army Auxiliary Corps. (QMAAC) in World War One and an amateur actress taking lead roles with the British Empire Shakespeare Society.