English Militancy and the Canadian Suffrage Movement Deborah G Or Ham
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English Militancy and the Canadian Suffrage Movement Deborah G or ham Many people who know very little about were not themselves travelling, their nineteenth and early twentieth century activities received widespread coverage English feminism will have heard of in the press. It is true that much of Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters this publicity was hostile and often Christabel and Sylvia, who led the distorted, but nonetheless it kept not English militant feminist organization, only suffrage, but also wider issues the Women's Social and Political Union. involved in the women's movement in the The techniques used by the suffragettes forefront of public consciousness. In in the period 1905~ 191 ^* captured atten• the case of Canada, for instance, the tion at the time, and although general activities of the English militants were historical treatment of changes in often the main or even the only source women's social, political and economic of news about the equal rights issue. position has been perfunctory, the This aspect of their activities has re• Pankhursts at least have found a place ceived little attention from historians, in general treatments of the period who have concerned themselves with the even though they may be regarded as WSPU. Indeed most analyses of the eccentric personalities rather than as women's movement have been limited to leaders of a genuine political movement. national history and little has been In contrast only those interested in made of the fact that many participants the history of feminism know the names thought of themselves as part of an in• of the major non-militant participants ternational movement. It would be use• in the English suffrage movement. The ful to know about the sort of activists popular memory reflects the position who thought of themselves in this way. the Pankhursts held at the time. It Did they espouse internationalism pri• was the suffragettes and not the con• marily as a way of strengthening their stitutionalists who mounted visible interna] strategies or were their ideas activity in the form of mass demonstra• molded and developed by the forging of tions; it was the suffragettes who made international links?l headlines; it was the suffragette leaders who successfully created public These questions are of particular rele• personalities for themselves. vance when one examines the historio• graphy of the women's movement in Cana• The Women's Social and Political Union da. Whereas the historiography of the and its leaders received world-wide movement in the United States and Brit• publicity. Mrs. Pankhurst herself, her ain is relatively well developed, in daughters and other members of the mil• Canada only the outlines have been itant movement travelled abroad and sketched out. Localized and specific thus had direct personal contact with information about activities in Canada women's groups and the general public is very scanty. Attempts to formulate in other countries. Even when they conceptual analyses have therefore rested on uncertain foundations and for which the women activists fought, most of the formulae for analysis have says that the belief that "there exist• been borrowed from the work of American ed in England from the late eighteenth and British historians. The use of century a steady coherent and consis• foreign explanatory models is not mis• tent continuum of events—comprising a leading in itself, but they are best 'movement' by mid-nineteenth century-- used when they help to illuminate a which eventually 'led' to women's eman• clearly perceived pattern of influence. cipation'" is "an assumption, still At present they are sometimes assumed largely untested."3 Kanner is writing to fit by analogy.a situation about of the women activists in England, which not enough is yet known.2 where the activities of the non- militant feminists had generated wide• Mrs. Pankhurst's visits to Canada and spread discussion of the "woman ques• the visits of other members of the WSPU tion" before 1905 and where, between form a focal point for an examination 1905-1914, the militant suffragettes of a specific example of interaction became unquestionably an important between women activists in Britain and feature of English political life. Canada. From an examination of Can• adian reaction to these visits and of If the existence of a women's movement more generalized Canadian reaction to in England is questionable, it is ob• the women's movement in England, it is viously even more questionable in Can• hoped that some useful generalizations ada. Canadian women were never invol• about the international crosscurrents ved in women's emancipation activities affecting Canadian women activists will to anything like a comparable degree: emerge, as well as some new insights whether measured by ability to demon• into the activities of the English mil- strate mass support or ability to or• i tants. ganize independent women's rights or newspapers, or even ability to generate One major purpose of the comparative organizational structures, the suffrage analysis will be to examine the concept movement in Britain had developed fur• of the "women's movement" in the British ther than it did in Canada before the and Canadian context. Although women Canadian activists really even got activists in England, the United States started. Yet female suffrage was and also in Canada spoke of themselves achieved in the two countries at ap• as participating in a "women's move• proximately the same time. Might this ment" many of their contemporaries mean that the whole "women's emancipa• denied the validity of their percep• tion movement" in England, from the tion. Many historians have also ques• constitutional phase to the militant tioned this belief. Barbara Kanner, a campaign, was unnecessary and extran- historian sympathetic to the causes eous and that there is little demon• strable connection between the activ• ities of both suffragists and suffra• gettes and the granting of the suffrage in 1918? If women were given the voce in Canada without any comparable activ• ity, it might be inferred that such activity was not necessary. On the other hand, it might mean that Canadian women activists, although they knew that their numbers were small, identi• fied strongly with activities in Eng• land and the United States (and also with those in Australia, New Zealand and the Scandinavian countries) and gathered strength from the successes and struggles of women elsewhere. This investigation of the interaction be• tween English militancy and Canadian activism tends to support the latter interpretation. Mrs. Pankhurst herself visited North America and spoke about woman suffrage on three occasions in the period before the outbreak of World War I: in 1909, 1911 and 1913.4 In all cases any Can• adian engagements were auxiliary to a United States tour. In 1909 she went only to Toronto. In 1911 she made a much more extensive cross-country tour. I have not found records of any Can• adian visits during the 1913 tour. In addition to Mrs. Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst also visited Canada. In the last months of 1912, Barbara Wylie, a member of the WSPU whose brother sat in the Saskatchewan legislature, made an extensive tour of Canada in what was initially planned as an attempt to Courtesy Central Press Photos Limited establish a branch of the WSPU in Can• dividuals and a right to a voice in ada.5 In addition to these members of soci ety. the WSPU several other English femin• ists came to Canada during the years There was a paradox involved in the 1909-1912, including Ethel Snowdon, a woman suffrage arguments. Male groups Labour Party activist and the wife of fighting for the suffrage (middle-class Labour MP, Philip Snowdon.6 and working-class groups) also used liberal individualist arguments. But Before beginning to discuss the impact it was clear that these groups wanted of the ideas and activities of the mil• the vote for concrete ends--and it was itant suffragettes on the Canadian assumed that they would vote as a bloc, scene, it will be necessary to briefly at least about those issues where their review the origins of the WSPU and ex• mutual interests were at stake. Women plain its place in the development of suffragists, however, wanted the vote English feminism. The militant suf• less because they believed that women frage movement emerged in England after would vote as a bloc than because they 1903 but non-militant activities for saw it as a symbol of women's humanity. women's emancipation began a half cen• The anti-suffragists opposed woman suf• tury before that or earlier and the frage not so much because they were suffrage movement itself has a contin• afraid of the woman's vote as because uous history dating from 1866.7 In the they too saw votes for women as a sym• last decades of the century the "Woman bol . In their case it was a negative Question" became almost as popular a symbol, signifying the destruction subject as it is today, one hundred of family life and ultimately of the years later. The vote was never the social order. only issue that concerned women's rights advocates. No one really ever This denial of their humanity was for thought that the vote by itself was many feminists the binding force that more than a means to a variety of ends would hold women together. However, but in the climate of liberal individ• the pressures of social and economic ualism out of which the English femin• class tended to erase whatever cohesive- ist movement arose, political rights ness women as a whole might have felt, became a symbol of women's recognition and it has often been pointed out that, as full members of society.